Download or read book Linguistic Pragmatism and Weather Reporting written by John Collins and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2020-03-26 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: John Collins defends the doctrine of linguistic pragmatism--arguing that linguistic meaning alone fails to fix truth conditions and detailing the relative sparseness of what language alone can provide to semantic interpretation--through his novel analysis of the syntax, semantics, and pragmatics of weather reporting.

Download or read book Linguistic Pragmatism and Weather Reporting written by John Collins and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-03-26 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Linguistic pragmatism claims that what we literally say goes characteristically beyond what the linguistic properties themselves mandate. In this book, John Collins provides a novel defence of this doctrine, arguing that linguistic meaning alone fails to fix truth conditions. While this position is supported by a range of theorists, Collins shows that it naturally follows from a syntactic thesis concerning the relative sparseness of what language alone can provide to semantic interpretation. Language-and by extension meaning-provides constraints upon what a speaker can literally say, but does not characteristically encode any definite thing to say. Collins then defends this doctrine against a range of alternatives and objections, focusing in particular on an analysis of weather reports: 'it is raining/snowing/sunny'. Such reporting is mostly location-sensitive in the sense that the utterance is true or not depending upon whether it is raining/snowing/sunny at the location of the utterance, rather than some other location. Collins offers a full analysis of the syntax, semantics, and pragmatics of weather reports, including many novel data. He shows that the constructions lack the linguistic resources to support the common literal locative readings. Other related phenomena are discussed such as the Saxon genitive, colour predication, quantifier domain restriction, and object deletion.

Download or read book Linguistic Intuitions written by Samuel Schindler and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-08-14 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the evidential status and use of linguistic intuitions, a topic that has seen increased interest in recent years. Linguists use native speakers' intuitions - such as whether or not an utterance sounds acceptable - as evidence for theories about language, but this approach is not uncontroversial. The two parts of this volume draw on the most recent work in both philosophy and linguistics to explore the two major issues at the heart of the debate. Chapters in the first part address the 'justification question', critically analysing and evaluating the theoretical rationale for the evidential use of linguistic intuitions. The second part discusses recent developments in the domain of experimental syntax, focusing on the question of whether gathering intuitions experimentally is epistemically and methodologically superior to the informal methods that have traditionally been used. The volume provides valuable insights into whether and how linguistic intuitions can be used in theorizing about language, and will be of interest to graduate students and researchers in linguistics, philosophy, and cognitive science.

Download or read book A Companion to Chomsky written by Nicholas Allott and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2021-04-27 with total page 644 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A COMPANION TO CHOMSKY Widely considered to be one of the most important public intellectuals of our time, Noam Chomsky has revolutionized modern linguistics. His thought has had a profound impact upon the philosophy of language, mind, and science, as well as the interdisciplinary field of cognitive science which his work helped to establish. Now, in this new Companion dedicated to his substantial body of work and the range of its influence, an international assembly of prominent linguists, philosophers, and cognitive scientists reflect upon the interdisciplinary reach of Chomsky's intellectual contributions. Balancing theoretical rigor with accessibility to the non-specialist, the Companion is organized into eight sections—including the historical development of Chomsky's theories and the current state of the art, comparison with rival usage-based approaches, and the relation of his generative approach to work on linguistic processing, acquisition, semantics, pragmatics, and philosophy of language. Later chapters address Chomsky's rationalist critique of behaviorism and related empiricist approaches to psychology, as well as his insistence upon a "Galilean" methodology in cognitive science. Following a brief discussion of the relation of his work in linguistics to his work on political issues, the book concludes with an essay written by Chomsky himself, reflecting on the history and character of his work in his own words. A significant contribution to the study of Chomsky's thought, A Companion to Chomsky is an indispensable resource for philosophers, linguists, psychologists, advanced undergraduate and graduate students, and general readers with interest in Noam Chomsky's intellectual legacy as one of the great thinkers of the twentieth century.

