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1
Wen qi hua yu xing tai yan jiu: A Study of the Wenqi Utterance Form. Bei Jing: Shang wu yin shu guan, 2014.
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2
Cave, Terence. Towards a Passing Theory of Literary Understanding. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198794776.003.0010.
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Relevance theory offers a model of communication where utterances are constantly updated by the speaker, inviting the listener to engage in a corresponding activity of inferential adjustment. In the case of literature, the potential time-scale of this activity is expanded, whether by the length of the text, the passage of historical time, or the demands of close reading. How then do incremental effects operate within the virtual time of literary utterance? How does one effect become a platform or trigger for others? This chapter touches on issues such as the situated logic of collocation and the ‘echoic’ as a way of approaching literary allusiveness, and brings together the micro-analysis of a line of poetry with a broader-scope reflection on the principles that operate over extended fictions. Adapting to literary understanding Davidson’s notion of a ‘passing theory’, it tracks the time-bound, ephemeral passage of verbal events through the reader’s cognitive focus.
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Bolens, Guillemette. Relevance Theory and Kinesic Analysis in Don Quixote and Madame Bovary. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198794776.003.0004.
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Relevance in acts of communication is a focus in both Cervantes’s Don Quixote and Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, and it operates on two levels. One level corresponds to interactions between characters in the plot, the other to readers’ reception of the overarching utterance constituting the literary work. The chapter addresses both levels while linking relevance theory to kinesic analysis, in order to account for some of the cognitive processes activated in literary reception when we understand complex kinesic information (movements, postures, gaits, gestural interactions). While relevance theory helps account for communicational inference procedures within the plot as well as in the work’s literary reception, kinesic analysis addresses the specific type of inference elicited in readers by linguistic utterances referring to gestural and sensorimotor elements in narrative.
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Carston, Robyn, and George Powell. Relevance Theory—New Directions and Developments. Edited by Ernest Lepore and Barry C. Smith. Oxford University Press, 2009. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199552238.003.0016.
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Much work in relevance theory relies on the kinds of method and data familiar to linguistic philosophers: essentially introspection and native speaker intuitions on properties such as truth conditions, truth values, what is said, etc. Recently, however, relevance theorists have been at the forefront of a newly-emerging research field, experimental pragmatics, which aims to apply the empirical techniques of psycholinguistics to questions about utterance interpretation. Over the last few years, this new research methodology has thrown up interesting and sometimes surprising insights into the psychological processes underlying human communication and comprehension, some of which are discussed in this article.
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Stokke, Andreas. What is Said. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198825968.003.0004.
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This chapter provides a new theory of the notion of what is said that is central to the book’s account of assertion, and hence of lying. It argues that what is said by utterances, in context, is relative to discourse structure, in particular, to socalled questions under discussion. The chapter shows that utterances of the same declarative sentence can be used to say, and hence assert, different things relative to which question is being addressed. In turn, the same declarative utterance may be a lie relative to one question under discussion and merely misleading relative to another question under discussion. Discourse-insensitive accounts of what is said fail to capture the lying-misleading distinction. A semantics for questions is provided and is employed in a detailed definition of what is said relative to questions under
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Keiser, Jessica. Varieties of Intentionalism. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198791492.003.0008.
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In Imagination and Convention: Distinguishing Grammar and Inference in Language, Ernie Lepore and Matthew Stone offer a multifaceted critique of the Gricean picture of language use, proposing in its place a novel framework for understanding the role of convention in linguistic communication. They criticize Lewis’s and Grice’s commitment to what they call ‘prospective intentionalism,’ according to which utterance meaning is determined by the conversational effects intended by the speaker. Instead, they make a case for what they call ‘direct intentionalism’, according to which utterance meaning is determined by the speaker’s intentions to use it under a certain grammatical analysis. I argue that there is an equivocation behind their critique, both regarding the type of meaning that is at issue and the question each theory is attempting to answer; once we prise these issues apart, we find that Lepore and Stone’s main contentions are compatible with the broadly Lewisian/Gricean picture.
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Perry, John. Indexicals and undexicals. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198714217.003.0004.
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According to Kaplan, the character of “tomorrow” tells us that the reference of a use of “tomorrow” is the day after the time in context. That time is the time at which the utterance occurred, or might have occurred. So, to get to the reference, we need a function, call it FTom, from a day to the next day. And we need a day to serve as the argument for the function. Kaplan’s character tells us to pick the day during which the time in the context occurs. But is this always the right place to get the argument for FTom? Consider “Never put off until tomorrow what you can do today.” The chapter argues that “undexical” uses can be handled in a way that preserves what is right about Kaplan’s theory, by introducing utterances explicitly into our account; and that doing so illuminates some related epistemological issues.
