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1
Losada, Alfonso. "Disagreements. Semantics, Pragmatics and Existence." Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú - Departamento de Humanidades, 2015. http://repositorio.pucp.edu.pe/index/handle/123456789/113033.
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In this article, we defend the existence of disagreements in areas of discourse that involve anagent’s perspective, as the semantic theory known as Radical Relativism” putsit. In the face of the idea that such disagreements exist and can only be explainedby a radical relativist semantics, contextualist theorists have offered arguments to deny their existence or to provide an explanation of them which does not imply departing from the standard semantic theory. These arguments will be our targetof criticism. We raise the debate in terms of the distinction between semantic andpragmatic aspects of disagreement, and we defend a simple vision of disagreement, which we believe the relativist must have in mind if he wants to argue that disagreements belonging to areas that involve an agent’s perspective can count as evidence in his favor.En este trabajo ofrecemos una defensa de la existencia de desacuerdos en ámbitos del discurso que involucran la perspectiva de un agente, tal como los contempla la teoría semántica conocida como relativismo radical. Ante la idea deque tales desacuerdos existen y que solo pueden ser explicados a partir de una semántica relativista radical, los teóricos del marco contextualista han ofrecido argumentos, o bien para negar la existencia de los mismos, o bien para proveer una explicación de ellos sin necesidad de postular un alejamiento de la teoría semántica estándar. Estos argumentos serán nuestro blanco de crítica. Planteamos el debate en términos de la distinción entre aspectos semánticos y aspectos pragmáticos del desacuerdo, y defendemos una visión simple del desacuerdo, la cual creemos que el relativista debe tener en mente si quiere sostener que los desacuerdos que pertenecen a ámbitos que involucran la perspectiva de un agente pueden contar como evidencia a su favor.
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Verspoor, Cornelia M. "Contextually-dependent lexical semantics." Thesis, University of Edinburgh, 1997. http://hdl.handle.net/1842/515.
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This thesis is an investigation of phenomena at the interface between syntax, semantics, and pragmatics, with the aim of arguing for a view of semantic interpretation as lexically driven yet contextually dependent. I examine regular, generative processes which operate over the lexicon to induce verbal sense shifts, and discuss the interaction of these processes with the linguistic or discourse context. I concentrate on phenomena where only an interaction between all three linguistic knowledge sources can explain the constraints on verb use: conventionalised lexical semantic knowledge constrains productive syntactic processes, while pragmatic reasoning is both constrained by and constrains the potential interpretations given to certain verbs. The phenomena which are closely examined are the behaviour of PP sentential modifiers (specifically dative and directional PPs) with respect to the lexical semantic representation of the verb phrases they modify, resultative constructions, and logical metonymy. The analysis is couched in terms of a lexical semantic representation drawing on Davis (1995), Jackendoff (1983, 1990), and Pustejovsky (1991, 1995) which aims to capture “linguistically relevant” components of meaning. The representation is shown to have utility for modeling of the interaction between the syntactic form of an utterance and its meaning. I introduce a formalisation of the representation within the framework of Head Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (Pollard and Sag 1994), and rely on the model of discourse coherence proposed by Lascarides and Asher (1992), Discourse in Commonsense Entailment. I furthermore discuss the implications of the contextual dependency of semantic interpretation for lexicon design and computational processing in Natural Language Understanding systems.
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Mendes, José Vicente Santos. "The semantics-pragmatics of route directions." [S.l. : s.n.], 2005. http://deposit.ddb.de/cgi-bin/dokserv?idn=974329509.
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Buckland, Warren Stephen. "Filmic meaning : the semantics-pragmatics interface." Thesis, University of East Anglia, 1992. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.333505.
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Papafragou, Anna. "Modality and the semantics-pragmatics interface." Thesis, University College London (University of London), 1998. http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/1317914/.
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This thesis explores certain aspects of the structure of lexical semantics and its interaction with pragmatic processes of utterance comprehension, using as a case-study a sample of the English modal verbs. Contrary to previous polysemy-based accounts, I propose and defend a unitary semantic account of the English modals, and I give a relevance-theoretic explanation of the construction of their admissible (mainly, root and epistemic) contextual interpretations. Departing from previous accounts of modality, I propose a link between epistemic modality and metarepresentation, and treat the emergence of epistemic modal markers as a result of the development of the human theory of mind. In support of my central contention that the English modals are semantically univocal, I reanalyse a range of arguments employed by previous polysemy-based approaches. These arguments involve the distributional properties of the modals, their relationship to truth-conditional content, the status of so-called speech-act modality, and the historical development of epistemic meanings: it turns out that none of these domains can offer reasons to abandon the univocal semantic analysis of the English modals. Furthermore, I argue that the priority of root over epistemic meanings in language acquisition is predicted by the link between epistemic modality and metarepresentation. Finally, data from a cognitive disorder (autism) are considered in the light of the metarepresentation hypothesis about epistemic modality. The discussion of modality has a number of implications for the concept of polysemy. I suggest that, despite its widespread use in current lexical semantics, polysemy is not a natural class, and use the example of the Cognitive Linguistics to illustrate that polysemy presupposes some questionable assumptions about the structure of lexical concepts. I propose a division of labour between ambiguity, semantic underdeterminacy, and a narrowed version of polysemy, and present its ramifications for the psychology of word meaning. In the final chapter, I extend the proposed framework for modality to the analysis of generic sentences, thereby capturing certain similarities between genericity and modality.
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Wong, King-on John. "Semantics and pragmatics of tautology in Cantonese." Click to view the E-thesis via HKUTO, 2006. http://sunzi.lib.hku.hk/hkuto/record/B36902640.
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Wong, King-on John, and 黃敬安. "Semantics and pragmatics of tautology in Cantonese." Thesis, The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong), 2006. http://hub.hku.hk/bib/B36902640.
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Greenhall, Owen F. R. "The semantics/pragmatics distinction : a defence of Grice." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2006. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:00db9bdd-143d-4900-b564-3af9d002f1ea.
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The historical development of Morris’ tripartite distinction between syntax, semantics and pragmatics does not follow a smooth path. Examining definitions of the terms ‘semantic’ and ‘pragmatic’ and the phenomena they have been used to describe, provides insight into alternative approaches to the semantics/pragmatics distinction. Paul Grice’s work receives particular attention and taxonomy of philosophical positions, roughly divisible into content minimalist and maximalist groups, is set up. Grice’s often neglected theory of conventional implicature is defended from objections, various tests for the presence of conventional implicature are assessed and the linguistic properties of conventional implicature defined. Once rehabilitated, the theoretical utility of conventional implicature is demonstrated via a case study of the semantic import of the gender and number of pronouns in English. The better-known theory of conversational implicature is also examined and refined. New linguistic tests for such implicatures are devised and the refined theory is applied to scalar terms. A pragmatic approach to scalar implicatures is proposed and shown to fare better than alternatives presented by Uli Sauerland, Stephen Levinson and Gennaro Chierchia. With the details of the theory conversational implicature established, the use made of Grice’s tool in the work of several philosophers is critically evaluated. Kent Bach’s minimalist approach to quantifier domain restriction is examined and criticised. Also, the linguistic evidence for semantic minimalism provided by Herman Cappelen and Ernie Lepore is found wanting. Finally, a content maximalist approach to quantifier domain restriction is proposed. The approach differs from other context maximalist theories, such as Jason Stanley’s, in relying on semantically unarticulated constituents. Stanley’s arguments against such theories are examined. Further applications of the approach are briefly surveyed.
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Mazzocconi, Chiara. "Laughter in interaction : semantics, pragmatics, and child development." Thesis, Université de Paris (2019-....), 2019. https://theses.md.univ-paris-diderot.fr/MAZZOCCONI_Chiara_va2.pdf.