Download or read book Indirect Reports and Pragmatics written by Alessandro Capone and published by Springer. This book was released on 2015-12-01 with total page 648 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume offers the reader a singular overview of current thinking on indirect reports. The contributors are eminent researchers from the fields of philosophy of language, theoretical linguistics and communication theory, who answer questions on this important issue. This exciting area of controversy has until now mostly been treated from the viewpoint of philosophy. This volume adds the views from semantics, conversation analysis and sociolinguistics. Authors address matters such as the issue of semantic minimalism vs. radical contextualism, the attribution of responsibility for the modes of presentation associated with Noun Phrases and how to distinguish the indirect reporter’s responsibility from the original speaker’s responsibility. They also explore the connection between indirect reporting and direct quoting. Clearly indirect reporting has some bearing on the semantics/pragmatics debate, however, there is much controversy on “what is said”, whether this is a minimal semantic logical form (enriched by saturating pronominals) or a much richer and fully contextualized logical form. This issue will be discussed from several angles. Many of the authors are contextualists and the discussion brings out the need to take context into account when one deals with indirect reports, both the context of the original utterance and the context of the report. It is interesting to see how rich cues and clues can radically transform the reported message, assigning illocutionary force and how they can be mobilized to distinguish several voices in the utterance. Decoupling the voice of the reporting speaker from that of the reported speaker on the basis of rich contextual clues is an important issue that pragmatic theory has to tackle. Articles on the issue of slurs will bring new light to the issue of decoupling responsibility in indirect reporting, while others are theoretically oriented and deal with deep problems in philosophy and epistemology.

Download or read book Overlooking Conventions written by Michael Devitt and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-10-08 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book criticizes the methodology of the recent semantics-pragmatics debate in the theory of language and proposes an alternative. It applies this methodology to argue for a traditional view against a group of “contextualists” and “pragmatists”, including Sperber and Wilson, Bach, Carston, Recanati, Neale, and many others. The author disagrees with these theorists who hold that the meaning of the sentence in an utterance never, or hardly ever, yields its literal truth-conditional content, even after disambiguation and reference fixing; it needs to be pragmatically supplemented in context. The standard methodology of this debate is to consult intuitions. The book argues that theories should be tested against linguistic usage. Theoretical distinctions, however intuitive, need to be scientifically motivated. Also we should not be guided by Grice’s “Modified Occam’s Razor”, Ruhl’s “Monosemantic Bias”, or other such strategies for “meaning denialism”. From this novel perspective, the striking examples of context relativity that motivate contextualists and pragmatists typically exemplify semantic rather than pragmatic properties. In particular, polysemous phenomena should typically be treated as semantic ambiguity. The author argues that conventions have been overlooked, that there’s no extensive “semantic underdetermination” and that the new theoretical framework of “truth-conditional pragmatics” is a mistake.

Download or read book Linguistic Luck written by Abrol Fairweather and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023-05-23 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Despite the considerable attention the topic of luck has received in ethics and epistemology, very little has been published in the philosophical literature overtly on linguistic luck. The essays collected here provide the first sustained examination of the diverse forms of linguistic luck, the mechanisms available to reduce the impact of linguistic luck and how to cope with residual luck not eliminated by the causal, inferential, and intentional mechanisms which aim at its eradication. Of primary interest is not some, hitherto unnoticed widespread prevalence of luck in the determinants of meaning and communication, but rather the impressive extent to which luck is reduced or eliminated therein. Whether through casual, inferential or intentional means, the determinants of meaning and communication are impressively independent of luck and chance. In fact, it is difficult to imagine a world with human language where efforts to communicate succeed no better than chance. Linguistic communication is only possible because robust luck reducing variables are at work. The essays collected seek to understand the diversity, scope and mode of operation of luck reducing mechanisms in language. While it is not possible here to cover the full range of linguistic phenomena affected by luck, a wide range of issues in linguistics and philosophy of language are investigated, including, syntax processing, demonstrative reference, conversational implicature, testimony, lexical innovation, joint attention, communicative value, conventionalism vs. anti-conventionalism, metasemantic safety, and semantic skepticism, to name a few.

Download or read book Reanimated Voices written by Daniel E. Collins and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2001-07-09 with total page 406 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reanimated Voices addresses three activities: reporters evoking speech events; interpreters (re)constituting those speech events; and historical pragmaticians eavesdropping in time on the reporters and interpreters. Can one reconstruct aspects of pragmatic competence on the basis of written texts only? Reanimated Voices answers this in the affirmative. It offers a methodology for historical-pragmatic reconstruction to explain the synchronic patterns of variation in premodern writings. Reanimated Voices examines the distribution of reporting strategies in a corpus of medieval Russian texts. Forms preferred in specific recurring contexts are matched with the need(s) served by those contexts — a fit reflecting collective intentionality. Occasional “residual forms” -strategies that appear in contexts where others predominate- also reflect cooperative behavior; they index utterances departing from the prototype or unusual configurations of participants. Thus Reanimated Voices explores reporting as an activity of rational agents coordinating interpretation in accordance with cultural and institutional notions of relevance.

