Download or read book Essays on Linguistic Context sensitivity and Its Philosophical Significance written by Steven Gross and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing upon research in philosophical logic, linguistics and cognitive science, this study explores how our ability to use and understand language depends upon our capacity to keep track of complex features of the contexts in which we converse.
Download or read book The Architecture of Context and Context Sensitivity written by Tadeusz Ciecierski and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-02-25 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume addresses foundational issues of context-dependence and indexicality, which are at the center of the current debate within the philosophy of language. Topics include the scope of context-dependency, the nature of content and the character of input data of cognitive processes relevant for the interpretation of utterances. There's also coverage of the role of beliefs and intentions as contextual factors, as well as the validity of arguments in context-sensitive languages. The contributions consider foundational issues regarding context-sensitivity from three different, yet related, perspectives on the phenomenon of context-dependence: representational, structural, and functional. The contributors not only address the representational, structural and/or functional problems separately but also study their mutual connections, thus furthering the debate and bringing competing approaches closer to unification and consensus. This text appeals to students and researchers within the field. This is a very useful collection of essays devoted to the roles of context in the study of language. Its essays provide a useful overview of the current debates on this topic, and they put forth novel contributions that will undoubtedly be of relevance for the development of all areas in philosophy and linguistics interested in the notion of context. Stefano Predelli Department of Philosophy, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK
Download or read book Context Sensitivity and Semantic Minimalism written by Gerhard Preyer and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2007-10-25 with total page 374 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This book represents a continuation of the research project in philosophy of language and semantics represented in the journal "Protosociology" at the J. W. Goethe-University, Frankfurt am Main." - editors' preface.
Download or read book Language in Context written by Jason Stanley and published by Clarendon Press. This book was released on 2007-07-05 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Natural languages all contain constructions the interpretation of which depends upon the situation in which they are used. In Language and Context, Jason Stanley presents a series of essays which develop a theory of how the situation in which we speak interacts with the words we use to help produce what we say. The reason we can so smoothly operate with sentences that can be used to express very different items of information, Stanley argues, is that there are linguistically mandated constraints on the effects of the situation on what we say. These linguistically mandated constraints are most evident in the cases of sentences containing explicit pronouns, such as 'She is a mathematician', where interpretation of the information expressed is guided by the use of the pronoun 'she'. But even when such explicit pronouns are lacking, our sentences provide similar cues to allow our interlocutors to determine the information expressed. We are, in the main, confident that our interlocutors will smoothly grasp what we say, because the grammar and meaning of our sentences encodes these constraints. In defending this theory, Stanley pays close attention to specific cases of context-sensitive constructions, such as quantified noun phrases, comparative adjectives, and conditionals. Philosophers and cognitive scientist have appealed to the dependence of what is intuitively said by a sentence on the situation in which it is uttered to argue against the possibility of a systematic theory of meaning for natural language. The theory developed in this book is a vigorous defence of the possibility of a systematic theory of meaning for natural language against these influential tendencies.
Download or read book Meaning and Relevance written by Deirdre Wilson and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2012-03-22 with total page 397 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When people speak, their words never fully encode what they mean, and the context is always compatible with a variety of interpretations. How can comprehension ever be achieved? Wilson and Sperber argue that comprehension is a process of inference guided by precise expectations of relevance. What are the relations between the linguistically encoded meanings studied in semantics and the thoughts that humans are capable of entertaining and conveying? How should we analyse literal meaning, approximations, metaphors and ironies? Is the ability to understand speakers' meanings rooted in a more general human ability to understand other minds? How do these abilities interact in evolution and in cognitive development? Meaning and Relevance sets out to answer these and other questions, enriching and updating relevance theory and exploring its implications for linguistics, philosophy, cognitive science and literary studies.
Download or read book Compositionality Context and Semantic Values written by Robert J. Stainton and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2008-11-14 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Are natural languages genuinely compositional? What roles does context play in linguistic communication, and by what means? In particular, does context interfere with the compositional determination of truth conditions? What meanings should theorists assign to sentences if compositionality is to be retained? These are the central questions of this important volume of new philosophical essays in honour of Ernie Lepore.