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Le rire est une vocalisation universelle à travers les cultures et les langues. Il est omniprésent dans nos dialogues et utilisé pour un large éventail de fonctions. Le rire a été étudié sous plusieurs angles, mais les classifications proposées sont difficiles à intégrer dans un même système. Malgré le fait qu’il soit crucial dans nos interactions quotidiennes, le rire en conversation a reçu peu d’attention et les études sur la pragmatique du rire en interaction, ses corrélats neuronaux perceptuels et son développement chez l’enfant sont rares. Dans cette thèse, est proposé un nouveau cadre pour l'analyse du rire, fondé sur l'hypothèse cruciale que le rire a un contenu propositionnel, plaidant pour la nécessité de distinguer différentes couches d'analyse, tout comme dans l'étude de la parole: forme, positionnement, sémantique et pragmatique. Une représentation formelle de la signification du rire est proposée et une étude de corpus multilingue (français, chinois et anglais) est menée afin d’approfondir notre compréhension de l’utilisation du rire dans les conversations entre adultes. Des études préliminaires sont menées sur la viabilité d'un mappage forme-fonction du rire basée sur ses caractéristiques acoustiques, ainsi que sur les corrélats neuronaux impliqués dans la perception du rire qui servent différentes fonctions dans un dialogue naturel. Nos résultats donnent lieu à de nouvelles généralisations sur le placement, l’alignement, la sémantique et les fonctions du rire, soulignant le haute niveau des compétences pragmatiques impliquées dans sa production et sa perception. Le développement de l'utilisation sémantique et pragmatique du rire est observé dans une étude de corpus longitudinale de 4 dyades mère-enfant de l’age de 12 à 36 mois, locuteurs d’anglais américain. Les résultats montrent que l'utilisation du rire subit un développement important à chaque niveau analysé et que le rire peut être un indicateur précoce du développement cognitif, communicatif et socialLaughter is a social vocalization universal across cultures and languages. It is ubiquitous in our dialogues and able to serve a wide range of functions. Laughter has been studied from several perspectives, but the classifications proposed are hard to integrate. Despite being crucial in our daily interaction, relatively little attention has been devoted to the study of laughter in conversation, attempting to model its sophisticated pragmatic use, neuro-correlates in perception and development in children. In the current thesis a new comprehensive framework for laughter analysis is proposed, crucially grounded in the assumption that laughter has propositional content, arguing for the need to distinguish different layers of analysis, similarly to the study of speech: form, positioning, semantics and pragmatics. A formal representation of laughter meaning is proposed and a multilingual corpus study (French, Chinese and English) is conducted in order to test the proposed framework and to deepen our understanding of laughter use in adult conversation. Preliminary investigations are conducted on the viability of a laughter form-function mapping based on acoustic features and on the neuro-correlates involved in the perception of laughter serving different functions in natural dialogue. Our results give rise to novel generalizations about the placement, alignment, semantics and function of laughter, stressing the high pragmatic skills involved in its production and perception. The development of the semantic and pragmatic use of laughter is observed in a longitudinal corpus study of 4 American-English child-mother pairs from 12 to 36 months of age. Results show that laughter use undergoes important development at each level analysed, which complies with what could be hypothesised on the base of phylogenetic data, and that laughter can be an effective means to track cognitive/communicative development, and potential difficulties or delays at a very early stage
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Mwihaki, Alice. "Meaning and use: a functional view of semantics and pragmatics." Universitätsbibliothek Leipzig, 2012. http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:bsz:15-qucosa-91021.
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This article addresses the notion of linguistic meaning with reference to Kiswahili. It focuses particular attention on meaning typology, with the assumption that a discussion of meaning types can enhance the understanding and appreciation of linguistic meaning. The discussion takes its general conceptual orientation from the approach that considers meaning as use, whereby the unit of analysis is the speech
act. This is a functional view of linguistic meaning, the tenets of which are contained in functional grammar. From a broader perspective, this article distinguishes conceptual and associative meaning then proceeds to deal with the individual types. Ultimately, five types of linguistic meaning are discussed: conceptual, connotative, social, affective and collocative. From the discussion, conclusionsabout the value of the typology for defining the concept and the scope of semantics are drawn.
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Puig, Waldmüller Estela Sophie. "Contracted Preposition-Determiner Forms in German: Semantics and Pragmatics." Doctoral thesis, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, 2008. http://hdl.handle.net/10803/7589.
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En el trabajo la semántica y pragmática de formas contraídas y no-contraídas en Alemán serán discutidas. Formas contraídas son preposiciones con sufijos flexionales, obligatorias en contextos en las que el contenido descriptivo del sintagma nominal es cierto de un individual o evento (expresiones que excluyen alternativas, referentes deducibles, Situative Unika, infinitivos nominalizados, referentes no específicos). Muchos autores consideran que las formas tienen artículos definidos que fusionan con una preposición. En contrario, propongo un análisis en términos de incorporación semántica en que una preposición tiene rasgos de caso, número y género. Interpretaciones únicas provienen del número singular y del contexto. Interpretaciones no específicas provienen de la semántica y el hecho de que el argumento nominal tiene menos rango que el argumento eventivo.The semantics and pragmatics of contracted and non-contracted forms found in German will be discussed. Contracted form are prepositions with inflectional endings, and obligatory in contexts in which the descriptive content of the noun fits only one individual or event ("alternative-excluding" expressions, inferable referents, Situative Unika, nominalized infinitives, non-specific referents). Most accounts assume that contracted forms have underlying definite articles which have amalgamated with a preposition. In contrast, I propose to analyse these forms as semantically incorporating prepositions, which are inflected for (singular) number, gender, and case, and combine with noun phrases. Uniqueness effects are derived from singular number and from contextual entailments. Non-specific readings can directly be accounted for since the semantics predicts narrow scope of the nominal argument with respect to the event argument.
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Mahnmoodan, Atena. "The Semantics and Pragmatics of Address forms in Persian." Thesis, Norges teknisk-naturvitenskapelige universitet, Institutt for språk og litteratur, 2013. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:no:ntnu:diva-24096.
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In Persian, there is a tendency to use plural pronouns instead of singular pronouns in order to show respect and politeness to either the addressee or some other individual referred to (2nd or 3rd person). The choice of such plural or singular forms (called T-V forms by Brown and Gilman 1966) in Persian is a challenging subject that has not been discussed enough so far. Although every native speaker of Persian unconsciously knows when such polite address forms can occur, it has turned out to be an amazingly complicated task to explicitly state the sufficient and necessary conditions for appropriate use of these forms in Persian. This thesis is an attempt to address this issue. The main objectives in this study are to: 1) Determine the contextual conditions when a plural form (i.e. pronoun, agreement marker or enclitic) is used to refer to a singular entity in contemporary Persian; 2) Investigate the relative influence of sociolinguistic features such as gender difference, age distance, power distance, solidarity, formality (relative distance), and mood shifting in the choice of pronominals in Persian and determine the factors that influence pronoun switching; and 3) Diagnose whether the choice of plural or polite referring forms in Persian is addressee oriented or referent oriented with respect to the T-V distinction. The present study mainly built on the sociolinguistic methodology of Ervin-Tripp (1976), Keshavarz’s study in forms of post-revolutionary Persian address forms (1988 and 2001) and Nanbakhsh (2011) dissertation on Persian address pronouns and politeness in interaction. The data analysis section is transcribed from a movie called ˈA separationˈ written and directed by Asghar Farhadi (2011). The film data analysis part consists of 8 episodes where each episode has special location, participant (interlocutors) and a topic (situation). I will investigate the choice of pronominal forms in this section with respect to the following six features: Age distance, gender difference, power distance, solidarity, mood and formality (relative distance). The secondary objectives of this research are based on a quantitative analysis of the film data. The distribution of the social features of the film data indicates that quantitatively, formality with 35% as a mean percentage is the most significant feature of the analysis with the reciprocal V form (plural honorific). The mood shifting with (26.5%) had the second place on converting the expected V to the T form (singular, non-honorific) or vice versa. The age difference feature with (12%) is the third most influential feature that has influence on the reciprocal T or V forms. The solidarity feature with (17%) has the fourth place in causing the reciprocal T form. The gender difference feature with (7%) has the fifth place on appearance of the reciprocal V form and the power distance feature with (2.5%) has the least influence on the non-reciprocal V form. Therefore I conclude that formality feature is more significant than power distance in the choice of Persian T-V forms. (There could be other hidden features (variables) that I have not considered in this analysis and they might cause errors in my study.) Regarding the T/V mismatching, I have found that the anger mood in order to show sarcasm is one of the reasons for it and the other cause of mismatching is to increase solidarity. Concerning the third objective of this research, the qualitative analysis indicates that the choice of plurality and politeness in the formal situation was mostly addressee oriented and it was mostly under the superior power of the judge. The first research objective is an overall question that will be clarified after consideration of the answers to the other two issues mentioned. This work will contribute to a broader understanding of how politeness governs Persian communication and how this interacts with pragmatics.
