Compositionality, Context and Semantic Values PDF Download

Author: Robert J. Stainton
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 1402083106
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 287

View

Book Description
Are natural languages genuinely compositional? What roles does context play in linguistic communication, and by what means? In particular, does context interfere with the compositional determination of truth conditions? What meanings should theorists assign to sentences if compositionality is to be retained? These are the central questions of this important volume of new philosophical essays in honour of Ernie Lepore.

Author: Robert J. Stainton
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 9781402083099
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 282

View

Book Description
Are natural languages genuinely compositional? What roles does context play in linguistic communication, and by what means? In particular, does context interfere with the compositional determination of truth conditions? What meanings should theorists assign to sentences if compositionality is to be retained? These are the central questions of this important volume of new philosophical essays in honour of Ernie Lepore.

Author: James A. Hampton
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319459775
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 342

View

Book Description
By highlighting relations between experimental and theoretical work, this volume explores new ways of addressing one of the central challenges in the study of language and cognition. The articles bring together work by leading scholars and younger researchers in psychology, linguistics and philosophy. An introductory chapter lays out the background on concept composition, a problem that is stimulating much new research in cognitive science. Researchers in this interdisciplinary domain aim to explain how meanings of complex expressions are derived from simple lexical concepts and to show how these meanings connect to concept representations. Traditionally, much of the work on concept composition has been carried out within separate disciplines, where cognitive psychologists have concentrated on concept representations, and linguists and philosophers have focused on the meaning and use of logical operators. This volume demonstrates an important change in this situation, where convergence points between these three disciplines in cognitive science are emerging and are leading to new findings and theoretical insights. This book is open access under a CC BY license.

Author: Markus Werning
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191633305
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 768

View

Book Description
In this book leading scholars from every relevant field report on all aspects of compositionality, the notion that the meaning of an expression can be derived from its parts. Understanding how compositionality works is a central element of syntactic and semantic analysis and a challenge for models of cognition. It is a key concept in linguistics and philosophy and in the cognitive sciences more generally, and is without question one of the most exciting fields in the study of language and mind. The authors of this book report critically on lines of research in different disciplines, revealing the connections between them and highlighting current problems and opportunities. The force and justification of compositionality have long been contentious. First proposed by Frege as the notion that the meaning of an expression is generally determined by the meaning and syntax of its components, it has since been deployed as a constraint on the relation between theories of syntax and semantics, as a means of analysis, and more recently as underlying the structures of representational systems, such as computer programs and neural architectures. The Oxford Handbook of Compositionality explores these and many other dimensions of this challenging field. It will appeal to researchers and advanced students in linguistics and philosophy and to everyone concerned with the study of language and cognition including those working in neuroscience, computational science, and bio-informatics.

Author: Laurence Goldstein
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0199664986
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 368

View

Book Description
Brevity in conversation is a window to the workings of the mind. People use ellipsis and various kinds of pragmatic enrichment, keyed to the particular conversational setting, to express concisely what they mean. Distinguished linguists, philosophers, and cognitive scientists here say how.

Author: John Searle
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9400989644
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 322

View

Book Description
In the study of language, as in any other systematic study, there is no neutral terminology. Every technical term is an expression of the assumptions and theoretical presuppositions of its users; and in this introduction, we want to clarify some of the issues that have surrounded the assumptions behind the use of the two terms "speech acts" and "pragmatics". The notion of a speech act is fairly well understood. The theory of speech acts starts with the assumption that the minimal unit of human communica tion is not a sentence or other expression, but rather the performance of certain kinds of acts, such as making statements, asking questions, giving orders, describing, explaining, apologizing, thanking, congratulating, etc. Characteristically, a speaker performs one or more of these acts by uttering a sentence or sentences; but the act itself is not to be confused with a sentence or other expression uttered in its performance. Such types of acts as those exemplified above are called, following Austin, illocutionary acts, and they are standardly contrasted in the literature with certain other types of acts such as perlocutionary acts and propositional acts. Perlocutionary acts have to do with those effects which our utterances have on hearers which go beyond the hearer's understanding of the utterance. Such acts as convincing, persuading, annoying, amusing, and frightening are all cases of perlocutionary acts.

Author: Markus Werning
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191633291
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 765

View

Book Description
In this book leading scholars from every relevant field report on all aspects of compositionality, the notion that the meaning of an expression can be derived from its parts. Understanding how compositionality works is a central element of syntactic and semantic analysis and a challenge for models of cognition. It is a key concept in linguistics and philosophy and in the cognitive sciences more generally, and is without question one of the most exciting fields in the study of language and mind. The authors of this book report critically on lines of research in different disciplines, revealing the connections between them and highlighting current problems and opportunities. The force and justification of compositionality have long been contentious. First proposed by Frege as the notion that the meaning of an expression is generally determined by the meaning and syntax of its components, it has since been deployed as a constraint on the relation between theories of syntax and semantics, as a means of analysis, and more recently as underlying the structures of representational systems, such as computer programs and neural architectures. The Oxford Handbook of Compositionality explores these and many other dimensions of this challenging field. It will appeal to researchers and advanced students in linguistics and philosophy and to everyone concerned with the study of language and cognition including those working in neuroscience, computational science, and bio-informatics.

Author: Daniel Gutzmann
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004279377
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 363

View

Book Description
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 notions of composition, values and interpretation and their relation to the interfaces to other disciplines. They take the classical theories one step further and closer to a realistic semantic theory that covers speaker’s intentions, the knowledge of discourse participants, meaning of fiction and literature, as well as vague and paradoxical utterances. Ede Zimmermann is a pioneering researcher in semantics whose students, friends, and colleagues have collected in this volume an impressive set of studies at the interfaces of semantics. How do meanings interact with the context and with intentions and beliefs of the people conversing? How do meanings interact with other meanings in an extended discourse? How can there be paradoxical meanings? Researchers interested in semantics, pragmatics, philosophy of language, anyone interested in foundational and empirical issues of meaning, will find inspiration and instruction in this wonderful volume. Kai von Fintel, MIT Department of Linguistics

Author: Zoltan Gendler Szabo
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199251517
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 476

View

Book Description
This is a collection of papers by leading scholars in the philosophy of language and theoretical linguistics on how semantics and pragmatics embed into a larger theory of interpretation and also on the disputed territories between these disciplines.

Author: Jason Stanley
Publisher: Clarendon Press
ISBN: 0199225923
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 275

View

Book Description
Natural languages all contain constructions the interpretation of which depends upon the situation in which they are used. In Language and Context, Jason Stanley presents a series of essays which develop a theory of how the situation in which we speak interacts with the words we use to help produce what we say. The reason we can so smoothly operate with sentences that can be used to express very different items of information, Stanley argues, is that there are linguistically mandated constraints on the effects of the situation on what we say. These linguistically mandated constraints are most evident in the cases of sentences containing explicit pronouns, such as "She is a mathematician", where interpretation of the information expressed is guided by the use of the pronoun "she". But even when such explicit pronouns are lacking, our sentences provide similar cues to allow our interlocutors to determine the information expressed. We are, in the main, confident that our interlocutors will smoothly grasp what we say, because the grammar and meaning of our sentences encodes these constraints. In defending this theory, Stanley pays close attention to specific cases of context-sensitive constructions, such as quantified noun phrases, comparative adjectives, and conditionals. Philosophers and cognitive scientist have appealed to the dependence of what is intuitively said by a sentence on the situation in which it is uttered to argue against the possibility of a systematic theory of meaning for natural language. The theory developed in this book is a vigorous defense of the possibility of a systematic theory of meaning for natural language against these influential tendencies.