Questions about the exact nature of linguistic as opposed to non-linguistic knowledge have been asked for as long as humans have studied language, be it as linguists, philosophers, psychologists, language teachers, semioticians or cognitive scientists. This distinction has been maintained and defended by some, attacked and abandoned by others. Through specially commissioned papers for this, the fifth volume in the Current Research in Semantics/Pragmatics Interface series, contributors argue both for and against the distinction between lexical knowledge and encyclopedic knowledge and...

This volume focuses on the interplay between grammatical and pragmatic factors in the comprehension of lexically communicated meaning. It uses a case-study, modality, in order to illustrate how the plasticity of lexically conveyed information can be accounted for without assuming semantic polysemy. The author's approach to the semantics and pragmatics of the English modal verbs is developed within the relevance-theoretic framework of communication.

The aim of this study is to discover basic principles underlying linguistic figurativeness and to develop a theory that is capable of capturing conventional figurative language (referred to as CFLT, i.e. Conventional Figurative Language Theory). The rich empirical data analysed for this publication include, among other things, idioms, proverbs, lexicalised metaphors, and figurative compounds, drawn from ten standard languages with widely different genetic relationships and/or cultural backgrounds (English, German, Dutch, Swedish, French, Russian, Lithuanian, Greek, Finnish, Japanese) and one...

This study presents an approach to metaphor that systematically takes contextual factors into account. It analyses how metaphors both depend on, and change, the context in which they are uttered, and specifically, how metaphorical interpretation involves the articulation of asserted, implied and presupposed material. It supplements this semantic analysis with a practice-based account of metaphor at the conceptual level, which stresses the role of sociocultural factors in concept formation.

This volume addresses contemporary issues in the semantics and the pragmatics of discourse and dialogue. Collected papers aim at providing insights on different theoretical approaches, all of them in the dynamic semantics tradition, such as Dynamic Predicate Logic (DPL), Discourse Representation Theory (DRT), and Segmented Discourse Representation Theory (SDRT). They reflect the current move of formal semantics from short multisentential texts towards structured discourses and dialogues, accounting for more and more phenomena at the semantics-pragmatics interface (such as subtleties of...

In recent decades, many theories of formal semantics of natural language have undergone what can be called a dynamic turn: they have moved from treating language as a static system to considering it 'in action' and to taking meanings as crucially involving 'context-change potentials'. The theories, however, usually concentrate much more on the hows of the turn than on its whys; and as a result, the conceptual foundations of dynamic semantics are much less elaborated than its technical side. This book, based on a conference held in Prague in September 2001, is a contribution to filling this...

Outlandish as it may seem to the uninitiated, the meaning of English cardinal numbers has been the object of many heated and fascinating debates. Notwithstanding the numerous important objections that have been formulated in the last three decades, the (neo-)Gricean, scalar account is still the standard semantic description of numerals. In this book, Bultinck writes the history of this implicature-driven approach and demonstrates that it suffers from methodological insecurity and postulates highly non-conventional meanings of numerals as their "literal meaning," while it confuses the level of...

How direct is the mapping between linguistic constructions and their interpretations? Much less direct than we commonly assume, according to Daniel Wedgwood. Extending current ideas from frameworks like Relevance Theory and Dynamic Syntax, Wedgwood upholds a radical position on modelling linguistic competence: the idea of interfacing static syntactic and semantic representations must be abandoned in favour of models of the incremental construction of meaning during parsing - which may involve significant pragmatic enrichment. In illustration, Wedgwood presents a detailed study of a key...

This is the first book to collect research on game-theoretic tools in the analysis of language with particular reference to semantics and pragmatics. Games are significant, because they pertain equally to pragmatics and semantics of natural language. The book provides an overview of the variety of ways in which game theory is used in the analysis of linguistic meaning and shows how games arise in pragmatic as well as semantic investigations. The book is a balanced combination of philosophical, linguistic, logical and mathematical argumentation. The book has an introductory and a concluding...

The Current Research in the Semantic / Pragmatics Interface series has carved out a new and vibrant area of research. This volume offers the reader a state-of-the-art record of new and established research in this area. Von Heusinger and Turner's careful selection of topics and contributors ensures that each chapter integrates semantic and pragmatic facts into a single theory, that each finds an adequate division of theoretical labour and that each attempts to design and corroborate an elegant account of meaning and use that would be compatible with other aspects of human behaviour....