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Mahmoodan, Atena. "The Semantics and Pragmatics of Address forms in Persian." Thesis, Norges teknisk-naturvitenskapelige universitet, Institutt for språk og litteratur, 2013. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:no:ntnu:diva-26739.
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In Persian, there is a tendency to use plural pronouns instead of singular pronouns in order to show respect and politeness to either the addressee or some other individual referred to (2nd or 3rd person). The choice of such plural or singular forms (called T-V forms by Brown and Gilman 1966) in Persian is a challenging subject that has not been discussed enough so far. Although every native speaker of Persian unconsciously knows when such polite address forms can occur, it has turned out to be an amazingly complicated task to explicitly state the sufficient and necessary conditions for appropriate use of these forms in Persian. This thesis is an attempt to address this issue. The main objectives in this study are to: 1) Determine the contextual conditions when a plural form (i.e. pronoun, agreement marker or enclitic) is used to refer to a singular entity in contemporary Persian; 2) Investigate the relative influence of sociolinguistic features such as gender difference, age distance, power distance, solidarity, formality (relative distance), and mood shifting in the choice of pronominals in Persian and determine the factors that influence pronoun switching; and 3) Diagnose whether the choice of plural or polite referring forms in Persian is addressee oriented or referent oriented with respect to the T-V distinction. The present study mainly built on the sociolinguistic methodology of Ervin-Tripp (1976), Keshavarz’s study in forms of post-revolutionary Persian address forms (1988 and 2001) and Nanbakhsh (2011) dissertation on Persian address pronouns and politeness in interaction. The data analysis section is transcribed from a movie called ˈA separationˈ written and directed by Asghar Farhadi (2011). The film data analysis part consists of 8 episodes where each episode has special location, participant (interlocutors) and a topic (situation). I will investigate the choice of pronominal forms in this section with respect to the following six features: Age distance, gender difference, power distance, solidarity, mood and formality (relative distance). The secondary objectives of this research are based on a quantitative analysis of the film data. The distribution of the social features of the film data indicates that quantitatively, formality with 35% as a mean percentage is the most significant feature of the analysis with the reciprocal V form (plural honorific). The mood shifting with (26.5%) had the second place on converting the expected V to the T form (singular, non-honorific) or vice versa. The age difference feature with (12%) is the third most influential feature that has influence on the reciprocal T or V forms. The solidarity feature with (17%) has the fourth place in causing the reciprocal T form. The gender difference feature with (7%) has the fifth place on appearance of the reciprocal V form and the power distance feature with (2.5%) has the least influence on the non-reciprocal V form. Therefore I conclude that formality feature is more significant than power distance in the choice of Persian T-V forms. (There could be other hidden features (variables) that I have not considered in this analysis and they might cause errors in my study.) Regarding the T/V mismatching, I have found that the anger mood in order to show sarcasm is one of the reasons for it and the other cause of mismatching is to increase solidarity. Concerning the third objective of this research, the qualitative analysis indicates that the choice of plurality and politeness in the formal situation was mostly addressee oriented and it was mostly under the superior power of the judge. The first research objective is an overall question that will be clarified after consideration of the answers to the other two issues mentioned. This work will contribute to a broader understanding of how politeness governs Persian communication and how this interacts with pragmatics.
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Itani, Reiko. "Semantics and pragmatics of hedges in English and Japanese." Thesis, University College London (University of London), 1995. http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/1318049/.
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Hedges are expressions used to communicate the speaker's weak commitment to information conveyed; i.e. by hedging, speakers may moderate the assertive force of their utterances. They include sentence adverbials such as probably and technically, adjectives such as regular and typical, particles such as ne and kedo in Japanese etc. Hedges crosscut parts of speech and therefore do not form a natural syntactic class. This thesis argues that existing analyses of hedging devices fall short of full adequacy and presents a Relevance-theoretic account. In Chapter 1, I argue that hedging is a pragmatic phenomenon as the effect may be derived via features of the ostensive stimulus other than encoded linguistic content; e.g. the speaker can communicate her weak commitment by using certain prosodic features, facial expressions, shoulder shrugging etc. Discussions of hedging often arise in sociolinguistic contexts. However, I argue that the moderation of social relations such as the consideration of politeness is not its intrinsic function. The inadequacy of existing analyses I point out in Chapter 1 is due to the lack of a sufficiently articulated pragmatic framework, and for this reason, I turn to Relevance theory. In Chapter 2, I outline Relevance theory which provides a cognitively based explanation of communication. The theory makes rigorous distinctions between encoded meaning and inferred meaning, between the explicit and implicit content of an utterance, between descriptive and interpretive representations, etc. which provide the concepts necessary to isolate the semantics of the hedging devices as I explain in Chapters 3 and 4. In Chapter 3 and 4, I propose Relevance-theoretic analyses of particular English and Japanese expressions, which appear regularly in the literature on hedging. I try to capture the intrinsic semantic content of these elements and show how the familiar hedging effects arise as a result of the interaction between this encoded content, the particularities of context and considerations of relevance.
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Cepollaro, Bianca. "The semantics and pragmatics of slurs and thick terms." Doctoral thesis, Scuola Normale Superiore, 2017. http://hdl.handle.net/11384/86019.
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In this thesis I develop a uniform account of slurs and thick terms in terms of presuppositions. I argue that slurs and thick terms – that were mainly studied by different disciplines – belong to the same class of ‘hybrid evaluatives’. My work is a contribution in filling the gap between the research on thick terms on the one hand and the research on slurs on the other, by showing that the mechanism underlying slurs and thick terms is one and the same and that the phenomenal differences that one can observe depend on the peculiarities of their descriptive content. In Part I, I define what counts as ‘hybrid evaluative’ and present my presuppositional account. Part II is a critical review of some alternative theories that have been put forward to account for slurs and thick terms respectively. In Part III, I propose a uniform account of two particular uses of slurs and thick terms that have been treated as independent so far, namely Appropriation of Slurs and Variability of thick terms.
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Mwihaki, Alice. "Meaning and use: a functional view of semantics and pragmatics." Swahili Forum 11 (2004) S. 127-139, 2004. https://ul.qucosa.de/id/qucosa%3A11492.
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This article addresses the notion of linguistic meaning with reference to Kiswahili. It focuses particular attention on meaning typology, with the assumption that a discussion of meaning types can enhance the understanding and appreciation of linguistic meaning. The discussion takes its general conceptual orientation from the approach that considers meaning as use, whereby the unit of analysis is the speech
act. This is a functional view of linguistic meaning, the tenets of which are contained in functional grammar. From a broader perspective, this article distinguishes conceptual and associative meaning then proceeds to deal with the individual types. Ultimately, five types of linguistic meaning are discussed: conceptual, connotative, social, affective and collocative. From the discussion, conclusionsabout the value of the typology for defining the concept and the scope of semantics are drawn.
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Raccah, Pierre-Yves. "Vers une semantique representationnelle." Thesis, McGill University, 1985. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=74050.
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Wolter, Lynsey Kay. "That's that : the semantics and pragmatics of demonstrative noun phrases /." Diss., Digital Dissertations Database. Restricted to UC campuses, 2006. http://uclibs.org/PID/11984.
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Horn, Stephen Wright. "Syntax, semantics, and pragmatics of accusative-quotative constructions in Japanese." Columbus, Ohio : Ohio State University, 2008. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc%5Fnum=osu1204662234.
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Falkum, I. L. "The semantics and pragmatics of polysemy : a relevance-theoretic account." Thesis, University College London (University of London), 2011. http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/1139079/.
