Current Research in the Semantics / Pragmatics Interface - Böcker

This volume examines explicitly the question of how the semantics and pragmatics of a number of expressions might be responsibly discussed. In the past, the temptation has been for the expressions in question to be discussed either in terms of the semantics, or in terms of the pragmatics, but extremely rarely in terms of both.

The study of questions and answers is challenging for various fields of theoretical linguistics, logic, analytical philosophy, and more recently computer science. Research into questions and answers addresses old and raises new and important questions about the semantics / pragmatics interface and about the dynamics of interpretation. This book brings together current work on the topic as it has been developed in Amsterdam, and congenial academic sites, over the past 15 years. Amsterdam is one of the breeding grounds for the formal study of logic and language, for dynamic semantics, and for the study of questions and answers. It covers the major issues of pragmatic/semantic investigation, including logical relations, context dependence, information structure, and more. It illustrates how semantic/pragmatic stance can be used for problems in other areas of linguistic theorising.

The central aim of this study is to elucidate the nature of the semantics / pragmatics distinction in both synchrony and diachrony. The author proposes a definition of semantics and pragmatics that is orthogonal to the question of truth-conditionality, and discusses the status of various types of meaning with respect to this definition. A corollary aim of the study is to propose an account of how and why erstwhile pragmatically-determined elements of meaning may, in the course of time, become semanticized. The nature, paths, and mechanisms of diachronic sense changes of the relevant type, as well as the motivations for them, are discussed in some detail. The author combines insights from different sources, prominently frame-based semantics, historical pragmatics, and Peircean semiotics, to arrive at a model of linguistic meaning that is both synchronically and diachronically dynamic, hence capable of integrating structure and usage. As a case study, the synchronic uses and diachronic evolution of the exceptionally polyfunctional French phasal adverbs deja ('already'), encore ('still/yet'), toujours ('still'), and enfin ('finally') are analyzed in some detail, with particular attention being paid to the semantic vs pragmatic nature of the various uses of these items. The book will be of interest to lexical semanticists, pragmaticians, historical linguists, functional/cognitive linguists, discourse analysts, and semioticians.

Although the notion of procedural meaning is found in areas such as discourse markers, reference, tense, modality and intonation, until now there has been no single volume entirely devoted to it. Over 25 years, since the initial proposal by Blakemore, a number of refinements have been suggested, yet some criticisms have also been raised. The role and status of the conceptual / procedural distinction within a theory of human communication and the nature of procedural encoding were in need of reassessment in the light of current research in linguistic theory, cognitive science, experimental pragmatics and language acquisition. The papers collected here serve this general purpose from different standpoints. Some of them consider the topic from the angle of its theoretical foundations and put forth original proposals aimed at clarifying the most controversial issues. Others take a more data-driven orientation and offer novel analyses illustrating how encoded instructions work and how much can be gained from approaching certain linguistic phenomena in procedural terms. The contributions in this volume represent an inflection point in the delimitation and understanding of the notion of procedural meaning and open new paths for future research.

This collection of especially invited papers aims to explore the nature of the semantics/pragmatics interface by examining the extent to which the analysis of certain expressions or constructions can be pragmaticised. As the title of the collection implicates, it is anticipated that the theoretical and descriptive burden will move from semantics to pragmatics. However not all parts of a linguistic system will yield to a pragmatic treatment. The possibility remains that certain expressions or constructions are more economically and elegantly treated in semantic terms. Thus, this collection also contains papers that address the topic of 'making pragmatics semantic'. This collection contributes to the current interest in examining the division of labour between semantics and pragmatics in the analysis of meaning. All of the papers are at the forefront of knowledge in these matters and each contains original empirical analyses and/or novel theoretical perspectives. This book is relevant to courses in university departments of linguistics, modern languages, philosophy and psychology and to a wide range of university teaching and research.