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Stojnić, Una. Context and Coherence. Oxford University Press, 2021. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198865469.001.0001.
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Natural languages are riddled with context-sensitivity. One and the same string of words can express indefinitely many different meanings on an occasion of use. And yet we understand one another effortlessly, on the fly. What fixes the meaning of context-sensitive expressions, and how are we able to recover this meaning so quickly and without effort? This book offers a novel response: we can do so because we draw on a broad array of subtle linguistic conventions that fully determine the interpretation of context-sensitive items. Contrary to the dominant tradition, which maintains that the meaning of context-sensitive language is underspecified by grammar, and depends on non-linguistic features of utterance situation, this book argues that meaning is determined entirely by discourse conventions, rules of language that have largely been missed, and the effects of which have been mistaken for extra-linguistic effects of an utterance situation on meaning. The linguistic account of context developed in this book sheds a new light on the nature of linguistic content, and the interaction between content and context. At the same time, it provides a novel model of context that should constrain and help evaluate debates across many sub-fields of philosophy where appeal to context has been common, often leading to surprising conclusions: for example, in epistemology, ethics, value theory, metaphysics, metaethics, and logic, among others.
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Starr, William B. Socializing Pragmatics. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198791492.003.0007.
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Lepore and Stone (2015) focus on two theoretically useful notions of meaning: conventional meaning and speaker meaning. For Lepore and Stone (2015, ch.14), the former consists of our mutual expectations about how language is used—conventions—to make ideas public. The latter consists in ideas that are made public by virtue of the speaker’s basic intentions in speaking (Lepore and Stone 2015, ch.13). This essay argues that there is a third, more basic notion of meaning I call significance. The significance of an utterance is not reducible to the content it makes mutual, because it is partly based on the private commitments speakers have when they make utterances and the private commitments hearers form on the basis of utterances. More specifically, significance is the private speaker commitments and hearer effects, which explain why utterances of a given type are reproduced in a population of agents (Millikan 2005). This leads to an approach that differs from Lepore and Stone (2015) in the treatment of non-conventional interpretive effects, speech acts, and deception.
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Perry, Imani. The Flowers Are Vexed. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190456368.003.0015.
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This work, at the intersection of feminist jurisprudence, critical race theory, and African American literary studies, challenges the concept of the reasonable man which informs Anglo-American jurisprudence. The argument revolves around a politics of relation that challenges the hierarchies of membership that are an integral part to the development of the American legal order. The chapter draws on Hortense Spillers’s germinal concept of vestibularity (standing at the threshold) as well as Stanley Cavell’s concept of the “passionate utterance” to furnish alternatives to the reasonable man. It concludes with readings of Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon and Ayana Mathis’s The Twelve Tribes of Hattie.
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McCready, Elin. The Semantics and Pragmatics of Honorification. Oxford University Press, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198821366.001.0001.
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This book provides an approach to the semantics and pragmatics of honorifics and expressions with honorific import, treating them as carrying expressive content which contributes either directly or indirectly to a register corresponding to the current formality of the speech situation. This system is given empirical application to a wide range of honorific expressions including utterance and argument honorifics in Japanese, Thai and several other languages, and it is proposed that languages use distinct strategies for honorification which has implications for the grammaticality of certain combinations of honorifics; on the theoretical side, philosophical connections are drawn to a wider range of issues in theory of the construction of social reality, social meaning, and the expression of gender.
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Stock, Kathleen. Extreme Intentionalism about Fictional Content. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198798347.003.0002.
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The defence of extreme intentionalism is launched. The notion of an intention is introduced in some detail, as well as some skeletal presuppositions about the sort of imagining called for by fiction. Grice’s theory of the meaning of conversational utterance is introduced, with an outline of how it might be extended to fictional content, with certain important adjustments. On the view favoured by the author, the content of fiction is what a reader is reflexively intended by the author to imagine, rather than what she is intended to believe. Finally four common objections to extreme intentionalism are introduced, and the first of these is rejected: namely, that extreme intentionalism entails that individual speakers can arbitrarily change or elude the conventionally given, rule-bound meanings of sentences, so that miswriting is ruled out as impossible.
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Stuart, Susan A. J. Feeling Our Way. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190210465.003.0003.
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Every action, touch, utterance, and look, every listening, taste, smell, and feel is a living question. But it is no ordinary propositional one-by-one question, rather it is a plenisentient sensing and probing non-propositional enquiry about how our world is and how we anticipate its becoming. Using the notion of enkinaesthesia, this paper explores the ways in which an agent’s affectively saturated coengagement with its world establishes patterns of co-articulation of meaning within the anticipatory affective dynamics and the experiential entanglement necessary for expedient action and adaptation. An amplification and extension of the claims made by the most radical of the embodied mind theories transcends minimalist notions of embodiment and yields a new wave of embodiment theory. This suggests an immanent intercorporeality where the living being of other agents is experienced by us directly, without cognitive mediation.
