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Author: Prerna Nadathur Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0192666827 Category : Psychology Languages : en Pages : 321
Book Description
This book investigates the phenomenon of actuality inferences, in which claims of ability are-in certain temporal contexts-interpreted as descriptions of actual events, instead of as descriptions of potentialities or possibilities. Although actuality inferences evidently arise in the interaction between modality and aspect, they have long resisted compositional explication in standard treatments of these semantic categories. Prerna Nadathur here pursues a new approach, in which actuality inferences are linked to a novel component in the semantics of ability: causal dependence relations. The account is developed through a comparative, crosslinguistic semantic analysis of three predicate classes that license similar inferences: implicative verbs in Finnish and English, enough/too predicates in French and English, and (modal) ability predicates in French, Hindi, and English. Similarities in the inferential profiles of these predicates are tied to their shared causal background structure, while their differences-including in sensitivity to grammatical aspect-derive from differences in asserted content and associated aspectual class contrasts. The central argument is that a complex causal structure for ability interacts with the compositional requirements of aspect to derive the observed actuality-ability ambiguity. The volume shows that causal structure and causal relationships shape patterns of linguistic inference beyond the overtly causal domain, and thus contributes to a new and growing body of research in which formal, computational causal models are employed as an analytic tool for lexical and compositional semantics.
Author: Prerna Nadathur Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0192666827 Category : Psychology Languages : en Pages : 321
Book Description
This book investigates the phenomenon of actuality inferences, in which claims of ability are-in certain temporal contexts-interpreted as descriptions of actual events, instead of as descriptions of potentialities or possibilities. Although actuality inferences evidently arise in the interaction between modality and aspect, they have long resisted compositional explication in standard treatments of these semantic categories. Prerna Nadathur here pursues a new approach, in which actuality inferences are linked to a novel component in the semantics of ability: causal dependence relations. The account is developed through a comparative, crosslinguistic semantic analysis of three predicate classes that license similar inferences: implicative verbs in Finnish and English, enough/too predicates in French and English, and (modal) ability predicates in French, Hindi, and English. Similarities in the inferential profiles of these predicates are tied to their shared causal background structure, while their differences-including in sensitivity to grammatical aspect-derive from differences in asserted content and associated aspectual class contrasts. The central argument is that a complex causal structure for ability interacts with the compositional requirements of aspect to derive the observed actuality-ability ambiguity. The volume shows that causal structure and causal relationships shape patterns of linguistic inference beyond the overtly causal domain, and thus contributes to a new and growing body of research in which formal, computational causal models are employed as an analytic tool for lexical and compositional semantics.
Author: Prerna Nadathur Publisher: ISBN: Category : Languages : en Pages :
Book Description
Crosslinguistically, expressions of ability exhibit a curious duality of interpretation, in some contexts describing the abilities and potential of an agent, and in others simply describing what the agent did on a particular occasion. In languages that mark grammatical aspect, the alternation between ability and action extends to abilitative uses of the possibility modal, and is governed by aspectual marking (Bhatt, 1999). For instance, imperfectively marked uses of the French modal 'pouvoir' ('can') are compatible with pure, potentially unrealized ability interpretations; by contrast, perfectively marked 'pouvoir' gives rise to actuality entailments, requiring the realization of its complement, and seemingly very little else. An influential line of work seeks to derive actuality entailments in the composition of modality and aspect, treating ability as a type of circumstantial possibility operator, and the perfective aspect as imposing temporal boundaries on eventualities in its scope (Hacquard, 2006, a.o.). This dissertation lays the groundwork for an account that links both the ability and actuality interpretations to a novel component in the semantics of ability: causal dependence. The main idea is that ability modals describe a complex causal structure, in which the (circumstantial) possibility that an agent S will realize an event A(S) obtains in view of the causal dependence of A(S) on an available choice or action for S. This proposal is motivated by philosophical work on ability, which suggests that abilitative possibilities have stronger truth conditions than pure circumstantial possibilities (Kenny, 1976; Brown, 1988). I develop the argument for a causal account of ability by comparing actuality inferences to the interpretation of two other types of complement-taking predicates: implicative verbs (e.g., 'manage'; Karttunen, 1971) and 'enough' and 'too' predicates (e.g., 'be fast enough'; Meier, 2003). I show that, in both cases, complement inferences follow from the combination of two things: (i) the presupposition that some prerequisite action for an agent is causally necessary and causally sufficient for the complement, and (ii) a determination of whether or not the prerequisite action occurred. Implicative verbs resolve the prerequisite as asserted content, deriving their characteristic complement entailments as causal consequences. 