Meaning Through Language Contrast: Volume 1: 99 - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 9027251193 ISBN 13: 9789027251190

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Co, 2003

Synopsis

These volumes contain selected papers from the Second International Conference on Contrastive Semantics and Pragmatics that was held at Newnham College, University of Cambridge, in September 2000. They include papers on negation, temporality, modality, evidentiality, eventualities, grammar and conceptualization, grammaticalization, metaphor, cross-cultural pragmatics and speech acts and the semantics-pragmatics boundary. There are contributions by, amongst many others, Les Bruce, Ilinca Crainiceanu, Thorstein Fretheim, Saeko Fukushima, Ronald Geluykens, Javier Gutiérrez-Rexach, Klaus von Heusinger, K. M. Jaszczolt, Susumu Kubo, Akiko Kurosawa, Eva Lavric, Didier Maillat, Márta Maleczki, Steve Nicolle, Sergei Tatevosov, L. M. Tovena, Jacqueline Visconti and Krista Vogelberg.

About this title

Synopsis

The discussion of the boundary between semantics and pragmatics has also undergone various changes of emphasis and style. In the 1970s, sense-generality and pragmatic inference were brought to the fore (see e.g., Cole 1981; Atlas 1989; Turner 1999; Jaszczolt 1999). Almost two decades later, dynamic perspective in semantics allowed for contextual information to be semanticized (see Kamp & Reyle 1993). Subsequent developments of the idea of underspecification (see e.g., van Deemter & Peters 1996) demonstrated that pragmatics, intentions and intentionality are frequently irreducible and do not yield to formalizations (see Blutner & van der Sandt 1998; van Deemter 1998; Dekker, forthcoming; Jaszczolt & Turner, forthcoming). The predominance of semantic analyses strongly suggests that (i) contrasting meaning in various natural languages requires firm foundations, strict modelling and some degree of formalization; (ii) both (a) cognitive semantics and (b) Tarskian, post-Montagovian semantics supplemented with post-Gricean pragmatics are more productive than the offshoots of the ordinary language philosophy.

Finally, to address the empiricism-rationalism dilemma, it can be observed that inferring from quantitative analyses and supporting theories by unquantified data constitute equally successful directions in semantic and pragmatic research.

Edition details

• Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Co
• Publication date: 2003
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 9027251193
• ISBN 13: 9789027251190
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 395
• Editor: Jaszczolt Katarzyna M., Turner Ken