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Menotti, Gabriel, and Virginia Crisp, eds. Practices of Projection. Oxford University Press, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190934118.001.0001.
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This volume makes an intervention in the fields of film studies and visual culture by examining projection as a pivotal element in the continuing technological becoming of media systems. The chapters come together to paint a picture of projection that incorporates a range of practices across time and space. From studies of travelling projectionists in early twentieth-century Scotland and modern-day Uruguay to considerations of the (almost) lost mediums of the slide-tape and the magic lantern, the authors invite us to consider the varied nature of the technologies, apparatuses, practices, and histories of projection in a holistic manner. In doing so, the volume departs from the psychological metaphors of projection often employed by apparatus theory, instead emphasizing the performative character of the moving image and the labour of the various actors involved in the utterance of such texts.
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Cappelen, Herman, and Ernest Lepore. Shared Content. Edited by Ernest Lepore and Barry C. Smith. Oxford University Press, 2009. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199552238.003.0040.
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A general and fundamental tension surrounds our concept of what is said. On the one hand, what is said (asserted, claimed, stated, etc.) by utterances of a significant range of sentences is highly context sensitive. More specifically, (Observation 1), what these sentences can be used to say depends on their contexts of utterance. On the other hand, speakers face no difficulty whatsoever in using many of these sentences to say (or make) the exact same claim, assertion, etc., across a wide array of contexts. More specifically, (Observation 2), many of the sentences in support of (Observation 1) can be used to express the same thought, the same proposition, across a wide range of different contexts.
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Fogal, Daniel, Daniel W. Harris, and Matt Moss, eds. New Work on Speech Acts. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198738831.001.0001.
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The essays collected in this book represent recent advances in our understanding of speech acts-actions like asserting, asking, and commanding that speakers perform when producing an utterance. The study of speech acts spans disciplines, and embraces both the theoretical and scientific concerns proper to linguistics and philosophy as well as the normative questions that speech acts raise for our politics, our societies, and our ethical lives generally. It is the goal of this book to reflect the diversity of current thinking on speech acts as well as to bring these conversations together, so that they may better inform one another. Topics explored in this book include the relationship between sentence grammar and speech act potential; the fate of traditional frameworks in speech act theory, such as the content-force distinction and the taxonomy of speech acts; and the ways in which speech act theory can illuminate the dynamics of hostile and harmful speech. The book takes stock of well over a half century of thinking about speech acts, bringing this classicwork in linewith recent developments in semantics and pragmatics, and pointing the way forward to further debate and research.
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Bateman, John A. Utterances in context: Towards a systemic theory of the intersubjective achievement of discourse. 1985.
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Bunt, Harry. Computational Pragmatics. Edited by Yan Huang. Oxford University Press, 2016. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199697960.013.18.
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This chapter presents a characterisation of the field of computational pragmatics, discusses some of the fundamental issues in the field, and provides a survey of recent developments. Central to computational pragmatics is the development and use of computational tools and models for studying the relations between utterances and their context of use. Essential for understanding these relations are the use of inference and the description of language use as actions inspired by the context, and intended to influence the context. The chapter therefore focuses on recent work in the use of inference for utterance interpretation and in dialogue modeling in terms of dialogue acts, viewed as context-changing actions. The chapter concludes with a survey of recent activities concerning the construction and use of resources in computational pragmatics, in particular annotation schemes, annotated corpora, and tools for corpus construction and use.
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Bybee, Joan L. Usage-based Theory and Exemplar Representations of Constructions. Edited by Thomas Hoffmann and Graeme Trousdale. Oxford University Press, 2013. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780195396683.013.0004.
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This chapter outlines a view of Construction Grammar in which the mental grammar of speakers is shaped by the repeated exposure to specific utterances, and in which domain-general cognitive processes such as categorization and cross-modal association play a crucial role in the entrenchment of constructions. Under this view, all linguistic knowledge is viewed as emergent and constantly changing. The chapter emphasizes that the process of chunking along with categorization leads to the creation of constructions. It also provides semantic/pragmatic and phonetic arguments for exemplar representation and a discussion of the role of type and token frequency in determining the structure of the schematic slots in constructions, as well as the productivity of constructions.
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Pearce, Kenneth L. Berkeley’s Theory of Language in Alciphron 7. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198790334.003.0004.
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Berkeley’s most detailed discussion of the philosophy of language appears in Alciphron. Although Berkeley’s discussion is motivated by problems about religious language raised by John Toland, his response is not to develop a theory of religious language as a special case but rather to defend a general theory of language and show that the meaningfulness of these religious utterances is a consequence of that theory. The theory Berkeley adopts holds that words get to be meaningful when they are used according to conventional rules as part of a public social practice aiming at practical ends. Berkeley does not endorse a sharp distinction between emotive and cognitive language, but rather holds that one and the same word is typically associated with a wide variety of rules, which may instruct users not only to have ideas but also to feel emotions or perform a variety of linguistic or non-linguistic actions.