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This thesis investigates the phenomenon of polysemy: a single lexical form with two or multiple related senses (e.g. catch the rabbit/order the rabbit; lose a wallet/lose a relative; a handsome man/a handsome gift). I develop a pragmatic account of polysemy within the framework of Sperber and Wilson’s relevance theory, where new senses for a word are constructed during on-line comprehension by means of a single process of ad hoc concept construction, which adjusts the meanings of individual words in different directions. While polysemy is largely unproblematic from the perspective of communication, it poses a range of theoretical and descriptive problems. This is sometimes termed the polysemy paradox. A widely held view in lexical semantics is that word meanings must consist of complex representations in order to capture the sense relations involved in polysemy. Contrary to this view, I argue that a conceptual atomist approach, which treats word meanings as unstructured atoms and thereby avoids the range of problems associated with decompositional theories of word meaning, may be at least as able to account for polysemy when paired with an adequate pragmatic theory. My proposed solution to the polysemy paradox is to treat polysemy as a fundamentally communicative phenomenon, which arises as a result of encoded lexical concepts being massively underdetermining of speaker-intended concepts, and is grounded in our pragmatic inferential ability. According to this approach, the role of the linguistic system in giving rise to polysemy is to provide a minimal input, or clue, which the pragmatic system uses as evidence to yield hypotheses about occasion-specific, speaker-intended meanings. I further show how this pragmatic approach can account for cases of ‘systematic polysemy’, usually seen as prime candidates for an analysis in terms of lexical rule application. Finally, I develop an account of metonymy within the overall framework of relevance-theory.
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Li, Chao. "Mandarin resultative verb compounds where syntax, semantics, and pragmatics meet." Muenchen LINCOM Europa, 2008. http://d-nb.info/990656497/04.
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Andueza, Patricia L. "Rhetorical Exclamative in Spanish." The Ohio State University, 2011. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1315414519.
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Peterson, Tyler Roy Gösta. "Epistemic modality and evidentiality in Gitksan at the semantics-pragmatics interface." Thesis, University of British Columbia, 2010. http://hdl.handle.net/2429/23596.
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This dissertation provides an empirically driven, theoretically informed investigation of how speakers of Gitksan, a Tsimshianic language spoken in the northwest coast of Canada, express knowledge about the world around them. There are three main goals that motivate this investigation: The first is to provide the first detailed description of the evidential and modal system in Gitksan. The second is to provide a formal semantic and pragmatic account of this system that adequately explains the meanings of the modals and evidentials, as well as how they are used in discourse. The third goal is to examine the specific properties the Gitksan evidential/modal system brings to bear on current theories of semantics and pragmatics, as well as the consequences this analysis has on the study of modality and evidentiality cross-linguistically. In addition to documenting the evidential and modal meanings in Gitksan, I work through a variety of theoretical tools designed to determine what level of meaning the individual evidentials in Gitksan operate on. The current state of research into the connection between evidentiality and epistemic modality has identified two different types of evidentials defined by the level of meaning they operate on: propositional and illocutionary evidentials. These two types correspond to a distinction between modal evidentials and non-modal evidentials respectively. I show that Gitksan has both modal and non-evidentials. This leads to an analysis where the Gitksan modal evidentials are treated as a specialized type of epistemic modals, and the non-modal evidentials are sentential force specifiers. I also identify various features of the evidential system that bring specific issues to bear upon current theories of the semantics and pragmatics of modality. This has four outcomes: first, I present a novel analysis of variable modal force in modals with fixed quantification. Secondly, I discuss the effect of modal evidentials in Conjectural Questions. Thirdly, I analyze how modal and non-modal evidentials interact in discourse contexts in implicating a speaker’s attitude towards the evidence they have for a proposition. And fourthly, I develop the first formal analysis of mirativity and non-literal uses of evidentials, analyzing them both as cases of conversational implicature.
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Fortin, Antonio. "The morphology and semantics of expressive affixes." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2011. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:88a23d7c-c229-49af-9fc9-2cb35fce9d54.
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This dissertation focuses on two aspects of expressive affixes: their morphological/typological properties and their semantics. With regard to the former, it shows that the expressive morphology of many languages (including Bantu, West Atlantic, Walman, Sanskrit, English, Romance, Slavic, and others), has the following properties: 1) it is systematically anomalous when compared to plain morphology, or the ordinary processes of word-formation and inflection. From this, it follows that many familiar morphological arguments that adduce the data of expressive morphology ought to be reconsidered; and 2) it is far more pervasive than has been traditionally thought. For example, the Sanskrit preverb, and the Indo-European aspectual prefix/particle generally, are shown to have systematically expressive functions. With respect to the semantics of expressive affixes, it develops a novel multidimensional account, in the sense of Potts (2005, 2007), of Spanish "connotative affixes," which can simultaneously convey descriptive and expressive meaning. It shows that their descriptive meaning is that of a gradable adjective, viewed as a degree relation which includes a measure function, in the sense of Kennedy (1997). The expressive meanings of connotative affixes, and expressives generally, arise as they manipulate the middle coordinate, I, of expressive indices which, it is proposed, is inherently specified on all lexical items and canonically set to "neutral." It introduces a new mechanism, AFF, which is an algebraic operation for manipulating I, and which accounts for the well-known, and seemingly "contradictory," range of meanings that expressive affixes can express. Whereas prior work assumes that expressive affixes are inherently polysemous, this approach derives their many attested meanings and functions (e.g., "small," "young," "bad," deprecation, appreciation, hypocorism, intensification/exactness, and attenuation/approximation, as well as pragmatic effects like illocutionary mitigation) compositionally, from the interactions of their multidimensionality with the meanings of the roots to which they attach.
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Noh, Eun-Ju. "The semantics and pragmatics of misrepresentation in English : a relevance-theoretic approach." Thesis, University College London (University of London), 1998. http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/1317897/.
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This thesis deals with the nature of metarepresentation in language. It proposes linguistic-semantic and pragmatic analyses of a variety of metarepresentational expressions in English, using the framework of relevance theory (Sperber and Wilson 1986/1995). The main aim is to deepen the relevance-theoretic analysis of metarepresentation, to apply it to a range of data which have not been previously analysed in this framework, and to compare the resulting account with alternative semantic and pragmatic accounts. Chapter 1 looks at various types of quotation (including mention, reported speech and thought, and mixed quotation) and surveys some of the problems encountered by traditional and more recent alternative accounts; the chief problem being that they either do not acknowledge the range and variety of semantic indeterminacies in quotation, or do not provide an adequate account of how these indeterminacies are resolved during utterance comprehension. Chapter 2 introduces relevance theory and shows how the comprehension strategy it provides can be used to resolve the various indeterminacies in quotation. It also shows how the relevance-theoretic notion of metarepresentation (representation by resemblance) can be applied not only to paradigmatic cases of direct and indirect quotation, but also to a range of other cases involving the exploitation of linguistic or conceptual resemblances. What is common to all these cases is that a representation is used with a guarantee of faithfulness to some other representation, rather than truthfulness to some state of affairs. The claim that a metarepresentation can be faithful enough without being identical to the original is illustrated and explored. The remaining chapters extend the analysis to more complex and controversial cases. Chapter 3 looks at previous accounts of metalinguistic negation, and develops a relevance-theoretic account whose linguistic-semantic and pragmatic properties are investigated and compared with previous relevance-theoretic accounts. Chapter 4 looks at previous treatments of echo questions, both inside and outside relevance theory and extends the relevance-theoretic analysis to deal with some standard and non-standard types of echoic question. Chapter 5 deals with a variety of metarepresentational conditionals, and develops a relevance-theoretic account, comparing it with previous accounts. My conclusion is that the relevance-theoretic approach can yield analyses that are better justified than previous accounts on both descriptive and explanatory grounds.
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Gorayska, Barbara Maria. "The semantics and pragmatics of English and Polish with reference to aspect." Thesis, University College London (University of London), 1985. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.262556.
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Lee, Hye-Kyung. "The semantics and pragmatics of connectives with reference to English and Korean." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2001. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.421569.
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Galery, T. N. "Descriptive pronouns revisited : the semantics and pragmatics of identification-based descriptive interpretations." Thesis, University College London (University of London), 2012. http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/1348321/.
