Literal MeaningThis is a provocative contribution to the current debate about the best delimitation of semantics and pragmatics. Is 'What is said' determined by linguistic conventions, or is it an aspect of 'speaker's meaning'? Do we need pragmatics to fix truth-conditions? What is 'literal meaning'? To what extent is semantic composition a creative process? How pervasive is context-sensitivity? Recanati provides an original and insightful defence of 'contextualism', and offers an informed survey of the spectrum of positions held by linguists and philosophers working at the semantics/pragmatics interface. |
Contents
Two approaches to what is said | 5 |
12 Minimalism | 7 |
13 Literal truthconditions vs actual truthconditions | 8 |
14 A problem for Minimalism | 10 |
15 The availability of what is said | 13 |
16 The availability based approach | 16 |
17 Saying as a pragmatic notion | 18 |
18 Availability vs Minimalism | 20 |
57 Conclusion | 81 |
From Literalism to Contextualism | 83 |
62 Indexicalism | 86 |
63 Contextualism | 90 |
64 Literalist responses to the contextualist challenge | 92 |
65 Where Indexicalism and Contextualism meet | 95 |
Indexicalism and the Binding Fallacy | 98 |
72 Two criteria | 100 |
Primary pragmatic processes | 23 |
22 Rejecting the Gricean picture | 27 |
23 Accessibility | 30 |
24 Objections and responses | 32 |
25 Interactive processing | 34 |
26 The role of schemata | 36 |
Relevancetheoretic objections | 38 |
32 Personal and subpersonal inferences | 40 |
33 Implicature or enrichment? | 44 |
34 Mutual adjustment of explicature and implicature | 46 |
35 Implicated premisses | 48 |
occurrent vs dispositional | 49 |
The Syncretic View | 51 |
the literalist picture | 54 |
43 Semantic underdeterminacy | 56 |
44 The minimal proposition as common denominator | 58 |
45 Interaction between saturation and optional pragmatic processes | 61 |
46 Do we need the minimal proposition? | 64 |
47 The reflexive proposition | 65 |
Nonliteral uses | 68 |
52 Nonliteral uses and secondary meaning | 70 |
53 Nonminimal departures without secondariness | 72 |
54 The transparency condition | 74 |
55 Varieties of nonliteral meaning | 75 |
56 Internal vs external duality | 78 |
73 The indexicalist challenge | 103 |
74 Is the Binding Criterion reliable? | 105 |
75 Variadic functions | 107 |
76 The Binding Fallacy | 109 |
the failure of Indexicalism | 111 |
Circumstances of evaluation | 115 |
82 Time and tense | 118 |
83 Situations | 121 |
84 Saturation or enrichment? | 124 |
85 Subsentential circumstances | 125 |
86 Conclusion | 127 |
Contextualism how far can we go? | 131 |
92 The semantic relevance of modulation | 133 |
93 Four approaches | 136 |
from Waismanns open texture to Searles background | 141 |
95 Ostensive definitions | 144 |
96 Meaning Eliminativism | 146 |
97 Conclusion | 151 |
Conclusion | 154 |
102 Remnants of Literalism | 159 |
103 Availability Minimalism and the dispositionaloccurrent contrast | 162 |
Bibliography | 166 |
| 175 | |
Other editions - View all
Common terms and phrases
accessible argument argument-role asserted Bach Barbara Partee Binding Cambridge University Press Carpintero Carston circumstance of evaluation Cognitive Communication complete proposition context-sensitive contextual ingredient contextualist contextually assigned contextually provided contrast conversational implicatures Dan Sperber derived determined distinction Eliminativism example explicature explicit free enrichment free variable Grice Gricean ham sandwich hearer Herb Clark implied indexical indexicalist inference inferential instance of saturation intuitive Jason Stanley John John Searle Kent Bach linguistic meaning literal meaning literalist logical form metonymical Mind and Language minimal proposition minimalist modal modulation natural language notion object Occam's Razor Philosophy Polysemy possible worlds predicate premiss primary pragmatic processes Principle of Compositionality quantifier domain restriction rains Recanati reference reflexive proposition representation role Searle semantic content semantic value sense situation speaker speaker's meaning speech act Sperber Stanley sub-personal Syncretic Syncretic View t-literal target-situation tense Tense Logic theory thing truth-conditional content truth-values unarticulated constituent underdeterminacy utterance variadic function verb words
Popular passages
Page 2 - The meaning of a sentence (or of any complex symbol) is determined by the meanings of its parts and the way they are put together.