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Scott, Michael. Religious Assertion. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198806967.003.0012.
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According to a standard theory of religious language, it should be taken at face value. Opposition to this face-value approach has tended to offer radical alternatives, for instance, that indicative religious utterances are not assertions but express a different speech act, or that religious utterances do not communicate beliefs in what is said. This chapter brings together this debate with contemporary constitutive norm theories of assertion. The chapter defends a novel ‘moderate’ theory of religious affirmation that rejects both the face-value and opposition approaches. It argues that religious affirmations are normatively distinct from assertions, and it argues that a theory of religious affirmation should not undermine either the face-value representational content or belief-reporting role of indicative religious utterances. The moderate theory shows how it is possible to do justice to the distinctiveness of religious discourse while staying faithful to the evidence about how speakers use religious language.
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Lepore, Ernie, and Matthew Stone. Explicit Indirection. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198738831.003.0007.
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Our goal in this chapter is to contest the traditional view of indirection in utterances such as, ‘Can you pass the salt?’ by developing a very different way of characterizing the interpretations involved. We argue that the felt “indirection” of such utterances reflects the kind of meaning the utterances have, rather than the way that meaning is derived. So understood, there is no presumption that indirect meanings involve the pragmatic derivation of enriched contents froma literal interpretation; rather, we argue that indirect meanings are explicitly encoded in grammar. We build on recent work on formalizing declarative, interrogative, and imperative meanings as distinct but compatible kinds of content for utterances.
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Lepore, Ernie, and Matthew Stone. Pejorative Tone. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198758655.003.0007.
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The view put forward in this chapter about slur terms is that their interpretations require expansive, open-ended engagement with an utterance and its linguistic meaning, through a host of distinctive kinds of reasoning. This reasoning may include inferences about the speaker’s psychology and her intentions—in light of the full social and historical context—but it may involve approaching the utterance through strategies for imaginative elaboration and emotional attunement, as required, for example, for metaphor, poetic diction, irony, sarcasm, and humor. In the face of their heterogeneity and open-endedness, these interpretive strategies are most perspicuously elucidated through critical attention to the psychological, social, historical, and even artistic considerations at play in specific cases. Thus, in contrast to the common practice in philosophy and linguistics, this chapter will not offer a general account of the interpretation of slur terms. It puts forward that there can be no such thing.
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Gauker, Christopher. Do Perceptions Justify Beliefs? Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198809630.003.0007.
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Why should we believe that perceptions justify beliefs? One argument starts with the premise that sentences of the form “a looks F” may be used to justify conclusions of the form “a is F”. That argument will show that perceptions justify beliefs only if we can find a reading of “a looks F” on which utterances of that form report the contents of perceptions and not the contents of non-perceptual beliefs. There might be a reading of “a looks F” on which utterances of that form report the contents of perceptions, but, when read in that way, such utterances do not justify a conclusion of the form “a is F”.
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Saul, Jennifer. Negligent Falsehood, White Ignorance, and False News. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198743965.003.0013.
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There has been considerable attention in philosophy to the deliberate propagation of falsehoods, either through their assertion (as in lying); or through implicating them by way of true assertions (as in misleading). But there are other important ways that falsehoods are propagated. This chapter focuses on ways that falsehoods may be negligently propagated by true utterances, with a particular focus on what happens when this occurs in communities. The kind of case the chapter is centrally interested in is one in which a collection of true utterances may together convey a falsehood: Individual news stories of crimes committed by black men may be true, but disproportionate selection of these stories for broadcast convey significant and immensely damaging falsehoods. The chapter also discusses the role of false news in the US Presidential election in 2016.
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Richard, Mark. How do Slurs Mean? Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198758655.003.0008.
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It seems “part of the meaning” of a slur that it is a device for displaying contempt. And this seems part of the explanation of differences between slurs and their “neutral counterparts.” But some people, making no linguistic mistake, use slurs in a jocular way, or without animus as interchangeable with their counterparts. And even if the illocutionary “fact” were in some sense “part of meaning,” one might doubt that it is relevant to what is said by an utterance. But information about illocution can be part of “what is said.” This chapter sketches an account of meaning in the sense of what needs to be grasped in order to be a competent speaker; and meaning in this sense is intimately connected with what determines what is “literally said” by an utterance. This provides a natural explanation of why the use of slurs gives rise to a distinctive sort of offense.
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Bach, Kent. Exaggeration and Invention. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198791492.003.0003.