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This thesis confronts the semantic/pragmatic issues raised by identification - based descriptive uses of pronouns. The phenomenon, also known as deferred uses (Nunberg, 1993), arises when the correct understanding of a pronoun is dependent on the identification of a specific individual in the context that provides it with a descriptive (as opposed to a singular) interpretation. Moreover, the identification of the salient individual makes the interpretation available in a rather indirect way. For example, by pointing at a huge footprint in the sand and uttering ‘He must be a giant’, the speaker can convey the proposition that the footprint maker must be a giant, where the mental representation footprint (necessary for identification) and the representation the footprintmaker (the pronoun’s interpretation) are not identical. These uses also display interesting properties when it comes to their ability to provide antecedents for other pronouns. As such, they are at the cross-road of many topics in philosophy of language and linguistics, including indexicality, anaphora, and figurative uses of language (metonymy). In this thesis, I propose that the data is best accounted for by a combination of relevance-theoretic pragmatics (Sperber and Wilson 1995, Carston 2002), certain motivated assumptions about visual information processing, and the grammar formalism of Dynamic Syntax (Kempson et al 2001; Cann et al 2005). DS models pronouns as encoding procedures that introduce a variable-like entity (e.g. a metavariable), which needs to be replaced by a semantic value (of the appropriate type), allowing for descriptive constituents, which emerge as a result of relevance-driven processes of identification and inference, to provide the pronoun with the relevant descriptive interpretation. Alternatively, the pronoun can be replaced by a singular value that communicates a descriptive proposition as an implicature. The context and the pronominal form used determine which of these approaches is the best suited.
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Yavuz, Alper. "The phrasal implicature theory of metaphors and slurs." Thesis, University of St Andrews, 2018. http://hdl.handle.net/10023/13189.
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This thesis develops a pragmatic theory of metaphors and slurs. In the pragmatic literature, theorists mostly hold the view that the framework developed by Grice is only applicable to the sentence-level pragmatic phenomena, whereas the subsentential pragmatic phenomena require a different approach. In this thesis, I argue against this view and claim that the Gricean framework, after some plausible revisions, can explain subsentential pragmatic phenomena, such as metaphors and slurs. In the first chapter, I introduce three basic theses I will defend and give an outline of the argument I will develop. The second chapter discusses three claims on metaphor that are widely discussed in the literature. There I state my aim to present a theory of metaphor which can accommodate these three claims. Chapter 3 introduces the notion of "phrasal implicature", which will be used to explain phrase-level pragmatic phenomena with a Gricean approach. In Chapter 4, I present my theory of metaphor, which I call "phrasal implicature theory of metaphor" and discuss certain aspects of the theory. The notion of phrasal implicature enables a new conception of what-is-said and a different approach to the semantics-pragmatics distinction. Chapter 5 looks into these issues. In Chapter 6, I compare my theory of metaphor with three other theories. Finally, in Chapter 7, I develop a phrasal implicature theory of slurs, which I argue outperforms its rivals in explaining various uses of slurs.
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Kolkmann, Julia. "The pragmatics of possession : issues in the interpretation of pre-nominal possessives in English." Thesis, University of Manchester, 2016. https://www.research.manchester.ac.uk/portal/en/theses/the-pragmatics-of-possession-issues-in-the-interpretation-of-prenominal-possessives-in-english(a8dc1f64-8c63-4105-b30d-6f174e01f6db).html.
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In everyday conversation, we frequently express relationships between two entities by using attributive possessive NPs. Structurally, these consist of a possessor referent, a possessum nominal and a possessive marker which explicates said relationship. For example, if I want to enquire about a house owned by your friend Mary which you are currently decorating, I might feasibly say "How are you getting on with Mary’s house?". My utterance of the pre-nominal possessive NP Mary’s house allows you to represent a specific referent, ensuring that we mentally converge on the same house and are able to talk about it. This study investigates English pre-nominal possessive NPs from a pragmatic point of view. It does so with the aim of providing a cognitively plausible description of their interpretationwhich simultaneously serves to understand how they function as referring expressions in communication. In particular, I discuss some of the intricacies they pose to interlocutors when itcomes to their referential interpretation. One of these concerns the fact that pre-nominal possessives are semantically compatible with numerous different interpretations, yet reference aparticular possessive relation in concrete communicative situations. Thus, given that the Englishlanguage, quite in contrast to the majority of the world’s languages, does not render thepossessive relation that holds between two entities morphosyntactically explicit, the interpretation of pre-nominal possessive NPs falls entirely within the remit of a pragmatic theory. This should explain how Mary’s house, which is compatible with interpretations such asthe house that Mary is letting, the house that Mary wishes to buy, as well as various others,comes to denote the house that Mary owns in a communicative situation like the above. Fullyinterpreting this NP, as Peters & Westerståhl (2013) suggest, involves knowing what possibleinterpretations it gives rise to, selecting the most salient one to the detriment of any others, and, finally, representing a determinate referent denoted by the NP as a whole. While the first aspect has received much attention (e.g. Barker, 1995; Vikner & Jensen, 2002), the other two have been considered by only few researchers. This study represents the first holistic account of possessive interpretations which combinesall three questions to explain the various facets of their pragmatics. On the theoretical level, itsuggests that the currently dominant stance (advocated by Vikner & Jensen, 2002), accordingto which it is the lexical semantic content of the possessum nominal which largely exhausts theinterpretation process, is in need of rethinking. Contrary to existing insights, I attribute a greaterrole to context and pragmatic reasoning both at the level of possible and at the level of salientinterpretations. On the methodological level, the study is multimethodological in its approach,complementing theoretical argument by means of a psycholinguistic production study and alarge-scale corpus study. In this respect, the present study paves the way for a description of pragmatic aspects of theEnglish grammar which have hitherto been explained in terms of more descriptive possessivetaxonomies, including ones delineating alienable vs. inalienable (e.g. Nikolaeva & Spencer,2013), prototypical vs. non-prototypical (e.g. Langacker, 1995; Rosenbach, 2002) and lexicalvs. pragmatic interpretations (Vikner & Jensen, 2002). Ultimately, I suggest that construing referential interpretation as an addressee-dependent search for relevance (e.g. Sperber & Wilson, 1986/1995) largely obviates the need for taxonomies of this kind at the descriptive level.
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Maillat, Didier. "The semantics and pragmatics of directionals : a case study in English and French." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2003. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.399424.
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Guerzoni, Elena. "Why even ask? : on the pragmatics of questions and the semantics of answers." Thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2003. http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/17646.
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Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Linguistics and Philosophy, 2003.Includes bibliographical references (p. 241-245).
This work investigates the semantics-pragmatics and syntax-pragmatics interface of interrogatives, focusing on the effect of presupposition-triggering expressions like even and Negative Polarity Items (NPIs). In exploring these cases, I aim is to contribute new empirical evidence and theoretical insight pertinent to the general issue of how presuppositions project in interrogative environments. Although the phenomenon of presuppositions has received considerable attention in previous work, very little is understood about how precisely presuppositions project in the domain of questions. My main goal is to establish what processes generate presuppositions in questions, starting from what we know about the semantics of questions and about the contribution of expressions introducing presuppositions in declaratives. The strategy I pursue in this investigation consists in looking at cases where presuppositional material affects the interpretation of a question in ways that go beyond the mere introduction of a presupposition. Even and certain NPIs (so called 'minimizers') provide a rich and constrained testing ground in this sense, as they can be exploited to signal that a questioning act is meant to be biased towards a negative answer. This thesis argues that this otherwise puzzling property of questions with minimizers and even can be understood as a product of (i) the way the presuppositions of even project in a question and affect the question denotation; and (ii) the way general pragmatic principles governing what it means to ask a question regulate how the resulting denotation can be used by speakers in a given context.
(cont.) More specifically I show that the anomalous properties of biased questions with even are the product of the presuppositions even introduces in their possible answers and the felicity of these answers in a given context. The general conclusion this result allows me to draw is that a theory of projection in questions must reduce their presuppositions to answerability conditions of a question in a context. The theory of bias and presuppositions of questions developed in this thesis leads to a number of interesting implications regarding on the one hand even and its variants across languages and, on the other hand, the semantics and syntax of constituent questions.
by Elena Guerzoni.
Ph.D.
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Meyer, Paul Georg. "Coming to know : studies in the lexical semantics and pragmatics of academic English /." Tübingen : G. Naar, 1997. http://catalogue.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cb392265811.