'Enough' and 'too' constructions, by contrast, simply indicate that the prerequisite action is available to the agent. Drawing on theories of aspectual coercion (Moens and Steedman, 1988, a.o.), I argue that perfective aspect interacts with this 'availability' assertion by systematically forcing an interpretation on which the agent instantiates the prerequisite. As a result, imperfectively marked 'enough' and 'too' constructions imply that their complements are possible, but perfectively marked constructions entail their complements as causal consequences of the prerequisite, in the same way as implicative verbs. 'Enough' and 'too' constructions thus represent a special type of ability attribution, which is specific about the nature of the causal prerequisite for the ability-complement. Pursuing this analysis, the actuality inferences of ability modals result not just from the composition of modality and aspect, but more specifically from the composition of aspect with the specific type of complex causal possibility conveyed by ability predicates. I formalize causal dependence relations over the structure of a causal model which represents causal connections between events as directed links in a graphical network (Pearl, 2000; Schulz, 2011; Kaufmann, 2013). In such a model, the felicity conditions imposed by causal necessity/sufficiency presuppositions depend crucially on the discourse background. Grammatical aspect then selects for a particular interpretation of the abilitative causal structure by selecting for a particular type of background. I argue that this view of ability is a natural extension of the standard modal theory, and suggest that formal models of causation are one way of representing reasoning about the 'normal' developments of situations ('stereotypicality'; Kratzer 1981).
Author: Klaus-Uwe Panther Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing ISBN: 9027296448 Category : Language Arts & Disciplines Languages : en Pages : 299
Book Description
In recent years, conceptual metonymy has been recognized as a cognitive phenomenon that is as fundamental as metaphor for reasoning and the construction of meaning. The thoroughly revised chapters in the present volume originated as presentations in a workshop organized by the editors for the 7th International Pragmatics Conference held in Budapest in 2000. They constitute, according to an anonymous reviewer, "an interesting contribution to both cognitive linguistics and pragmatics." The contributions aim to bridge the gap, and encourage discussion, between cognitive linguists and scholars working in a pragmatic framework. Topics include the metonymic basis of explicature and implicature, the role of metonymically-based inferences in speech act and discourse interpretation, the pragmatic meaning of grammatical constructions, the impact of metonymic mappings on and their interaction with grammatical structure, the role of metonymic inferencing and implicature in linguistic change, and the comparison of metonymic principles across languages and different cultural settings.
Author: David J. Staley Publisher: Lexington Books ISBN: 0739117548 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 191
Book Description
Perhaps the most important histiographic innovation of the twentieth century was the application of the historical method to wider and more expansive areas of the past. Where historians once defined the study of history strictly in terms of politics and the actions and decisions of Great Men, historians today are just as likely to inquire into a much wider domain of the past, from the lives of families and peasants, to more abstract realms such as the history of mentalities and emotions. Historians have applied their method to a wider variety of subjects; regardless of the topic, historians ask questions, seek evidence, draw inferences from that evidence, create representations, and subject these representations to the scrutiny of other historians. This book severs the historical method from the past altogether by applying that method to a domain outside of the past. The goal of this book is to apply history-as-method to the study of the future, a subject matter domain that most historians have traditionally and vigorously avoided. Historians have traditionally rejected the idea that we can use the study of history to think about the future. The book reexamines this long held belief, and argues that the historical method is an excellent way to think about and represent the future. At the same time, the book asserts that futurists should not view the future as a scientist might--aiming for predictions and certainties--but rather should view the future in the same way that an historian views the past.
