The Semantics Pragmatics Boundary In Philosophy

The boundary between semantics and pragmatics has been important since the early twentieth century, but in the last twenty-five years it has become the central issue in the philosophy of language. This anthology collects classic philosophical papers on the topic, along with recent key contributions. It stresses not only the nature of the boundary, but also its importance for philosophy generally.

One of the most lively and contentious issues in contemporary linguistic theory concerns the elusive boundary between semantics and pragmatics, and Professor Laurence R. Horn of Yale University has been at the center of that debate ever since his groundbreaking 1972 UCLA dissertation. This volume in honor of Horn brings together the best of current work at the semantics/pragmatics boundary from a neo-Gricean perspective. Featuring the contributions of 22 leading researchers, it includes papers on implicature (Kent Bach), inference (Betty Birner), presupposition (Barbara Abbott), lexical semantics (Georgia Green, Sally McConnell-Ginet, Steve Kleinedler & Randall Eggert), negation (Pauline Jacobson, Frederick Newmeyer, Scott Schwenter), polarity (Donka Farkas, Anastasia Giannakidou, Michael Israel), implicit variables (Greg Carlson & Gianluca Storto), definiteness (Barbara Partee), reference (Ellen Prince, Andrew Kehler & Gregory Ward), and logic (Jerrold Sadock, Francis Jeffry Pelletier & Andrew Hartline). These original papers represent not only a fitting homage to Larry Horn, but also an important contribution to semantic and pragmatic theory.

This book is about the pragmatics of language and it illustrates how pragmatics transcends the boundaries of linguistics. This volume covers Gricean pragmatics as well as topics including: conversation and collective belief, the norm of assertion, speech acts, what a context is, the distinction between semantics and pragmatics and implicature and explicature, pragmatics and epistemology, the pragmatics of belief, quotation, negation, implicature and argumentation theory, Habermas’ Universal Pragmatics, Dascal’s theory of the dialectical self, theories and theoretical discussions on the nature of pragmatics from a philosophical point of view. Conversational implicatures are generally meaning augmentations on top of explicatures, whilst explicatures figure prominently in what is said. Discussions in this work reveal their characteristics and tensions within current theories relating to explicatures and implicatures. Authors show that explicatures and implicatures are calculable and not (directly) tied to conventional meaning. Pragmatics has a role to play in dealing with philosophical problems and this volume presents research that defines boundaries and gives a stable picture of pragmatics and philosophy. World renowned academic experts in philosophy and pragmalinguistics ask important theoretical questions and interact in a way that can be easily grasped by those from disciplines other than philosophy, such as anthropology, literary theory and law. A second volume in this series is also available, which covers the perspective of linguists who have been influenced by philosophy.

The two sections of this volume present theoretical developments and practical applicative papers respectively. Theoretical papers cover topics such as intercultural pragmatics, evolutionism, argumentation theory, pragmatics and law, the semantics/pragmatics debate, slurs, and more. The applied papers focus on topics such as pragmatic disorders, mapping places of origin, stance-taking, societal pragmatics, and cultural linguistics. This is the second volume of invited papers that were presented at the inaugural Pragmasofia conference in Palermo in 2016, and like its predecessor presents papers by well-known philosophers, linguists, and a semiotician. The papers present a wide variety of perspectives independent from any one school of thought.

This book shows how pragmatics and philosophy are interconnected, and explores the consequences and ramifications of this innovative idea, especially in addressing and solving the problem of breaking Grice's circle. The author applies philosophy in order to get to a better understanding of pragmatics, and pragmatics in order to get a better understanding of philosophy. The book starts with a chapter on the non-cancellability of explicatures and the role that this idea plays in the resolution of Grice’s circle, and proceeds with the discussion of other topics in which explicatures or cancellability play an important and decisive role. While the reader proceeds in the reading of this book, they accumulate notions and pieces of knowledge which will be of invaluable use when arriving at the chapter on conversational presuppositions (and related chapters), where the author expresses his most radical views: namely that (potential) presuppositions are indeed cancellable, contrary to what many believe.

Semantics and pragmatics – the study of meaning, and meaning in context, respectively – are two fundamental areas of linguistics, and as such are crucial to our understanding of how meaning is created. However, their theoretical ideas are often introduced without making clear connections between views, theories, and problems. This pioneering volume is both a textbook and a research guide, taking the reader on a journey through language and ultimately enabling them to think about meaning as linguists and philosophers would. Assuming no prior knowledge of linguistics, it introduces semantics, pragmatics, and the philosophy of language, showing how all three fields can address the 'big questions' that run through the study of meaning. It covers key theories and approaches, while also enabling increasingly more sophisticated questions about the interconnected aspects of meaning, with the end goal of preparing the reader to make their own, original contributions to ideas about meaning.

It is a near truism of philosophy of language that sentences are prior to words. Sentences, it is said, are what we believe, assert, and argue for; uses of them constitute our evidence in semantics; only they stand in inferential relations, and are true or false. Sentences are, indeed, the only things that fundamentally have meaning. Does this near truism really hold of human languages? Robert Stainton, drawing on a wide body of evidence, argues forcefully that speakers can and do use mere words, not sentences, to communicate complete thoughts. He then considers the implications of this empirical result for language-thought relations, various doctrines of sentence primacy, and the semantics-pragmatics boundary. The book is important both for its philosophical and empirical claims, and for the methodology employed. Stainton illustrates how the methods and detailed results of the various cognitive sciences can bear on central issues in philosophy of language. At the same time, he applies philosophical distinctions with subtlety and care, to show that arguments which seemingly support the primacy of sentences do not really do so. The result is a paradigm example of The New Philosophy of Language: a rich melding of empirical work with traditional philosophy of language.

This work builds on Kasia Jaszczolt's earlier work on Default Semantics. It draws on data from a variety of languages to show that meaning should be understood as a merger of information coming from different sources and via a variety of interacting processes.