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Author: Zoltan Gendler Szabo
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2005-01-06
Total Pages: 476
ISBN-13: 0199251517
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis is a collection of papers by leading scholars in the philosophy of language and theoretical linguistics on how semantics and pragmatics embed into a larger theory of interpretation and also on the disputed territories between these disciplines.
Author: Carol A. Kates
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Published: 2020-02-15
Total Pages: 256
ISBN-13: 1501752170
DOWNLOAD EBOOKWhat is the nature of communicative competence? Carol Kates addresses this crucial linguistic question, examining and finally rejecting the rationalistic theory proposed by Noam Chomsky and elaborated by Jerrold J. Katz, among others. She sets forth three reasons why the rationalistic model shoudl be rejected: (1) it has not been supported by empirical tests; (2) it cannot accommodate the pragmatic relation between speaker and sign; and (3) the theory of universal grammar carries with it unacceptable metaphysical implications unless it is interpreted in light of empiricism. Kates proposes an empiricist model in place of the rationalistic theory—a model that, in her view, is more consistent with recent findings in linguistics and psycholinguistics. In attempting to clarify the nature of utterance meaning, Kates develops theoretical perspectives on phenomenological empiricism and produces an account of reference and intentionality directly relevant to empiricaly based theories of speaking and understanding. Among the major topics addressed in the book are transformational-generative and universal grammer, cognitive theories of language acquisition, pragmatic structure, predication and topic-comment structure, and empiricism and the philosophical problem of universals. An innovative and probing work, Pragmatics and Semantics will be welcomed by philosophers, linguists, and psycholinguists.
Author: Paul R. Kroeger
Publisher: Language Science Press
Published: 2019
Total Pages: 502
ISBN-13: 3961101361
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis book provides an introduction to the study of meaning in human language, from a linguistic perspective. It covers a fairly broad range of topics, including lexical semantics, compositional semantics, and pragmatics. The chapters are organized into six units: (1) Foundational concepts; (2) Word meanings; (3) Implicature (including indirect speech acts); (4) Compositional semantics; (5) Modals, conditionals, and causation; (6) Tense & aspect. Most of the chapters include exercises which can be used for class discussion and/or homework assignments, and each chapter contains references for additional reading on the topics covered. As the title indicates, this book is truly an INTRODUCTION: it provides a solid foundation which will prepare students to take more advanced and specialized courses in semantics and/or pragmatics. It is also intended as a reference for fieldworkers doing primary research on under-documented languages, to help them write grammatical descriptions that deal carefully and clearly with semantic issues. The approach adopted here is largely descriptive and non-formal (or, in some places, semi-formal), although some basic logical notation is introduced. The book is written at level which should be appropriate for advanced undergraduate or beginning graduate students. It presupposes some previous coursework in linguistics, but does not presuppose any background in formal logic or set theory.
Author: Patrick Griffiths
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Published: 2006-05-29
Total Pages: 206
ISBN-13: 0748626883
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAn introduction to the linguistic study of meaning, this book outlines the meaning potential (semantics) of English and how language knowledge is put to use (pragmatics). As well as gaining a systematic overview of meaning in English, readers can learn how to argue for analyses. Among the significant concepts introduced are denotation, sense relations, event types, explicature, implicature, presupposition, metaphor, reference, speech acts and (at an elementary level) Generalised Quantifier Theory. Sense relations--such as antonymy and hyponymy--are presented as summarising patterns of entailment. The sense of a word is seen as the contributions it makes to the entailments carried by sentences.
Author: Franz Guenthner
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Published: 2012-12-06
Total Pages: 380
ISBN-13: 9400997752
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe essays in this collection are the outgrowth of a workshop, held in June 1976, on formal approaches to the semantics and pragmatics of natural languages. They document in an astoundingly uniform way the develop ments in the formal analysis of natural languages since the late sixties. The avowed aim of the' workshop was in fact to assess the progress made in the application of formal methods to semantics, to confront different approaches to essentially the same problems on the one hand, and, on the other, to show the way in relating semantic and pragmatic explanations of linguistic phenomena. Several of these papers can in fact be regarded as attempts to close the 'semiotic circle' by bringing together the syntactic, semantic and pragmatic properties of certain constructions in an explanatory framework thereby making it more than obvious that these three components of an integrated linguistic theory cannot be as neatly separated as one would have liked to believe. In other words, not only can we not elaborate a syntactic description of (a fragment of) a language and then proceed to the semantics (as Montague pointed out already forcefully in 1968), we cannot hope to achieve an adequate integrated syntax and semantics without paying heed to the pragmatic aspects of the constructions involved. The behavior of polarity items, 'quantifiers' like any, conditionals or even logical particles like and and or in non-indicative sentences is clear-cut evidence for the need to let each component of the grammar inform the other.