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In Imagination and Convention Lepore and Stone make two sweeping claims about language, convention, and communication. One is that linguistic communication is of what is conventionally encoded. The other, complementary, claim is that when speakers use language in nonconventional ways, their intention is not to communicate some specific thing but rather to invite the hearer into a bit of “imaginative engagement.” So understanding an utterance requires no more than disambiguating it; insofar as imaginative interpretation is required, its aim is distinct from understanding the utterance. I agree with L&S that linguistic convention is much more comprehensive than traditionally supposed and that language is often used figuratively without specific communicative intentions, but their two claims go implausibly further. Both are subject to counterexample and counterargument, and rely on reasoning that downplays some distinctions and disregards others, as abetted by casual use of such key terms as “meaning,” “interpretation,” “convention,” and “Gricean.”
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Abell, Catharine. Fiction. Oxford University Press, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198831525.001.0001.
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The aim of this book is to provide a unified solution to a wide range of philosophical problems raised by fiction. While some of these problems have been the focus of extensive philosophical debate, others have received insufficient attention. In particular, the epistemology of fiction has not yet attracted the philosophical scrutiny it warrants. There has been considerable discussion of what determines the contents of works of fiction, but there have been few attempts to explain how audiences identify their contents, or to identify the norms governing the correct understanding and interpretation of works of fiction. This book answers a wide range of both metaphysical and epistemological questions concerning fiction in a way that clarifies the relations between them. The metaphysical questions include: what distinguishes works of fiction from works of non-fiction; what is the nature of fictive utterances; what determines the contents of works of fiction; what kinds of fictive content are there; how broad in scope is fictive content; and what kinds of things are fictional entities? The epistemological questions include: how do audiences identify the contents of authors’ fictive utterances; how does understanding a work of fiction differ from interpreting it; and what role do thinking and talking about fiction from an external perspective play in enabling communication through fiction? This book develops the first single theory that provides answers to all these questions.
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Brogaard, Berit. The Semantics of ‘Appear’ Words. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190495251.003.0002.
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In this initial chapter, the author establishes her framework for discussion of perceptual verbs like ‘look’, ‘see’, ‘seem’. Perceptual reports are particular speech acts made by utterances of sentences that contain a perceptual verb. More specifically, they are assertions made by utterances of these sentences. Perceptual reports assert how objects in the world and their perceptible property instances are perceived by subjects. A subset of these reports purport to assert how objects in the world and their visually perceptible property instances are visually perceived by subjects. This chapter is primarily concerned with the semantics of ‘seem’ and ‘look’, which—it is argued—subject-raising verbs. Subject-raising verbs function as intensional operators at the level of logical form, just like ‘it is possible’, ‘it was the case’, and ‘it might be the case’. The author’s main argument for the representational view rests on this fact about ‘seem’ and ‘look’.
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Stainton, Robert J., and Christopher Viger. Two Questions about Interpretive Effects. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198791492.003.0002.
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Our exposition is framed around two questions: What interpretive effects can linguistic utterances have? What causes those effects? Lepore and Stone make an empirical case that some effects are contributions to the public record of a conversation determined by linguistic conventions—following Lewis—while non-contributions (our term) produced by imagination offer no determinate content—following Davidson. They thereby replace the old semantics–pragmatics divide by eliminating conversational implicature altogether. We critique Lepore and Stone’s position on empirical grounds, presenting cases in which contributions are made non-conventionally. We also critique their view methodologically, presenting a dilemma by which they either cannot handle many cases using their framework or they do so in an ad hoc fashion. We conclude by suggesting Relevance Theory as an alternative that follows Lepore and Stone’s purported methodology and handles many of their empirical cases.
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Camp, Elisabeth. A Dual Act Analysis of Slurs. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198758655.003.0003.
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Slurs are incendiary terms—many deny that sentences containing them can ever be true. And utterances where they occur embedded within normally “quarantining” contexts, like conditionals and indirect reports, can still seem offensive. At the same time, others find that sentences containing slurs can be true; and there are clear cases where embedding does inoculate a speaker from the slur’s offensiveness. This chapter argues that four standard accounts of the “other” element that differentiates slurs from their more neutral counterparts—semantic content, perlocutionary effect, presupposition, and conventional implicature—all fail to account for this puzzling mixture of intuitions. Instead, it proposes that slurs make two distinct, coordinated contributions to a sentence’s conventional communicative role.
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Haddad, Youssef A. Hearer-Oriented Attitude Datives in Social Context. Edinburgh University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474434072.003.0004.