Download or read book Perspectives on Pragmatics and Philosophy written by Alessandro Capone and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-11-26 with total page 664 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is about the pragmatics of language and it illustrates how pragmatics transcends the boundaries of linguistics. This volume covers Gricean pragmatics as well as topics including: conversation and collective belief, the norm of assertion, speech acts, what a context is, the distinction between semantics and pragmatics and implicature and explicature, pragmatics and epistemology, the pragmatics of belief, quotation, negation, implicature and argumentation theory, Habermas’ Universal Pragmatics, Dascal’s theory of the dialectical self, theories and theoretical discussions on the nature of pragmatics from a philosophical point of view. Conversational implicatures are generally meaning augmentations on top of explicatures, whilst explicatures figure prominently in what is said. Discussions in this work reveal their characteristics and tensions within current theories relating to explicatures and implicatures. Authors show that explicatures and implicatures are calculable and not (directly) tied to conventional meaning. Pragmatics has a role to play in dealing with philosophical problems and this volume presents research that defines boundaries and gives a stable picture of pragmatics and philosophy. World renowned academic experts in philosophy and pragmalinguistics ask important theoretical questions and interact in a way that can be easily grasped by those from disciplines other than philosophy, such as anthropology, literary theory and law. A second volume in this series is also available, which covers the perspective of linguists who have been influenced by philosophy.
Download or read book The Routledge Handbook of Semantics written by Nick Riemer and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-07-30 with total page 550 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Routledge Handbook of Semantics provides a broad and state-of-the-art survey of this field, covering semantic research at both word and sentence level. It presents a synoptic view of the most important areas of semantic investigation, including contemporary methodologies and debates, and indicating possible future directions in the field. Written by experts from around the world, the 29 chapters cover key issues and approaches within the following areas: meaning and conceptualisation; meaning and context; lexical semantics; semantics of specific phenomena; development, change and variation. The Routledge Handbook of Semantics is essential reading for researchers and postgraduate students working in this area.
Download or read book Semantics and Pragmatics Drawing a Line written by Ilse Depraetere and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-03-16 with total page 357 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores new territory at the interface between semantics and pragmatics, reassessing a number of linguistic phenomena in the light of recent advances in pragmatic theory. It presents stimulating insights by experts in linguistics and philosophy, including Kent Bach, Philippe de Brabanter, Max Kölbel and François Recanati. The authors begin by reassessing the definition of four theoretical concepts: saturation, free pragmatic enrichment, completion and expansion. They go on to confront (sub)disciplines that have addressed similar issues but that have not necessarily been in close contact, and then turn to questions related to reported speech, modality, indirect requests and prosody. Chapters investigate lexical pragmatics and (cognitive) lexical semantics and other interactions involving experimental pragmatics, construction grammar, clinical linguistics, and the distinction between mental and linguistic content. The authors bridge the gap between different disciplines, subdisciplines and methodologies, supporting cross-fertilization of ideas and indicating the empirical studies that are needed to test current theoretical concepts and push the theory further. Readers will find overviews of the ways in which concepts are defined, empirical data with which they are illustrated and explorations of the theoretical frameworks in which concepts are couched. This exciting exchange of ideas has its origins in the editors’ workshop series on the theme ‘The semantics/pragmatics interface: linguistic, logical and philosophical perspectives’, held at the University of Lille 3 in 2012-13. Scholars of linguistics, logic and philosophy and those interested in the research benefits of crossing disciplines will find this work both accessible and thought-provoking, especially those with an interest in pragmatic theory or semantics.
Download or read book The Legitimacy of Truth written by Riccardo Dottori and published by LIT Verlag Münster. This book was released on 2003 with total page 452 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume contains the Proceedings of the Third meeting Italian/American Philosophy that took place in Rome in June 5-10, 2001. What is "Truth" in Analytic Philosophy after the linguistic turn? What can we say about "Truth" in Hermeneutics, after taking into account the so-called hermeneutical circle? According to Nietzsche: "Truth is that form of error without which human beings could not live." From this definition it follows: "The point is not the rightness of theory but its importance for human existence." Could we say the same from an epistemological point of view? Who (or what) could be the neutral arbiter among different conceptual schemes? Can an interpretative paradigm stand in as a substitute for traditional objectivity? The controversial problem of "Truth," however, must be discussed within the various fields of philosophy: Aesthetics, Logic, Epistemology, Ethics and Politics. In view of this, Hermeneutics and Analytic Philosophy converged to create the body of this meetin
Download or read book Meaning Without Representation written by Steven Gross and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2015-08-20 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Much contemporary thinking about language is animated by the idea that the core function of language is to represent how the world is and that therefore the notion of representation should play a fundamental explanatory role in any explanation of language and language use. Leading thinkers in the field explore various ways this idea may be challenged as well as obstacles to developing various forms of anti-representationalism. Particular attention is given to deflationary accounts of truth, the role of language in expressing mental states, and the normative and the natural as they relate to issues of representation. The chapters further various fundamental debates in metaphysics—for example, concerning the question of finding a place for moral properties in a naturalistic world-view—and illuminate the relation of the recent neo-pragmatist revival to the expressivist stream in analytic philosophy of language.