Author: Masayoshi Shibatani
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
Published: 1996-01-01
Total Pages: 344
ISBN-13: 9027285683
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis volume reflects the influence of Chuck Fillmore’s ground-breaking work in the fields of semantics and pragmatics. The papers in the volume pay tribute to his pioneering research into the deepest realms of the nature of ‘meaning’.
Author: Ferenc Kiefer
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
Published: 2001-01-01
Total Pages: 382
ISBN-13: 9789027251091
DOWNLOAD EBOOKProfessor Ferenc Kiefer of the Linguistics Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences was instrumental in bringing early transformational grammar to Europe. His extensive work contributes substantially to making a connection between the grammatical theory and other areas of linguistics. The 17 essays in this book celebrate his career by continuing to explore inter-area research in linguistics: pragmatics in grammar (de Groot, van Riemsdijk, Dressler & Barbaresi, Comrie), semantic compositionality and pragmatics (Wunderlich, Partee, Borschev, Szabo, Bach), logical structures and universals in semantics and pragmatics (van der Auwera, Bultinck, Burton-Roberts, Harnish, Wierzbicka) dialogue and thematic structure (Jonasson, Doherty, Hajicova, Panevova, Sgall, Allwood, Fraser).
Author: Wesley M. Jacobsen
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Published: 2020-10-12
Total Pages: 1223
ISBN-13: 1501501054
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe volume on Semantics and Pragmatics presents a collection of studies on linguistic meaning in Japanese, either as conventionally encoded in linguistic form (the field of semantics) or as generated by the interaction of form with context (the field of pragmatics), representing a range of ideas and approaches that are currently most influentialin these fields. The studies are organized around a model that has long currency in traditional Japanese grammar, whereby the linguistic clause consists of a multiply nested structure centered in a propositional core of objective meaning around which forms are deployed that express progressively more subjective meaning as one moves away from the core toward the periphery of the clause. The volume seeks to achieve a balance in highlighting both insights that semantic and pragmatic theory has to offer to the study of Japanese as a particular language and, conversely, contributions that Japanese has to make to semantic and pragmatic theory in areas of meaning that are either uniquely encoded, or encoded to a higher degree of specificity, in Japanese by comparison to other languages, such as conditional forms, forms expressing varying types of speaker modality, and social deixis.
Author: Geoffrey N. Leech
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
Published: 1980
Total Pages: 142
ISBN-13: 9027225060
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe aim of this book is to show the way forward to a coherent view of language in which the achievement of the formalist paradigm is strengthened to the extent that its claims are weakened. A formal theory such as generative grammar is a special theory which is to be subsumed in a general theory of linguistic communication that also includes pragmatics. The tension between the psycho-formalist and the socio-functional views could be resolved in a synthesis whereby both the psychological and social natures of language are fully acknowledged. Semantics and pragmatics, representing these two natures in the study of meaning, have distinct goals, which can be defined more clearly and pursued more effectively to the extent that both their distinctness and their interdependence are recognized.
Author: Gregory L. Ward
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2016-11-25
Total Pages: 209
ISBN-13: 1134992971
DOWNLOAD EBOOKFirst published in 1988, this book examines the aspects of pragmatic competence involving the class of preposing constructions in English. By limiting the scope of investigation to particular grammatical categories, the author argues previous studies have failed to capture significant pragmatic generalisations. The author asserts what distinguishes one preposing type from another are the semantic and pragmatic properties of the referent of that constituent. After a review of the past literature on preposing, the book goes on to present a pragmatic theory in which two discourse functions of preposing are proposed. It then provides a functional taxonomy of the various preposing types which the theory is designed to account for. One type of preposing, Topicalization, and two of its subtypes, Proposition Affirmation and Ironic Preposing, are discussed in detail in the subsequent chapters before the book concludes with a summary along with directions for future research.