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This chapter examines the social functions of hear-oriented attitude datives in Levantine Arabic. These are often used to grab the hearer’s attention, especially in such activities as storytelling. In addition, the datives may also be employed by a speaker to anchor the main message of her utterance, along with her evaluation of it, to her hearers and to mark their engagement in an attempt to recruit their empathy, solicit their assent, and/or invoke a shared identity, experience, knowledge, and membership. The chapter analyzes specific instances of hearer-oriented attitude datives as used in different types of social acts (e.g., promises) and in different types of activities (e.g., gossip).
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Chalmers, David J. Two‐Dimensional Semantics. Edited by Ernest Lepore and Barry C. Smith. Oxford University Press, 2009. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199552238.003.0024.
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Two-dimensional approaches to semantics, broadly understood, recognize two ‘dimensions’ of the meaning or content of linguistic items. On these approaches, expressions and their utterances are associated with two different sorts of semantic values, which play different explanatory roles. Typically, one semantic value is associated with reference and ordinary truth-conditions, while the other is associated with the way that reference and truth-conditions depend on the external world. The second sort of semantic value is often held to play a distinctive role in analyzing matters of cognitive significance and/or context-dependence. In this broad sense, even Frege's theory of sense and reference might qualify as a sort of two-dimensional approach.
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Schwarz, Wolfgang. Semantic Possibility. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198739548.003.0013.
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This chapter starts out from the idea that semantics is a “special science” whose aim, like that of chemistry or ecology, is to identify systematic, high-level patterns in a fundamentally physical world. I defend an approach to this task on which sentences are associated with sets of possible worlds (of some kind). These sets of worlds, however, are not postulated for the compositional treatment of intensional contexts; they are not meant to capture what is intuitively asserted or communicated by an utterance; nor are they supposed to shed light on the cognitive processes that underlie our linguistic competence. Instead, their job description is to capture certain regularities in the interactions between subjects using the relevant language. I also raise some questions about how the relevant worlds might be construed.
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Kay, Paul. The Limits of (Construction) Grammar. Edited by Thomas Hoffmann and Graeme Trousdale. Oxford University Press, 2013. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780195396683.013.0003.
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This chapter analyzes the limits of Construction Grammar. It advocates the conservative view which only considers those linguistic phenomena as constructions that a speaker needs to know to "produce and understand all possible utterances of a language and no more." The chapter argues that there are many patterns which appear in language data that do not qualify as parts of a grammar, and that these patterns are neither necessary nor sufficient to produce or interpret any set of expressions of the language. The chapter highlights the need to distinguish coining from the true constructions because the failure to observe the distinction between grammatical constructions and patterns of coining can have undesirable consequences beyond grammatical theory per se, for example in comparative lexical semantics.
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Szabó, Zoltán Gendler. The Distinction between Semantics and Pragmatics. Edited by Ernest Lepore and Barry C. Smith. Oxford University Press, 2009. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199552238.003.0017.
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Semantics is the study of linguistic meaning, or more precisely, the study of the relation between linguistic expressions and their meanings. This article gives a sketch of the distinction between semantics and pragmatics; it is the intention of the rest of this article to make it more precise. It starts by considering three alternative characterizations and explain what the article finds problematic about each of them. This leads to the discussion of utterance interpretation, which situates semantics and pragmatics in a larger enterprise. But the characterization of their contrast remains sketchy until the final section, where the article discusses how truth-conditions and the notion of what is said fit into the picture.
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Sawada, Osamu. Comparison with an indeterminate pronoun. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198714224.003.0004.
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Chapter 4 focuses on the dual-use phenomenon of comparison with an indeterminate pronoun in Japanese (and other languages) and considers the similarities and differences between at-issue comparative meaning (i.e. individual comparison) and a CI comparative meaning (i.e. noteworthy comparison). Although an individual comparison and a noteworthy comparison are compositionally and dimensionally different, there is a striking parallelism in terms of the scale structure. The chapter explains the similarities and differences between the two kinds of comparison in a systematic way. It also considers the role of scalarity and comparison in a discourse context and argues that they provide a way of signaling to what extent an at-issue utterance contributes to the goal of the conversation. The timing of signaling information on noteworthiness in a discourse and its pragmatic effect are also discussed.
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Haddad, Youssef A. Speaker-Oriented Attitude Datives in Social Context. Edinburgh University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474434072.003.0003.
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This chapter examines the social functions of speaker-oriented attitude datives in Levantine Arabic. It analyzes these datives as perspectivizers used by a speaker to instruct her hearer to view her as a form of authority in relation to him, to the content of her utterance, and to the activity they are both involved in. The nature of this authority depends on the sociocultural, situational, and co-textual context, including the speaker’s and hearer’s shared values and beliefs, their respective identities, and the social acts employed in interaction. The chapter analyzes specific instances of speaker-oriented attitude datives as used in different types of social acts (e.g., commands, complaints) and in different types of settings (e.g., family talk, gossip). It also examines how these datives interact with facework, politeness, and rapport management.