Download or read book How to Think about Meaning written by Paul Saka and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2007-05-16 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: According to truth-conditional semantics, to explain the meaning of a statement is to specify the conditions necessary and sufficient for its truth. This book develops a more radical mentalist semantics by shifting the object of semantic inquiry. Classical semantics analyzes an abstract sentence or utterance such as "Grass is green"; in attitudinal semantics the object of inquiry is a propositional attitude such as "Speaker so-and-so thinks grass is green".
Download or read book Meaning and Context written by Luca Baptista and published by Peter Lang. This book was released on 2010 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The contextual contributions to meaning are at the core of the debate about the semantics/pragmatics distinction, one of the liveliest topics in current philosophy of language and linguistics. The controversy between semantic minimalists and contextualists regarding context and semantic content is a conspicuous example of the debate's relevance. This collection of essays, written by leading philosophers as well as talented young researchers, offers new approaches to the ongoing discussion about the status of lexical meaning and the role of context dependence in linguistic theorizing. It covers a broad range of issues in semantics and pragmatics such as presuppositions, reference, lexical meaning, discourse relations and information structure, negation, and metaphors. The book is an essential reading for philosophers, linguists, and graduate students of philosophy of language and linguistics.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Philosophy written by Frank Jackson and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2005-10-28 with total page 917 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Oxford Handbooks offer authoritative and up-to-date surveys of original research in a particular subject area. Specially commissioned essays from leading figures in the discipline give critical examinations of the progress and direction of debates. Oxford Handbooks provide scholars and graduate students with compelling new perspectives upon a wide range of subjects in the humanities and social sciences. The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Philosophy is the definitive guide to what's going on in this lively and fascinating subject. Jackson and Smith, themselves two of the world's most eminent philosophers, have assembled more than thirty distinguished scholars to contribute incisive and up-to-date critical surveys of the principal areas of research. The coverage is broad, with sections devoted to moral philosophy, social and political philosophy, philosophy of mind and action, philosophy of language, metaphysics, epistemology, and philosophy of the sciences. This Handbook will be a rich source of insight and stimulation for philosophers, students of philosophy, and for people working in other disciplines of the humanities, social sciences, and sciences, who are interested in the state of philosophy today.
Download or read book Linguistic Meaning Truth Conditions and Relevance written by C. Iten and published by Springer. This book was released on 2005-05-13 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The main argument of this book is that the notion of truth plays no role in speaker-hearers' interpretation of linguistic utterances and that it is not needed for theoretical accounts of linguistic meaning either. The theoretical argument is developed in the first part, while the second part supports it with cognitive relevance-theoretic, rather than truth-based, analyses of the 'concessive' expressions but, although and even if .
Download or read book What is a Context written by Rita Finkbeiner and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2012 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Context is a core notion of linguistic theory. However, while there are numerous attempts at explaining single aspects of the notion of context, these attempts are rather diverse and do not easily converge to a unified theory of context. The present multi-faceted collection of papers reconsiders the notion of context and its challenges for linguistics from different theoretical and empirical angles. Part I offers insights into a wide range of current approaches to context, including theoretical pragmatics, neurolinguistics, clinical pragmatics, interactional linguistics, and psycholinguistics. Part II presents new empirical findings on the role of context from case studies on idioms, unarticulated constituents, argument linking, and numerically-quantified expressions. Bringing together different theoretical frameworks, the volume provides thought-provoking discussions of how the notion of context can be understood, modeled, and implemented in linguistics. It is essential for researchers interested in theoretical and applied linguistics, the semantics/pragmatics interface, and experimental pragmatics.
Download or read book Metasemantics written by Alexis Burgess and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2014 with total page 378 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Metasemantics presents new work on the philosophical foundations of linguistic semantics. Experts in the philosophy of language, metaphysics, and the theory of content provide new perspectives on old problems about linguistic meaning, pose questions that suggest novel research projects, and sharpen our understanding of linguistic representation.