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Wedgwood, Daniel J. "Predication and information structure : a dynamic account of Hungarian pre-verbal syntax." Thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2003. http://hdl.handle.net/1842/630.
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Hungarian 'focus position' is typically thought of as a central example of a 'discourse configurational' phenomenon, since it not only involves the expression of information-structural (or 'discourse semantic') meaning through the manipulation of word order but also interacts syntactically with other elements of the sentence. In this thesis, I argue that this kind of phenomenon highlights fundamental theoretical problems with conventional assumptions about the relationships between linguistic form and different kinds of meaning and demonstrate that these problems have led to empirical inadequacies in the syntactic analysis of Hungarian. I propose an alternative analysis that makes use of a dynamic, incremental parsing-based approach to grammar, which in turn allows for the influence of inferential pragmatic operations (investigated in terms of Relevance Theory) at all stages in the process of interpreting linguistic form. This opens up possibilities of structural and interpretive underspecification that allow for the interpretation of the 'focus position' to be unified with the information-structural interpretation of sentences that do not contain a syntactically focused expression. This analysis explains the interaction of syntactic foci with other pre-verbal items. The burden of explanation is thus shifted away from specialised, abstract syntactic representations and onto independently necessary aspects of cognitive organisation. The use of 'discourse semantic' primitives---whether in terms of focus or exhaustivity---to encode the effects of the 'focus position' is shown to be both theoretically problematic and empirically inadequate. The information-structural meanings associated with the position must be viewed not as the input to interpretive processes but instead as the result of inferential processes performed in context. Reanalysis of the syntactic evidence shows the relevant position to be not merely pre-verbal, but underlyingly pre-tense, showing that the unmarked position of the main verb is essentially the same as that of syntactically focused expressions. This leads to an analysis whereby both 'neutral', topic-comment readings and cases of narrow focus emerge from inferences over a common interpretive procedure. This procedure is identified as 'main predication': the point in the parsing of a sentence at which the application of a single predicate effects the conversion of a mere description of an event into a truth-conditional assertion. Main predication is represented using neo-Davidsonian, event-based semantics (the effect of the main predicate being equivalent to that of the application of an existential quantifier over an event variable in the neo-Davidsonian approach) and made dynamic by the use of the epsilon calculus. This analysis predicts the postposing of any (otherwise pre-tense) 'verbal modifier' (VM) in the presence of a syntactic focus and the apparent information-structural ambiguity of VMs when they are pre-tense. Certain constraints on the distribution of quantifiers are also predicted, one such constraint being adequately characterisable only within a semantically underspecified, procedural account. The behaviour of the negative particle "nem" is also given a maximally simple explanation. The apparently variable scope of the negative operator is explicable without ad hoc syntactic mechanisms: the apparent wide scope reading associated with 'sentential' negation follows inferentially from narrow scope negation of temporal information. The syntactic positions of negation are predictable on this basis. In addition, the assumption of consistent narrow scope negation correctly predicts that VMs must postpose or receive a narrow focus reading in the presence of "nem".
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Ranalter, Kurt. "Reasoning about assertions, obligations and causality on a categorical semantics for a logic for pragmatics." Thesis, Queen Mary, University of London, 2008. http://qmro.qmul.ac.uk/xmlui/handle/123456789/28169.
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The aim of the logic for pragmatics considered in this work is to provide a logical framework that formalises reasoning about the pragmatic forces with which a sentence may be uttered. The concept of pragmatic or illocutionary force comes from speech act theory and plays a crucial role also in certain branches of artificial intelligence, in particular in the development of communication protocols for software agents. Instead of considering the full-blown theory of speech acts, we focus on speech acts that either have the pragmatic force of an assertion or the pragmatic force of an obligation, and on how these speech acts may be related to each other. In particular, we are interested in a principle proposed by Bellin and Dalla Pozza that allows one to promote acts of obligations through causal chains of acts of assertions. The main achievement of this thesis is a sound and complete categorical semantics for a logic for pragmatics incorporating the aforementioned principle. One of the benefits of the proposed semantics is that it allows one to deal with conditional obligations as well, thus extending the framework in a very interesting way. Although the logical framework considered in this work incorporates only two types of speech acts, we hope to be able to show that we have a well-behaved core fragment that can serve as a fruitful basis for further investigations.
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Rouchota, Vassiliki. "The semantics and pragmatics of the subjunctive in modern Greek : a relevance-theoretic approach." Thesis, University College London (University of London), 1994. http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/1317935/.
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The aim of this thesis is to propose a semantic analysis of the subjunctive mood in Modem Greek and to show how the various interpretations subjunctive clauses may have can be accounted for in terms of independently motivated communicative principles. My analysis is based on relevance-theoretic assumptions about semantics and pragmatics (Sperber and Wilson 1986, Wilson and Sperber 1988a, 1993). In chapter 1 some of the existing accounts of the subjunctive are considered and found inadequate. A new semantic account, based on the relevance-theoretic approach to semantics, is put forward and discussed, with special reference to the subjunctive in Modern Greek. It is argued that the subjunctive encodes procedural meaning about propositional attitude, which is non-truth- conditional. In particular, it constrains the interpretation of an utterance by indicating that the proposition expressed is entertained as a description of a state of affairs in a possible world. In chapters 2 and 3 the issue addressed is how we can account for the various interpretations of subjunctive clauses. Imperative-like subjunctive clauses, and subjunctive clauses expressing wishes, potentiality and possibility are discussed in chapter 2; expressive, narrative and interrogative subjunctive clauses are dealt with in chapter 3. It is shown that the way subjunctive clauses are interpreted in a particular context is a function of their semantically encoded meaning and considerations of optimal relevance. Chapter 4 prepares the ground for chapter 5. It is argued that definite and indefinite descriptions are not semantically ambiguous; their various interpretations are accounted for by a univocal semantics interacting with context and relevance considerations, i.e. pragmatically. In chapter 5 the interpretation of Modern Greek restrictive relatives in the indicative and subjunctive is discussed. It is shown that the restrictions on the possible interpretations of the description which the relative clause accompanies fall out from the semantic contrast between the indicative and the subjunctive as defined in chapter 1.
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Leclercq, Benoît. "On the semantics-pragmatics interface : a theoretical bridge between Construction Grammar and Relevance Theory." Thesis, Lille 3, 2019. http://www.theses.fr/2019LIL3H041.