This book, Utterance Interpretation and Cognitive Models, is a collection of papers that stems from the conference of the same name held at the Free University of Brussels in June 2006. Our main objective is to reconcile armchair theorising about the semantics-pragmatics interface with hypotheses about cognitive architecture. For that reason, the papers in the collection place some of the hottest questions in contemporary philosophy of language within the scope of a psychologically plausible theory of human communication. The collection is articulated into three parts. The first concerns the cognitive counterparts of lexical meanings. The second explores the links between moods and forces. The third looks at the epistemological status of semantic theory from the point of view of human psychology.

So it is hardly a decade ago that presupposition theory has been cast into a promising theoretical form. And as this provided an inspiring starting point for further research, we thought that, at the turn of the century, the time had come to discuss what the new theory had taught us and which promising further perspectives had been opened up. This was the motivation behind the conference on "Presupposition" which we convened in Stuttgart in October 2000, and which gave rise to the papers collected in this volume. The conference was funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, which we gratefully acknowledge. Undoubtedly, presupposition theory is a major chapter in the success story of dynamic semantics. A conference on the topic thus also seemed to us the ideal birthday present for one of the founding fathers of dynamic semantics, our teacher and friend Hans Kamp, on his 60th birthday. To him we dedicate the volume as an expression of our gratitude for his untiring effort to make us understand.

The overall aim of this book is to advance a Gricean theoretical framework of conventional implicature within which Chinese pragmatic markers can be accommodated. It has two linked objectives. Firstly it sets out to advance a theory of conventional implicature. Conventional implicature is itself a highly controversial term, understood very differently by various brands of contemporary pragmatic theory, and is a pivotal concept in the debates between the Gricean and Neo-Gricean theorists on the one hand and proponents of Relevance Theory on the other. This book offers an exemplary analysis and definition of what is involved in these current debates, and it both clarifies and 'problematises' a large range of associated issues. The second objective is to offer a principled and systematic analysis of pragmatic markers in Chinese. Markers of this sort (and a range of interconnnected categories including discourse particles) have been the subject of intense investigation in recent years, and this detailed study of Chinese markers is a contribution in this area which is of substantial importance, both theoretical and empirical.

The Semantics of Grammatical Dependencies argues that constraints of interaction from semantic evaluations enforce grammatical dependency patterns that recur across natural languages and within constructions at intra and inter sentential levels as well as discourse levels. The book develops along three lines. Firstly, a handle is gained on why languages are structured around localities, with localities functioning as actions of 'reset' to permit the reuse of grammatical resources that maintain a fixed semantic contribution. Secondly, sensitivity is brought to the linear and hierarchical placement of scope information to capture ordering effects like accessibility, crossover and intervention. Thirdly, an interestingly different perspective is reached on what it means to be grammatical: rather than being a destructive feature that bans or filters out bad structure, grammaticality takes on a role of constructive guidance that keeps languages to what are generally unambiguous canonical forms that moreover guarantee required dependencies. The book will be of interest to advanced undergraduate students, post-graduate and research students and all researchers in the formal analysis of the syntax, semantics and pragmatics of natural language.

In Potential Questions at the Semantics-Pragmatics Interface Edgar Onea proposes a novel component for question under discussion based discourse pragmatic theories thereby combining such theories with new ideas from inquisitive semantics. He shows how potential questions account for an entire range of grammatical phenomena. These phenomena include the semantics of indefinite determiners, the meaning contribution of nominal appositives, specificational constructions and non restrictive relative clauses. This book delivers a comprehensive and empirically rich investigation into the role of questions in natural language interpretation. Drawing on data from German, English, Hungarian and Russian, Edgar Onea's study significantly broadens our understanding of conventional sensitivity to questions through formally rigorous analyses of specificational particles, parentheticals and indefinites. The Potential Questions framework offers a new and exciting perspective on utterance meanings as not just addressing, but also raising questions, with important consequences for integrated analyses of discourse structure and discourse relations. This book is essential reading for anybody interested in the semantics-pragmatics interface.Judith Tonhauser, The Ohio State University