Author: Christopher Badura Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1000399036 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 341
Book Description
This book explores a topic that has recently become the subject of increased philosophical interest: how can imagination be put to epistemic use? Though imagination has long been invoked in contexts of modal knowledge, in recent years philosophers have begun to explore its capacity to play an epistemic role in a variety of other contexts as well. In this collection, the contributors address an assortment of issues relating to epistemic uses of imagination, and in particular, they take up the ways in which our imaginings must be constrained so as to justify beliefs and give rise to knowledge. These constraints are explored across several different contexts in which imagination is appealed to for justification, namely reasoning, modality and modal knowledge, thought experiments, and knowledge of self and others. Taken as a whole, the contributions in this volume break new ground in explicating when and how imagination can be epistemically useful. Epistemic Uses of Imagination will be of interest to scholars and advanced students who are working on imagination, as well as those working more broadly in epistemology, aesthetics, and philosophy of mind.
Author: Dale Jacquette Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1317489586 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 278
Book Description
The philosophical study of what exists and what it means for something to exist is one of the core concerns of metaphysics. This introduction to ontology provides readers with a comprehensive account of the central ideas of the subject of being. This book is divided into two parts. The first part explores questions of pure philosophical ontology: what is meant by the concept of being, why there exists something rather than nothing, and why there is only one logically contingent actual world. Dale Jacquette shows how logic provides the only possible answers to these fundamental problems. The second part of the book examines issues of applied scientific ontology. Jacquette offers a critical survey of some of the most influential traditional ontologies, such as the distinction between appearance and reality, and the categories of substance and transcendence. The ontology of physical entities - space, time, matter and causation - is examined as well as the ontology of abstract entities such as sets, numbers, properties, relations and propositions. The special problems posed by the subjectivity of mind and of postulating a god are also explored in detail. The final chapter examines the ontology of culture, language and art.
Author: Angeliki Athanasiadou Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG ISBN: 3110652242 Category : Language Arts & Disciplines Languages : en Pages : 315
Book Description
Although the figure of irony has enjoyed extensive attention through important contributions to the diverse literatures addressing figurative thought and language, it still remains relatively in the background compared to other figures such as metaphor and metonymy. The present volume, together with a 2017 collection by Angeliki Athanasiadou and Herbert L. Colston, aims to the further exploration of verbal and situational irony, its gestural accompaniments, its comprehension and interpretation, its constructional diversity and its cooperation with other figures such as metaphor and hyperbole. The present volume is a highly interesting collection of chapters dealing with both theoretical investigations and descriptive applications of a central figure pervading human thought and language. Its aim is to draw more attention to irony’s diversity and its concomitant connections to other aspects of figurativeness.
Author: Peter Lipton Publisher: Taylor & Francis ISBN: 9780415242035 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 236
Book Description
Inference to the Best Explanation is an unrivalled exposition of a theory of particular interest to students both of epistemology and the philosophy of science.
Author: Clifford S. Poirot Jr. Publisher: Taylor & Francis ISBN: 1000838234 Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 231
Book Description
Evolutionary Social Theory and Political Economy traces the origins, extension, marginalization and revival of evolutionary approaches to social theory from the Enlightenment through the beginning of the 21st century. It demonstrates how changes in understandings of social evolution corresponded to changes in definitions of Political Economy and how both reflected changes in the Philosophy of Science. This book is written for students and researchers alike in all the social sciences. Economists will benefit from understanding how ideas about evolution in Economics corresponded to ideas about evolution in other social sciences, and Social Scientists outside of Economics will benefit from understanding how Economics has related to their discipline.
Author: Prerna Nadathur
Author: Prerna Nadathur
Author: Prerna Nadathur
Author: Klaus-Uwe Panther
Author: David J. Staley
Author: Christopher Badura
Author: Christoph Sigwart
Author: Dale Jacquette
Author: Angeliki Athanasiadou
Author: Peter Lipton
Author: Clifford S. Poirot Jr.