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Davis, Wayne A. Calculability, Convention, and Conversational Implicature. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198791492.003.0004.
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I applaud the arguments in Lepore and Stone (2015) that Gricean, Neo-Gricean, and Relevance theories of conversational implicature and utterance interpretation are deeply flawed because the additional meanings speakers convey when using sentences are conventional rather than calculable. I then go on to rebut several conclusions Lepore and Stone endorse that do not follow: that there is no such thing as conversational implicature; that in figurative speech speakers do not mean anything beyond what the sentences they utter mean; that anything a speaker means is something the speaker directly intends and says; and that any meanings conveyed conventionally are given by the grammar or semantics of the language. Along the way, I argue that conventions are constituted by certain causal processes, not mutual expectations, and I distinguish two types of speaker meaning.
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Auer, Peter, and Ina Hörmeyer. Achieving Intersubjectivity in Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC). Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190210465.003.0013.
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This paper investigates communication, including computer-based speech aids by people with severe cerebral palsy—namely Augmented and Alternative Communication, AAC. The reduced bodily capacities and the “uncontrolled bodies” of CP sufferers make bodily synchronization with their partners a considerable challenge. What is more, the electronic speech aid not only produces a disembodied language (synthetic speech), but also has a massive impact on the mutual corporeal attunement of the participants. It will be shown that these detrimental effects of AAC can lead to a breakdown in temporal, sequential and topical structure, and to interactional failure and lack of understanding. However, there are ways to overcome these risks—for example, a “moderator” who channels and controls co-participants’ activities despite the Augmented/Alternative Communicator’s focus on the machine, even during the production of a complex utterance. Thus the machine can be “embodied,” and the interaction can—despite CP—become an “intercorporeal” one.
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Ridouane, Rachid, and Pierre A. Hallé. Word-initial geminates. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198754930.003.0004.
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This study investigates the relationship between the production and perception of word-initial gemination in stops and fricatives in Tashlhiyt Berber. Gemination in this language is primarily implemented through longer duration, even for utterance-initial voiceless stops. This timing information is sufficient for native listeners to identify geminate fricatives and voiced stops and distinguish them from their singleton counterparts. For voiceless stops, however, native listeners’ discrimination performance is only slightly above chance level. Native speakers can thus encode a phonemic contrast at the articulatory level and yet be unable to fully decode it at the perceptual level. Implications of these results for the general issue of phonological representation of gemination are briefly discussed.
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Millikan, Ruth Garrett. Out-Side Pragmatics. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198717195.003.0016.
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Out-side pragmatics concerns cases in which the referent of a construction is not fixed by the intentional content of the utterance but is a “natural referent,” fixed by the construction’s informational content. Examples are incomplete definite descriptions, clauses with unrestricted quantifiers, possessives. In these cases the linguistic sign contains a marker that conventionally directs a hearer to look outside of semantic content for a natural referent. Other times, although its referent is semantically determinate, the construction’s surface form is ambiguous in a way that requires looking outside for its natural referent, as is the case when someone starts talking about “Jane” or “Mary” without supplying any conventional indication of which Jane or Mary they are talking about.
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Tambling, Jeremy. Bunyan, Emblem, and Allegory. Edited by Michael Davies and W. R. Owens. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199581306.013.19.
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This chapter discusses John Bunyan in relation to five versions of allegory, in turn: personification; allegorical narratives, and Bunyan’s use of the allegorical framework of the dream, popular in the medieval period; the concept of figura, as developed by Erich Auerbach; emblems and emblematic allegory; and pictorial symbols as allegory. Finally, the chapter considers the work of Walter Benjamin and Paul de Man, and discusses the radical uses of allegory in critiquing ideological meanings and the view that language is inherently allegorical, which destabilizes both authors and their utterance, making all expression ironic, taking irony as a form of allegory. Although focusing mainly on The Pilgrim’s Progress, the chapter also discusses Bunyan’s use of allegory in his other fictional works.
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Metzger, Melanie, and Cynthia Roy. Sociolinguistic Studies of Signed Language Interpreting. Edited by Robert Bayley, Richard Cameron, and Ceil Lucas. Oxford University Press, 2013. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199744084.013.0036.
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Sociolinguistic processes are inherent in the practice of interpretation. Interpreters, within seconds, receive, interpret, and reconstruct utterances between two languages, using their linguistic, social and cultural, or sociolinguistic, knowledge to create a successful, communicative exchange. This chapter describes some major and minor sociolinguistic studies of interpretation with the underlying assumption that interpretation itself constitutes a sociolinguistic activity from the moment an assignment is accepted, including the products and processes inherent to the task, reflecting variously issues of bilingualism or multilingualism, language contact, variation, language policy and planning, language attitudes, and, of course, discourse analysis.