Download or read book Preformulating the News written by Geert Jacobs and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 1999-05-15 with total page 446 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Preformulating the News is a study of press releases and of how they anticipate the requirements of journalistic writing. Drawing from a large corpus (Dutch and English), it is argued that the genre’s peculiar audience-directedness can be related to a number of metapragmatic textual features and that this sheds light on the asymmetries of what can be termed the ‘newsmaking’ and ‘news management’ processes. In the first chapter the study of press releases is put in the context of institutional discourse and the details of a linguistic pragmatic research method are proposed. Chapter 2 looks at the complex receiver roles in press releases, which are characterized as indirectly targeted, i.e. ‘projected’, discourse. In chapters 3 to 6 a data analysis of the metapragmatics of press releases is presented: in particular, it is shown that self-reference, pseudo-quotation and explicit semi-performative play a ‘preformulating’ role in press releases. Chapter 7 offers a case study of the press releases that the American multinational Exxon issued in the wake of the 1989 Alaska oil spill. In the eighth and final chapter it is suggested that the study’s findings support a hegemonic view of the media. In analysing the much neglected genre of press releases, the book aims to contribute to the study of the language of the news. At the same time, it explores more general issues of participation and footing as well as reflexive language, including deixis, reported speech and performativity.

Download or read book The Praxis of Indirect Reports written by Mostafa Morady Moghaddam and published by Springer. This book was released on 2019-06-11 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book discusses the concept of indirect reporting in relation to sociopragmatic, philosophical, and cognitive factors. In addition, it deals with several state-of-the-art topics with regard to indirect reports, such as trust, politeness, refinery and photosynthetic processes and cognitive features. The book presents socio-cognitive accounts of indirect reports that take into consideration Grice’s Cooperation Principle and Sperber and Wilson’s Relevance Theory. It discusses direct and indirect reports and their similarities and differences, with a focus on the neglected role of the hearer in indirect reports. It presents an extensive comparison of translation and indirect reports (with a detailed discussion on reporting/translating slurring), and examines politeness issues and the role of trust. It deals with the main principles governing the use and interpretation of indirect reports (among them, the Principle of Commitment and the Principle of Immunity). Finally, the book discusses the idea of ‘common core’ and cross-cultural studies in reported speech and illustrates by means of an analysis of Persian reported speech, how subjectivity and uncertainty are presented among Persian speakers.

Download or read book Speech Act Theory and Pragmatics written by John Searle and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the study of language, as in any other systematic study, there is no neutral terminology. Every technical term is an expression of the assumptions and theoretical presuppositions of its users; and in this introduction, we want to clarify some of the issues that have surrounded the assumptions behind the use of the two terms "speech acts" and "pragmatics". The notion of a speech act is fairly well understood. The theory of speech acts starts with the assumption that the minimal unit of human communica tion is not a sentence or other expression, but rather the performance of certain kinds of acts, such as making statements, asking questions, giving orders, describing, explaining, apologizing, thanking, congratulating, etc. Characteristically, a speaker performs one or more of these acts by uttering a sentence or sentences; but the act itself is not to be confused with a sentence or other expression uttered in its performance. Such types of acts as those exemplified above are called, following Austin, illocutionary acts, and they are standardly contrasted in the literature with certain other types of acts such as perlocutionary acts and propositional acts. Perlocutionary acts have to do with those effects which our utterances have on hearers which go beyond the hearer's understanding of the utterance. Such acts as convincing, persuading, annoying, amusing, and frightening are all cases of perlocutionary acts.

