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Meaning in Linguistic Interaction: Semantics, Metasemantics, Philosophy of Language

Online ISBN:
9780191815867
Print ISBN:
9780199602469
Publisher:
Oxford University Press
Book

Meaning in Linguistic Interaction: Semantics, Metasemantics, Philosophy of Language

Kasia M. Jaszczolt
Kasia M. Jaszczolt

Professor of Linguistics and Philosophy of Language

Professor of Linguistics and Philosophy of Language, University of Cambridge
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Published online:
23 June 2016
Published in print:
1 January 2016
Online ISBN:
9780191815867
Print ISBN:
9780199602469
Publisher:
Oxford University Press

Abstract

The book contains a semantic and metasemantic inquiry into the representation of meaning in linguistic interaction. It offers a new contextualist take on the semantics/pragmatics boundary issue, proposing the most radical form of contextualism to date (called ‘salience-based contextualism’) and arguing that it is the only promising stance on meaning as it allows one to select the cognitively plausible object of enquiry, namely the intended, primary meaning, and adopt it as a unit of semantic analysis in spite of the varying provenance of the contributing information—some of which is traceable to the lexicon and structure, but some of which has to be recovered through various pragmatic processes pertaining to a variety of sources of information. Such a semantics transcends the what is said/what is implicated distinction and heavily relies on the dynamic construction of meaning in discourse, using truth conditions as a tool and at the same time conforming to pragmatic compositionality. The discussions grow out of the earlier work on Default Semantics, adding new arguments in favour of radical contextualism, discussions of grammar vis-à-vis conceptual structure in the composition of meaning, psychologism, salience in interpretation, as well as a new proposal of ‘pragmaticizing’ Kaplan’s characters to account for dynamic word meaning, and arguments and evidence that put into question the indexical/non-indexical distinction, developed in the example of the first-person reference. It contains examples from a variety of languages as well as examples of semantic representations in the metalanguage of Default Semantics.

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