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Kehler, Andrew, and Jonathan Cohen. On Convention and Coherence. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198791492.003.0014.
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A bedrock principle in pragmatics is that the linguistic signals produced by speakers generally underdetermine the meanings that are communicated to interpreters. For Grice, for instance, utterance meaning lies close to what is overtly encoded, allowing only for the resolution of indexicals, tense, reference, and ambiguity. Lepore and Stone (L&S) agree, but with a stunning twist: they analyze all extrasemantic content as being derived from ambiguity resolution, leaving no work for Gricean tools. Despite significant areas of concurrence with L&S, we ultimately find their analysis to be untenable. To establish this, we focus on a form of pragmatic enrichment that recruits coherence establishment processes to apply within the clause—‘eliciture’—for which we see no credible analysis in terms of ambiguity resolution. We argue that an adequate account of language understanding must recognize the robust roles of both ambiguity resolution and pragmatic enrichment, using tense interpretation as a case study.
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Adler, Jonathan E. Lying and Misleading. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198743965.003.0016.
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This chapter argues that there is a moral asymmetry between lying and intentionally misleading. In particular, it is argued that ethical rules against asserting what one believes to be false with the intention to deceive the listener should be stronger than rules against asserting what one believes to be true with the intention that, as a result, the hearer infers, and comes to believe, something one believes to be false. In the latter case the speaker chooses to mislead, rather than to outright lie, and thereby takes on an additional cognitive burden in generating her utterance. This makes it possible to see the choice to avoid lying by merely misleading as an expression of an intention to respect a norm of truthfulness, as well as the hearer’s interests.
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Konrad, Eva-Maria. Signposts of Factuality: On Genuine Assertions in Fictional Literature. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198805403.003.0003.
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This chapter argues for compositionalism, which is the view that a fictional text can consist of both fictional and factual discourse. One reason to think compositionalism is true is that it explains why authors go to great lengths, and commit to high levels of superfluous detail, to achieve accuracy in their works. This chapter argues for compositionalism within a framework of an institution of fictionality. The conventions of this institution are detailed and provide the basis on which we can identify factual discourse in an overall fictional context: Specific signposts of factuality demand of the reader that he read the utterance as factual and consider it to be a source of knowledge. Therefore, compositionalism allows for reliable beliefs to be formed on the basis of engaging with fictions.
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Valian, Virginia. Null Subjects. Edited by Jeffrey L. Lidz, William Snyder, and Joe Pater. Oxford University Press, 2016. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199601264.013.17.
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Some languages have obligatory overt subjects in all person and tense combinations (e.g., English); some have optional overt subjects in all combinations (e.g., Italian; Chinese); some are mixed (e.g., Hebrew, Shipibo). Parameter setting is less workable an explanation for language variation than is a feature approach. Children in non-null subject languages produce more subjects than do children in null subject languages; children of all language types gradually produce more subjects, especially pronominal subjects, as development proceeds; children are most likely to produce subjects that fit a prosodic template, have high information content, or are in shorter utterances; children produce fewer subjects than obligatory objects. No current acquisition theory—purely competence, purely performance, or hybrid—explains all the behavioral phenomena.
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Stokke, Andreas. Bullshitting and Indifference Toward Truth. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198825968.003.0006.
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This chapter discusses the phenomenon of bullshitting, traditionally understood as utterances made by speakers who are indifferent toward the truth or falsity of what they say. It argues that indifference toward truth is a more differentiated phenomenon than originally proposed by such accounts. A way of understanding indifference toward truth in terms of indifference toward inquiry and questions under discussion is introduced. The chapter criticizes attempts to characterize bullshitting in terms of Gricean Quality maxims. It shows that speakers may be indifferent toward truth in the sense of being indifferent toward contributing true answers to questions under discussion while caring about the truth-value of their particular assertions. This view is applied to phenomena such as evasion and changing the topic, and argues that lying and bullshitting may sometimes be used to advance inquiry.
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Green, Mitchell. Showing, Expressing, and Figuratively Meaning. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198791492.003.0009.
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We first correct some errors in Lepore and Stone’s discussion of speaker meaning and its relation to linguistic meaning. With a proper understanding of those notions and their relation, we may then motivate a liberalization of speaker meaning that includes overtly showing one’s psychological state. I then distinguish this notion from that of expression, which, although communicative, is less cognitively demanding than speaker meaning since it need not be overt. This perspective in turn enables us to address Lepore and Stone’s broadly Davidsonian view of figurative language, which rightly emphasizes the role of imagination and perspective-taking associated with such language, but mistakenly suggests it is sui generis relative to other types of pragmatic process, and beyond the realm of communication. Figurative utterances may influence conversational common ground, and may be assessed for their aptness; they also have a characteristically expressive role that a Davidsonian view lacks the resources to explain.