The basic claims of traditional truth-conditional semantics are that the semantic interpretation of a sentence is connected to the truth of that sentence in a situation, and that the meaning of the sentence is derived compositionally from the semantic values meaning of its constituents and the rules that combine them. Both claims have been subject to an intense debate in linguistics and philosophy of language. The original research papers collected in this volume test the boundaries of this classic view from a linguistic and a philosophical point of view by investigating the foundational notions of composition, values and interpretation and their relation to the interfaces to other disciplines. They take the classical theories one step further and closer to a realistic semantic theory that covers speaker’s intentions, the knowledge of discourse participants, meaning of fiction and literature, as well as vague and paradoxical utterances.Ede Zimmermann is a pioneering researcher in semantics whose students, friends, and colleagues have collected in this volume an impressive set of studies at the interfaces of semantics. How do meanings interact with the context and with intentions and beliefs of the people conversing? How do meanings interact with other meanings in an extended discourse? How can there be paradoxical meanings? Researchers interested in semantics, pragmatics, philosophy of language, anyone interested in foundational and empirical issues of meaning, will find inspiration and instruction in this wonderful volume. Kai von Fintel, MIT Department of Linguistics

The concept of meaning, since Frege initiated the linguistic turn in 1884, has been the subject of numerous theories, hypotheses, methodologies and distinctions. One distinction of considerable strategic value relates to the location of meaning: some aspects of meaning can be found in language and are modelled with semantic values of various kinds; some aspects of meaning can be found in communicative processes and are modelled with pragmatic inferences of one sort or another. One hypothesis of great heuristic utility concerns the relationship that is assumed between the semantic and the pragmatic. This collection of especially commissioned papers examines current thinking on the plausible nature of the semantic, the possible character of the pragmatic and the mechanics of their intersection.

The volume Questions in Discourse - Vol. 1 Semantics contains a comprehensive overview of the semantic analysis of questions and their role in structuring discourse, next to a series of in-depth contributions on individual aspects of question meanings. The expert contributions offer novel accounts of semantic phenomena such as negation and biased questions, question embedding, exhaustivity, disjunction in alternative questions, and superlative quantification particles in questions. Some accounts are modelled in the framework of inquisitive semantics, whereas others employ alternative semantics, and yet others point to the discourse-structuring potential of marked questions. All contributions are easily accessible against the background of the general introduction. Together, they give an excellent overview of current trends in question semantics.

The volume Questions in Discourse - Vol. 2 Pragmatics collects original research on the role of questions in understanding text structure and discourse pragmatics. The in-depth studies discuss the effects of focus, questions and givenness in unalternative semantics, as well as the role of scalar particles, question-answer pairs and prosody from the perspective of Questions under Discussion. Two contributions compare the discourse-structuring potential of Questions under Discussion and rhetorical relations, whereas another adds a perspective from inquisitive semantics. Some contributions also look at understudied languages. Together, the contributions allow for a better understanding of question-related pragmatic and discourse-semantic phenomena, and they offer new perspectives on the structure of texts and discourses.

This book offers an in-depth account of the meaning of grammatical elements representing evidentiality in connection to modality, focusing on theoretical/formal perspectives by eminent pioneers in the field and on recently discovered phenomena in Korean evidential markers by native scholars in particular. Evidentiality became a hot topic in semantics and pragmatics, trying to see what kind of evidential justification is provided by evidentials to support or be related to the ‘at-issue’ prejacent propositions. This book aims to provide a deeper understanding of such evidentiality in discourse contexts in a broad range of languages such as American Indian, Korean and Japanese, Turkish and African languages over the world. In addition, an introduction to the concept of evidentiality and theoretical perspectives and recent issues is also provided.

A text usually provides more information than a random sequence of clauses: It combines sentence-level information to larger units which are glued together by coherence relations that may induce a hierarchical discourse structure. Since linguists have begun to investigate texts as more complex units of linguistic communication, it has been controversially discussed what the appropriate level of analysis of discourse structure ought to be and what the criteria to identify (minimal) discourse units are. Linguistic structure–and more precisely, the extraction and integration of syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic information–is shown to be at the center of text processing and discourse comprehension. However, its role in the establishment of basic building blocks for a coherent discourse is still a subject of debate. This collection addresses these issues using various methodological approaches. It presents current results in theoretical, diachronic, experimental as well as computational research on structuring information in discourse.