Download or read book The Pragmatic Turn written by Andreas K. Engel and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2022-06-07 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Experts from a range of disciplines assess the foundations and implications of a novel action-oriented view of cognition. Cognitive science is experiencing a pragmatic turn away from the traditional representation-centered framework toward a view that focuses on understanding cognition as “enactive.” This enactive view holds that cognition does not produce models of the world but rather subserves action as it is grounded in sensorimotor skills. In this volume, experts from cognitive science, neuroscience, psychology, robotics, and philosophy of mind assess the foundations and implications of a novel action-oriented view of cognition. Their contributions and supporting experimental evidence show that an enactive approach to cognitive science enables strong conceptual advances, and the chapters explore key concepts for this new model of cognition. The contributors discuss the implications of an enactive approach for cognitive development; action-oriented models of cognitive processing; action-oriented understandings of consciousness and experience; and the accompanying paradigm shifts in the fields of philosophy, brain science, robotics, and psychology. Contributors Moshe Bar, Lawrence W. Barsalov, Olaf Blanke, Jeannette Bohg, Martin V. Butz, Peter F. Dominey, Andreas K. Engel, Judith M. Ford, Karl J. Friston, Chris D. Frith, Shaun Gallagher, Antonia Hamilton, Tobias Heed, Cecilia Heyes, Elisabeth Hill, Matej Hoffmann, Jakob Hohwy, Bernhard Hommel, Atsushi Iriki, Pierre Jacob, Henrik Jörntell, Jürgen Jost, James Kilner, Günther Knoblich, Peter König, Danica Kragic, Miriam Kyselo, Alexander Maye, Marek McGann, Richard Menary, Thomas Metzinger, Ezequiel Morsella, Saskia Nagel, Kevin J. O'Regan, Pierre-Yves Oudeyer, Giovanni Pezzulo, Tony J. Prescott, Wolfgang Prinz, Friedemann Pulvermüller, Robert Rupert, Marti Sanchez-Fibla, Andrew Schwartz, Anil K. Seth, Vicky Southgate, Antonella Tramacere, John K. Tsotsos, Paul F. M. J. Verschure, Gabriella Vigliocco, Gottfried Vosgerau

Download or read book Cyberpragmatics written by Francisco Yus and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2011-08-22 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cyberpragmatics is an analysis of Internet-mediated communication from the perspective of cognitive pragmatics. It addresses a whole range of interactions that can be found on the Net: the web page, chat rooms, instant messaging, social networking sites, 3D virtual worlds, blogs, videoconference, e-mail, Twitter, etc. Of special interest is the role of intentions and the quality of interpretations when these Internet-mediated interactions take place, which is often affected by the textual properties of the medium. The book also analyses the pragmatic implications of transferring offline discourses (e.g. printed paper, advertisements) to the screen-framed space of the Net. And although the main framework is cognitive pragmatics, the book also draws from other theories and models in order to build up a better picture of what really happens when people communicate on the Net. This book will interest analysts doing research on computer-mediated communication, university students and researchers undergoing post-graduate courses or writing a PhD thesis. Now Open Access as part of the Knowledge Unlatched 2017 Backlist Collection.

Download or read book After Babel written by George Steiner and published by New York : Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1976 with total page 530 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When it first appeared in 1975, After Babel created a sensation, quickly establishing itself as both a controversial and seminal study of literary theory. In the original edition, Steiner provided readers with the first systematic investigation since the eighteenth century of the phenomenology and processes of translation both inside and between languages. Taking issue with the principal emphasis of modern linguistics, he finds the root of the "Babel problem" in our deep instinct for privacy and territory, noting that every people has in its language a unique body of shared secrecy. With this provocative thesis he analyzes every aspect of translation from fundamental conditions of interpretation to the most intricate of linguistic constructions.For the long-awaited second edition, Steiner entirely revised the text, added new and expanded notes, and wrote a new preface setting the work in the present context of hermeneutics, poetics, and translation studies. This new edition brings the bibliography up to the present with substantially updated references, including much Russian and Eastern European material. Like the towering figures of Derrida, Lacan, and Foucault, Steiner's work is central to current literary thought. After Babel, Third Edition is essential reading for anyone hoping to understand the debates raging in the academy today.

Download or read book Key Terms in Pragmatics written by Nicholas Allott and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2010-04-23 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first study of pragmatics with an introduction organised by key terms, including short biographies of key thinkers, and a list of key works for further reading.

Download or read book An Introduction to Language and Linguistics written by Ralph Fasold and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2006-03-09 with total page 481 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This accessible textbook offers balanced and uniformly excellent coverage of modern linguistics.

Download or read book Second Language Instruction acquisition Abstracts written by and published by . This book was released on 1996 with total page 480 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: