Semantics, Pragmatics, Philosophy: A Journey Through Meaning

ISBN-13: 9781108731041 / Angielski / Miękka / 2023 / 438 str.

Kasia M. (University of Cambridge) Jaszczolt

Opis

Combining semantics, pragmatics, and philosophy, this is a guide on how to think about meaning like a linguist and philosopher.

Spis treści

Preface and tips on how to read this book; Acknowledgements; List of abbreviations and symbols; Stage 1. Introduction: meaning – what it is and where to find it: 1.1 How (not) to study meaning; 1.2 Semantics, pragmatics, and philosophy (and why they are best done together); 1.3 Proposition: a flexible unit for studying meaning?; 1.4 Meaning and its correlates; Stage 2. word meaning and concepts: 2.1 Harnessing word meaning; 2.2 The 'concept' commotion; 2.3 Language and thought; 2.4 Lexicon and pragmatics; 2.5 The role of reference; Stage 3. Composing sentence meaning: tools and their purpose: 3.1 Truth in service of meaning: truth conditions and truth-value judgements; 3.2 The metalanguage for the logical form; 3.3 Possible worlds and models; 3.4 Semantic composition and semantic types; 3.5 Type-theoretic metalanguage and lambda abstraction; 3.6 Formal tools and cognitive reality; Stage 4. Operations on sentences: 4.1 Sentential connectives and propositional logic; 4.2 Conjunction; 4.3 Disjunction; 4.4 Conditional and biconditional; 4.5 Negation; 4.6 Linguistic diversity: snakes and ladders, cluedo, and monopoly; Stage 5. Inside the sentence: 5.1 Limitations of the metalanguage; 5.2 Quantification; 5.3 Representing time; 5.4 Modality; 5.5 Propositional attitude reports; 5.6 Interim conclusions: semantic tools for formal cognitive representations?; Stage 6. Conveying information: 6.1 From sentences to discourses: dynamic semantics for dynamic meaning; 6.2 Referring and its tools; 6.3 Organizing information in discourse; Stage 7. Utterance meaning, or what lurks under the surface: 7.1 Saying, implicating and inferring; 7.2. Truth-conditional vs. non-truth-conditional, semantic vs. pragmatic: what to include and what to leave out; 7.3 Keeping semantics and pragmatics apart; Stage 8. Meaning in service of its makers: 8.1 Who needs literal meanings?; 8.2 What makes a metaphor; 8.3. Speech and action; 8.4 At a crossroads with ethical and social debates; Stage 9. Conclusion: the future of meaning?; Index.