Author: Diane Blakemore Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 1139437305 Category : Language Arts & Disciplines Languages : en Pages : 212
Book Description
The importance of discourse markers (words like 'so', 'however', and 'well') lies in the theoretical questions they raise about the nature of discourse and the relationship between linguistic meaning and context. They are regarded as being central to semantics because they raise problems for standard theories of meaning, and to pragmatics because they seem to play a role in the way discourse is understood. In this new and important study, Diane Blakemore argues that attempts to analyse these expressions within standard semantic frameworks raise even more problems, while their analysis as expressions that link segments of discourse has led to an unproductive and confusing exercise in classification. She concludes that the exercise in classification that has dominated discourse marker research should be replaced by the investigation of the way in which linguistic expressions contribute to the inferential processes involved in utterance understanding.
Author: Deirdre Wilson Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 052176677X Category : Language Arts & Disciplines Languages : en Pages : 397
Book Description
When people speak, their words never fully encode what they mean, and the context is always compatible with a variety of interpretations. How can comprehension ever be achieved? Wilson and Sperber argue that comprehension is a process of inference guided by precise expectations of relevance. What are the relations between the linguistically encoded meanings studied in semantics and the thoughts that humans are capable of entertaining and conveying? How should we analyse literal meaning, approximations, metaphors and ironies? Is the ability to understand speakers' meanings rooted in a more general human ability to understand other minds? How do these abilities interact in evolution and in cognitive development? Meaning and Relevance sets out to answer these and other questions, enriching and updating relevance theory and exploring its implications for linguistics, philosophy, cognitive science and literary studies.
Author: C. Iten Publisher: Springer ISBN: 0230503233 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 277
Book Description
The main argument of this book is that the notion of truth plays no role in speaker-hearers' interpretation of linguistic utterances and that it is not needed for theoretical accounts of linguistic meaning either. The theoretical argument is developed in the first part, while the second part supports it with cognitive relevance-theoretic, rather than truth-based, analyses of the 'concessive' expressions but, although and even if .
Author: John Collins Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA ISBN: 9780198709329 Category : Language Arts & Disciplines Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
John Collins presents an analysis of the problem of the unity of the proposition - how propositions can be both single things and complexes at the same time. He surveys previous investigations of the problem and offers his own solution, which is defended from both philosophical and linguistic perspectives.
Author: Deirdre Wilson Publisher: ISBN: 9781139341394 Category : Cognition Languages : en Pages : 382
Book Description
"When people speak, their words never fully encode what they mean, and the context is always compatible with a variety of interpretations. How can comprehension ever be achieved? Wilson and Sperber argue that comprehension is a process of inference guided by precise expectations of relevance. What are the relations between the linguistically encoded meanings studied in semantics and the thoughts that humans are capable of entertaining and conveying? How should we analyse literal meaning, approximations, metaphors and ironies? Is the ability to understand speakers' meanings rooted in a more general human ability to understand other minds? How do these abilities interact in evolution and in cognitive development? Meaning and Relevance sets out to answer these and other questions, enriching and updating relevance theory and exploring its implications for linguistics, philosophy, cognitive science and literary studies"--
Author: Keith Allan Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1134742444 Category : Language Arts & Disciplines Languages : en Pages : 826
Book Description
Dr Keith Allan presents a coherent, consistent and comprehensive account of linguistic meaning, centred around an informally presented theory of meaning. It is intended for graduate and undergraduate students of linguistics, or any linguist curious about what a theory of meaning should seek to accomplish and the way to achieve that aim. The work assumes that the primary task of a theory of linguistic meaning is to describe the meaning of speech acts. This in turn presupposes a theory of semantics and a theory of prosodic meaning, as well as a proper treatment of the co-operative principle, context and background information. These matters are dealt with in detail. The second task of a theory of linguistic meaning is to identify what meaning is, to explain the relationships between sense and denotation, and to explicate the nature of meaningful properties and meaning relations. These matters are fully covered, and the work concludes with a summary of the principle arguments presented.
Author: Agnieszka Piskorska Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing ISBN: 1443891681 Category : Language Arts & Disciplines Languages : en Pages : 345
Book Description
The collection of papers discusses various applications of Relevance Theory within several areas of pragmatics and discourse analysis. It covers an array of topics, including the treatment of figurative language, pragmatic markers and lexical pragmatics within Relevance Theory. It also discusses relevance-theoretic analyses of special kinds of discourse, such as discourse emerging from the internet or from psychotherapeutic sessions. The volume will primarily interest relevance theorists and scholars working on the subjects addressed by particular chapters.
Author: Elly Ifantidou Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing ISBN: 9781588110329 Category : Language Arts & Disciplines Languages : en Pages : 252
Book Description
This book uses Sperber and Wilson s Relevance Theory to show how evidential expressions can be analysed in a unified semantic/pragmatic framework. The first part surveys general linguistic work on evidentials, presents speech-act theory and examines Grice s theory of meaning and communication with emphasis on three main issues: for linguistically encoded evidentials, are they truth-conditional or non-truth-conditional, and do they contribute to explicit or implicit communication? For pragmatically inferred evidentials, is there a pragmatic framework in which they can be adequately accounted for? The second part examines those assumptions of Relevance theory that bear on the study of evidentials, offers an account of pragmatically inferred evidentials and introduces three distinctions relevant to the issues discussed in this book: between explicit and implicit communication, truth-conditional and non-truth-conditional meaning, and conceptual and procedural meaning. These distinctions are applied to a variety of linguistically encoded evidentials, including sentence adverbials, parenthetical constructions and hearsay particles. This book offers convincing evidence that not all evidentials behave similarly with respect to the above distinctions and offers an explanation for why this is so.
Author: Diane Blakemore
Author: Deirdre Wilson
Author: C. Iten
Author: Kate Scott
Author: John Collins
Author: Nick Riemer
Author: Deirdre Wilson
Author: Keith Allan
Author: Agnieszka Piskorska
Author: Elly Ifantidou