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Cette thèse se propose de réexaminer l’interface sémantique/pragmatique en associant la Grammaire de Construction (CxG) et la Théorie de la Pertinence (RT). Ces deux théories ont pour but de fournir des descriptions cognitivement plausibles de l’utilisation du langage. Étant donné leurs objectifs respectifs, il arrive cependant que les mêmes phénomènes linguistiques soient analysés de manière opposée (en exagérant le rôle de la connaissance linguistique dans la CxG ou en la minimisant dans la RT). Par conséquent, la question se pose de la précision descriptive de ces cadres théoriques. L'hypothèse centrale de cette thèse est que l'association des deux approches permet une meilleure précision descriptive. Ainsi, elles ne doivent pas être considérées comme contradictoires, mais plutôt comme complémentaires. Les associer semble donc essentiel. Pour ce faire, un certain nombre de notions (spécifiques aux théories) doivent être discutées et (re)définies. Le principal point de discorde étant la sémantique/pragmatique lexicale, cette thèse ré-évalue le rôle de la connaissance linguistique et de l'inférence pragmatique lors de l'interprétation d'un lexème. Il est démontré que ces deux aspects sont intimement liés et que l’interprétation d’une unité lexicale dépend à la fois d’une connaissance sémantique riche ainsi que de mécanismes pragmatiques ancrés dans la cognition. Interpréter un lexème repose donc sur un processus de saturation lexico-régulée. En outre, ce processus est contraint par la fonction des structures dans lesquelles les lexèmes apparaissent, ce qui peut engendrer des effets de coercion. La nature de ces effets est réexaminée, et les racines pragmatiques de la coercion sont soulignées. La coercion est vue comme une conséquence logique de la sémantique procédurale associée aux constructions grammaticales. Pour cela, la notion de procéduralité est redéfinie. Finalement, le modèle est mis à l'épreuve : il est appliqué au domaine de la modalité en anglais et un grand échantillon de corpus est utilisé pour discuter des verbes modaux can, could et be able toThe aim of this thesis is to reassess the interface between semantics and pragmatics by combining insights from Construction Grammar (CxG) and Relevance Theory (RT). Both theories are driven by a commitment to provide cognitively accurate descriptions of language use; however, their respective goals often lead to opposite understandings of the same phenomena (either by overplaying the role of linguistic knowledge in CxG, or by underplaying it in RT). As a consequence, the question arises as to whether either of these frameworks actually achieves descriptive accuracy. A central assumption of this thesis is that together these two perspectives allow for better descriptive accuracy. Thus, they should not be seen as contradictory, but rather as complementary. Merging these two perspectives therefore seems essential. In order to do so, a number of (theory-specific) notions have to be critically discussed and (re-)defined. Since the main point of contention is lexical semantics-pragmatics, this thesis re-evaluates the role of linguistic knowledge and pragmatic inference during the interpretation of a lexeme. It shows that these two aspects are deeply intertwined, and that interpreting a lexeme depends both on rich semantic knowledge and on cognitively-governed pragmatic principles. In this view, the interpretation of a lexeme results from a process of lexically-regulated saturation. This process is further constrained by the function of the larger structures in which lexemes are embedded, which can lead to coercion. This thesis challenges the nature of coercion while highlighting its pragmatics roots. Coercion is argued to follow naturally from the procedural nature of the semantic content encoded by grammatical constructions. This leads to a new definition of procedural encoding. Finally, this model is put to the test by applying it to modality in English and by examining a large corpus sample with the verbs can, could and be able to
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Herbstritt, Michele [Verfasser]. "Investigating the Language of Uncertainty - experimental data, formal semantics & probabilistic pragmatics / Michele Herbstritt." Tübingen : Universitätsbibliothek Tübingen, 2020. http://d-nb.info/1218073543/34.
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Stokke, Andreas. "Indexicality and presupposition : explorations beyond truth-conditional information." Thesis, University of St Andrews, 2010. http://hdl.handle.net/10023/1704.
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This thesis consists of four essays and an introduction dedicated to two main topics: indexicality and presupposition. The first essay is concerned with an alleged problem for the standard treatment of indexicals on which their linguistic meanings are functions from context to content (so-called characters). Since most indexicals have their content settled, on an occasion of use, by the speaker’s intentions, some authors have argued that this standard picture is inadequate. By demonstrating that intentions can be seen as a parameter of the kind of context that characters operate on, these arguments are rejected. In addition, it is argued that a more recent, variable-based framework is naturally interpreted as an intention-sensitive semantics. The second essay is devoted to the phenomenon of descriptive uses of indexicals on which such an expression seems to contribute, not its standard reference as determined by its character, but a property to the interpretation. An argument that singular readings of the cases in question are incoherent is shown to be incorrect, and an approach to descriptive readings is developed on which they arise from e-type uses akin to other well known cases. Further, descriptive readings of the relevant kind are seen to arise only in the presence of adverbs of quantification, and all sentences in which such an adverb takes scope over an indexical are claimed to be ambiguous between a referential and an e-type (descriptive) reading. The third essay discusses a version of the variable analysis of pronouns on which their descriptive meanings are relegated to the so-called phi-features – person, gender and number. In turn, the phi-features are here seen as triggering semantic presuppositions that place constraints on the definedness of pronouns, and ultimately of sentences in which they appear. It is argued that the descriptive information contributed by the phi-features diverges radically from presuppositional information of both semantic and pragmatic varieties on several dimensions of comparison, and instead the main role of the phi-features is seen to be that of guiding hearers’ attempts to ascertain the speaker’s intentions. The fourth essay addresses an issue concerning the treatment of presuppositions in dynamic semantics. Representing a semantic treatment of pragmatic presuppositions, the dynamic framework is shown to incorrectly regard conversational infelicity as sufficient for semantic undefinedness, given the standard way of defining truth in terms of context change. Further, it is shown that a proposal for a solution fail to make correct predictions for epistemic modals. A novel framework is developed on which context change potentials act on contexts that have more structure than the contexts usually countenanced by dynamic semantics, and it is shown that this framework derives truth from context change while making correct predictions for both presuppositions and modals.
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Wulf, Douglas J. "The imperfective paradox in the English progressive and other semantic course corrections /." Thesis, Connect to this title online; UW restricted, 2000. http://hdl.handle.net/1773/8368.
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Sbardolini, Giorgio. "Conventions and Change in Semantics." The Ohio State University, 2019. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1555334547254546.
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Glougie, Jennifer Robin Sarah. "The semantics and pragmatics of English evidential expressions : the expression of evidentiality in police interviews." Thesis, University of British Columbia, 2016. http://hdl.handle.net/2429/59531.
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The goal of this dissertation is to examine how English speakers express their evidence in the context of police interviews. I show that speakers use discourse markers, in particular, actually, apparently and supposedly, to explain their evidence in a criminal investigation. The data for this research was collected exclusively from transcripts of police interviews of lay witnesses in the investigation into the disappearance and murder of Caylee Anthony that occurred in Orange County, Florida, between 2008 and 2011. I show that actually marks evidence strength and is felicitous where the speaker has the ‘best’ evidence for their proposition. Actually’s evidential contribution largely parallels the best possible grounds evidential -mi in Cuzco Quechua, and contrasts with that observed for English must. Apparently marks that the speaker’s evidence for the proposition is indirect and supposedly marks that the speaker has reported evidence for the proposition and that they distrust the report. In addition to what evidentials mean, this dissertation considers what speakers use evidentials to do. I show that speakers use evidentials to negotiate the common ground (cg) of discourse. While a bare assertion proposes its propositional content for inclusion in the cg, speakers use actually-assertions both to propose the propositional content for inclusion and to advocate for its inclusion by marking that the speaker has best evidence for that content. Because actually highlights the strength of the speaker’s evidence, it can be used to achieve delicate discourse actions like correcting, challenging and disagreeing. In questions, actually puts the addressee on notice that the information proposed in a bare assertion cannot be included in the cg without more information; actually-questions encourage the addressee to justify their evidence either by disclosing the source of their evidence or by expressly aligning as author and/or principal of that information. Speakers use apparently and supposedly to proffer information that may be relevant to the investigation but without proposing it for inclusion in the cg, because they are either agnostic about its reliability or know it to be untrustworthy.Arts, Faculty of
Graduate
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Jenkins, Stephen Graham. "An object oriented and visual data analysis environment : semantics and pragmatics of multi language programming." Thesis, University of the West of England, Bristol, 2003. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.274390.
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de, la Fuente Israël. "Putting pronoun resolution in context : the role of syntax, semantics, and pragmatics in pronoun interpretation." Sorbonne Paris Cité, 2015. http://www.theses.fr/2015USPCC053.
