Ferenc Kiefer - Böcker

First published in 1997. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

No detailed description available for "A theory of structural semantics".

This volume contributes to a major area of research in linguistics of the last decade, and provides novel, state-of-the-art views on some of the central topics in linguistic research, and will appeal to an audience of graduate and advanced undergraduate researchers in linguistics, philosophy of language and computational linguistics.

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 aminimal 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.

This volume contributes to a major area of research in linguistics of the last decade, and provides novel, state-of-the-art views on some of the central topics in linguistic research, and will appeal to an audience of graduate and advanced undergraduate researchers in linguistics, philosophy of language and computational linguistics.

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.

Eight Decades of General Linguistics presents the key lectures delivered at the eighteen conferences organized by the Permanent International Committee of Linguists and also a history of the Committee itself. The contributions of outstanding scholars such as Otto Jesperson, Louis Hjelmslev, André Martinet, Uriel Weinreich, Noam Chomsky and many other linguists cannot be over-estimated. The majority of the papers address a radically new topic, each of which became one of the central issues in subsequent linguistic research. In addition to their empirical findings and/or the theoretical innovations presented in their papers, each contribution is still interesting and pivotal to the development of contemporary linguistics.

This volume contains a selection of recent theoretical studies, deriving from presentations at the 16th International Morphology Meeting (Budapest, 2014), on the organization of morphological paradigms, paradigm complexity, and the inflectional marking of morphosyntactic relations, as well as on the application of information theory to the analysis of morphological systems aiming to achieve a clearer understanding of the close relation between notions of ‘morphological information’ based on ‘uncertainty’ and ‘uncertainty reduction’ and the error-driven structure of discriminative learning models.

In the last decade a profound change has occurred in linguistic science. Not only have old problems been tackled from an entirely new point of view but also quite a few new fields of linguistic research have been opened. The common characteristic of the majority of the theories and methods developed recently is the search for a more adequate description of language. Adequacy does not mean simply that the theory must conform to the facts. It must also meet the general requirements of present-day theories: coherence, clear-cut notions, rigor of presentation. It has also become abundantly clear that linguistic research cannot be content with the registration and classification of linguistic phenomena. In one way or another linguistics must try to explain the deep-seated regularities in language which in general do not appear on the surface in some straightforward way. Therefore, we find the attribute 'deep' very often in contemporary linguistic literature. Linguistic theories seek an explanation for the observed facts in terms of a system of hypotheses about the functioning of language. As research proceeds these will undergo essential changes. Some of them will be waived, others com­ plemented. The papers of the present volume follow these general principles of linguistic theory though they may differ from each other in the way of presentation considerably. Some of the papers make use of the framework of transformational-generative grammar (e. g. Kuroda; Perlmutter), others approach the pertinent problem from a different angle (e. g. Dupraz and Rouault; Apresyan, Mel'cuk, and Zolkovski).