This volume, the fourth in the Current Research in Semantics/Pragmatics Interface series, is a collection of nine papers dealing with the topic of reporting on beliefs and other attitudes, and in particular with the issue of the semantics-pragmatics boundary dispute which is the core topic of the current research in the field. Written by highly-regarded philosophers of language and linguists working on theoretical semantics and pragmatics, it brings together works in the mainstream tradition of logical form and the contextualism-anticontextualism debate and the research on the role of...

An area of linguistic research can be considered mature when the validity of theoretical and empirical results is tested cross-linguistically and when predictions from different languages influence and modify the course of theoretical development. The semantics/pragmatics interface poses a special challenge in this respect because of its interdisciplinary and multi-theoretical nature. This volume attempts to bridge the gap between theory and empirical analysis by focussing on several aspects of the semantics and the pragmatics of Spanish from a variety of theoretical points of view. Some of...

This selection of research papers written by Hans Kamp presents the core of his scientific research on natural language semantics and its relation to logic, philosophy and linguistics. Arranged in six sections, the topics range from philosophical reflection on the foundational issues in the ancient Sorites Paradox with a formal account of its solution, to a detailed account of presuppositions in dynamic semantics. Ranking among the philosophers with great and lasting influence on formal semantics, Hans Kamp contributed early foundational research to core theoretical topics like temporal...

Beyond Expressives: Explorations in Use-Conditional Meaning offers empirical and theoretical studies of expressions whose meaning falls outside the standard realm of truth-conditional semantics. Aspects of meaning that are better captured by their use-conditions instead came into the spotlight of formal semantics recently, mainly due to the raised interest in expressions like interjections or swear words. Going beyond such expressives, the contributions provide detailed semantic analyses of a broad range of use-conditional items, including particles, non-inflectional constructions,...

This book presents a study of the connections between vagueness and gradability, and their different manifestations in adjectives (morphological gradability effects) and nouns (typicality effects). It addresses two opposing theoretical approaches from within formal semantics and cognitive psychology. These approaches rest on different, apparently contradictory pieces of data. For example, for psychologists nouns are linked with vague and gradable concepts, while for linguists they rarely are. This difference in approach has created an unfortunate gap between the semantic and psychological...

Multidimensional Semantics of Evaluative Adverbs provides a multidimensional analysis for the lexical semantics of evaluative adverbs: nonfactive evaluative adverbs trigger a conventional implicature, whereas factive evaluative adverbs not only trigger a conventional implicature but also a conventional presupposition. This analysis proves to be more advantageous than existing analysis in terms of empirical coverage and explanatory power. With the case of evaluative adverbs, the book demonstrates how secondary meanings (e.g. conventional presuppositions, conventional implicatures)...

An utterance is normally produced by a speaker in linear time and the hearer normally correctly identifies the speaker intention in linear time and incrementally. This is hard to understand in a standard competence grammar since languages are highly ambiguous and context-free parsing is not linear. Deterministic utterance generation from intention and n-best Bayesian interpretation, based on the production grammar and the prior probabilities that need to be assumed for other perception do much better. The proposed model uses symbolic grammar and derives symbolic semantic representations, but...

Free indirect discourse presents us with the inner world of protagonists of a story. We seem to see the world through their eyes, and listen to their inner thoughts. The present study analyses the logic of free indirect discourse and offers a framework to represent multiple ways in which words betray the speaker's feelings and attitude. The theory covers tense, aspect, temporal indexicals, modal particles, exclamatives and other expressive elements and their dependence on shifting utterance contexts. It traces the subtle ways in which story texts can offer information about protagonists....

The basic claims of traditional truth-conditional semantics are that the semantic interpretation of a sentence is connected to the truth of that sentence in a situation, and that the meaning of the sentence is derived compositionally from the semantic values meaning of its constituents and the rules that combine them. Both claims have been subject to an intense debate in linguistics and philosophy of language. The original research papers collected in this volume test the boundaries of this classic view from a linguistic and a philosophical point of view by investigating the foundational...

In Potential Questions at the Semantics-Pragmatics Interface Edgar Onea proposes a novel component for question under discussion based discourse pragmatic theories thereby combining such theories with new ideas from inquisitive semantics. He shows how potential questions account for an entire range of grammatical phenomena. These phenomena include the semantics of indefinite determiners, the meaning contribution of nominal appositives, specificational constructions and non restrictive relative clauses. This book delivers a comprehensive and empirically rich investigation into the...