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Cette thèse étudie les mécanismes qui influencent la résolution de pronoms dans des contextes ambigus. Nous proposons une analyse détaillée de la structure discursive ou la dépendance pronominale a été établie, qui explique pourquoi le rôle des facteurs jouant un rôle dans ce processus varie en fonction du contexte. Nous soutenons que l'unité discursive (UD) est le domaine optimal pour l'étude de la résolution de pronoms. Nous proposons une définition 'relationnelle' de l'UD selon laquelle la configuration des UD de la phrase dépend du contenu syntactique, sémantique et pragmatique de la proposition subordonnée et de la relation entre celle-ci et la proposition principale. Nous étudions deux types de subordonnées adverbiales : les non-relationnelles (temporelles), qui, selon nous, constituent une seule UD avec la proposition principale, et les relationnelles (causales), qui constituent une ud indépendante de la proposition principale. Nous soutenons que la configuration des UD de la phrase influence l'interprétation de pronoms et que les facteurs jouant un rôle dans ce processus ont un poids différent selon qu'ils se trouvent dans une UD ou au travers de deux UD. Nous défendons la thèse selon laquelle la résolution de pronoms est fortement basee sur le principe de cohérence discursive : la résolution des pronoms est guidée soit par le maintien (intra-UD), soit par l'établissement de la cohérence (inter-UD). Nous testons ces hypothèses avec une série d'expériences étudiant le rôle de la fonction grammaticale de l'antécédent, de son statut informationnel et des relations de cohérence entre deux propositions dans le contexte d'une ou deux UD, en anglais, espagnol et françaisThis thesis investigates the mechanisms involved in pronoun resolution in ambiguous contexts. Beyond the typical psycholinguistic approach that puts forward the factors that play a role in pronoun interpretation, we propose an in-depth analysis of the discourse structure of the context where the pronominal dependency is established in order to explain why the role of these factors varies as a function of the contextual circumstances. We argue that the discourse unit (DU) is the optimal domain for the study of pronoun resolution. We propose a "relational" definition of DU, whereby the DU configuration of a complex sentence depends on the syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic content of the subordinate clause and its relation with the matrix clause. We analyze two types of adverbial adjuncts : non-relational (temporal) and relational adjuncts (causal). We argue that, while the former are processed as part of the same DU as the matrix clause, the latter are processed as separate dus from the matrix clause. We claim that the du configuration of the sentence has an effect on pronoun interpretation and that factors affecting resolution have a different weight according to whether they occur within a DU or across two DU. We propose that pronoun resolution searches a maximum of discourse coherence and that interpretation preferences come about in the process of maintaining coherence (intra-unit) or establishing coherence (inter-unit). We test these claims with a series of experiments that investigate the role of the syntactic function of the antecedent, its information status, and the coherence relations between propositions in the context of 1 or 2 DU, in english, french and spanish
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Floyd, Charles Kamper III. "Truly Normative Matters: An Essay on the Value of Truth." UKnowledge, 2012. http://uknowledge.uky.edu/philosophy_etds/2.
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Is truth valuable? In addressing this question, one must parse it into questions that are more manageable. Is the property of truth only instrumentally valuable, or is it both instrumentally valuable and noninstrumentally valuable? Is the normativity of the concept of truth an intrinsic or extrinsic property of the concept? In addressing the first of these questions, I show that certain arguments are flawed, arguments that purport to show that truth is not valuable in any kind of way. After establishing that it is reasonable to think that the property of truth is valuable, I show how inflationists and deflationists can agree that the property of truth is noninstrumentally valuable. In addressing the second question, I rely on the distinction between semantics and pragmatics and the resources of moral semantics to claim that the normativity of the concept of truth is an extrinsic feature of the concept. I conclude that the property of truth is both instrumentally and noninstrumentally valuable and that the normativity associated with the concept of truth is an extrinsic property of the concept. In doing so, I suggest that beginning with an investigation about the value and normativity of truth has important ramifications for theories of truth in general.
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Winder, Deidre. "Pragmatic conversational skills of children identified as emotionally disturbed." PDXScholar, 1990. https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/open_access_etds/4283.
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Communication refers to the conveyance of intended messages so that the listeners' attitudes, beliefs, or behaviors are changed. Communication through a language system may be thought of as the integration of the three components of content (semantics), form (syntax), and use (language in context or pragmatics). The corning together of content, form, and use in signs, words, phrases, and discourse is the essence of language development. The synergism of content/form/use makes up language competence, or knowledge. When children speak and understand a message, they have a plan that is knowledge of language and they use that plan for the behavior involved in speaking or understanding messages, (Bates, 1976; Bloom and Lahey, 1978).
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Hussein, Miri Muhammad. "Relevance theory and procedural meaning : the semantics and pragmatics of discourse markers in English and Arabic." Thesis, University of Newcastle Upon Tyne, 2009. http://hdl.handle.net/10443/1155.
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The present study is an attempt to investigate the use of discourse markers in English and Arabic. The study uses Relevance Theory as a theoretical framework for the analysis of discourse markers in both Syrian and Standard Arabic. It benefits from Blakemore’s (1987, 2002) account of procedural meaning, in which she argues that discourse markers encode procedural meaning that constrains the inferential phase of the interpretation of the utterance in which they occur. According to Blakemore, the procedural meaning encoded by discourse markers controls the hearer’s choice of context under which the utterance is relevant. The study concentrates on ten discourse markers, five of which are only used in Standard Arabic. These are lakinna, bainama, lakin, bal and fa. The other five (bass, la-heik, la-ha-sabab, ma‘nāt-o and bi-ittal ī ) are only used in Syrian Arabic. The choice of these discourse markers has been motivated by the fact that they can be compared and contrasted with Blakemore’s two favoured discourse markers, but and so. The claim is that like so and but, such discourse markers encode procedural meaning that constrains the interpretation of the utterance in which they occur. The study argues that like but in English, bass in Syrian Arabic encodes a general procedure that can be implemented to derive different meanings such as ‘denial of expectation’, ‘contrast’, ‘correction’ and ‘cancellation’. The four discourse markers (lakinna, bainama, lakin and bal) used in Standard Arabic are analysed as lexical representations of these different implementations. The discourse marker fa, in this study, has also been analysed as encoding a general procedure that can be implemented to derive different meanings such as ‘sequentiality’, ‘immediacy’, ‘non-intervention’ and ‘causality’. It has also been argued that the procedure encoded by fa can put constraints on either the explicit or the implicit side of the interpretation of the utterance in which it occurs.
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FOPPOLO, FRANCESCA. "The logic of pragmatics. An experimental investigation with children and adults." Doctoral thesis, Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca, 2007. http://hdl.handle.net/10281/9949.
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In the first part of my dissertation I present some experimental works that investigate how adults interpret scalar items such as or in different syntactic contexts, such as (1) and (2), and ambiguous sentences like (3), in which the pronoun "it" admits of two interpretations, due to the presence of an indefinite antecedent:
(1) If an A has a B or a C, then she also has a D
(2) If an A has a D, then she also has a B or a C
(3) If a farmer owns a donkey, he beats it
In interpreting these sentences, adults display a high degree of “spontaneous logicality”, showing sensitivity to logic properties (such as entailment patterns and monotonicity properties) of the elements in the sentence.
The second part is focused on the investigation of “pragmatic” inferences in children, aiming at attesting which factors may influence children’s computation of Scalar Implicatures (like the ones arising in (2)) and eventually contribute to their failure or their improvement in this task
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Nordgren, Lars. "The Greek Interjections : Studies on the Syntax, Semantics and Pragmatics of the Interjections in Fifth-Century Drama." Doctoral thesis, Stockholm University, Department of French, Italian and Classical Languages, 2012. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:su:diva-75536.
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This thesis investigates the linguistic and philological characteristics of the primary interjections in Ancient Greek drama. It employs Ameka’s definition and classification from 1992 as its theoretical base, and provides a comprehensive research survey. The thesis has a data-driven approach, and is based on all items traditionally classified as interjections. In the chapter on morphology and syntax, the unique characteristics of interjections are presented. E.g., NPs co-occurring with interjections form an interjection phrase, which follows a specific pattern, in accordance with a phrase schema. The chapter on semantics, which is the main part of the thesis, employs an analytical model based on a moderate minimalism approach. This assumes that all items have a core meaning that can be identified without the aid of context, yet allows different, but related, meanings. The definition adopted in the present thesis states that interjections share only formal characteristics, and thus can be divided into categories based on their semantic features, which are defined using Kaplan’s notion of informational equivalence. The thesis deals with three such categories, each with its individual semantic properties: expressive interjections, express the speaker’s experience of emotion and/or cognition; conative interjections, express what the speaker wants the addressee or auditor to do; imitative interjections, depict or reproduce sounds or events. Items in category 1 are the most frequent and thus receive most attention. In the chapter on pragmatics, it is proposed that the primary function of interjections is to express the core semantics in a specified context. Felicity conditions are suggested for an utterance to convey the primary meaning of an interjection. Interjections are also shown to have various secondary functions, e.g. that of strengthening markers. Finally, a lexicon is provided, which offers individual informational equivalents of all interjections under study.
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Deichsel, Annika [Verfasser], and Klaus von [Akademischer Betreuer] Heusinger. "The semantics and pragmatics of the indefinite demonstrative dieser in German / Annika Deichsel. Betreuer: Klaus von Heusinger." Stuttgart : Universitätsbibliothek der Universität Stuttgart, 2015. http://d-nb.info/1072410842/34.
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