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A model of production and interpretation of natural language utterances is developed which explains why communication is normally fast and successful. Interpretation is taken to be analogous with visual perception in finding the most probable hypothesis that explains the utterance.
Bidirectional Optimality Theory (BiOT) emerged at the turn of the millennium as a fusion of Radical Pragmatics and Optimality Theoretic Semantics. It stirred a wealth of new research in the pragmatics-semantics interface and heavily influenced e.g. the development of evolutionary and game theoretic approaches. Optimality Theory holds that linguistic output can be understood as the optimized products of ranked constraints. At the centre of BiOT is the insight that this optimisation has to take place both in production and interpretation, and that the production-interpretation cycle has to lead back to the original input. BiOT is now generally interpreted as a description of diachronically stable and cognitively optimal formmeaning pairs. It found applications beyond the semantics-pragmatics interface in language acquisition, historical linguistics, phonology, syntax, and typology. This book provides a state of the art overview of these developments. It collects nine chapters by leading scientists in the field.
Castel Ivano, originally built in 1375, is one of many beautiful and impressive castles strategically placed atop hills in Trentino's Valsugana in Northern Italy. It was in this castle on a series of brilliant sunny crisp November days in 1990 that an international group of computer scientists and cognitive scientists met at a workshop to discuss theoretical and applied issues concerning communi cation from an Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science perspective. About forty people, representing nine countries, participated in the workshop, either as speakers, discussants, or observers. The main motivationfor the workshop wasto address the questionofwhether and how current computational...
This book presents current research that discusses some of the major issues in pragmatics from new perspectives, and directs attention to aspects of fundamental tenets that have been investigated only to a limited extent. Current pragmatic theories emphasize the importance of intention, cooperation, common ground, mutual knowledge, relevance, and commitment in executing communicative acts. However, recent research in cognitive psychology, linguistic pragmatics, and intercultural communication has raised questions that warrant some revision of these major tenets. Debates about the place of intention in pragmatics have indicated that Gricean intentions may play a less central role in communica...
This book introduces the most important problems of reference and considers the solutions that have been proposed to explain them. Reference is at the centre of debate among linguists and philosophers and, as Barbara Abbott shows, this has been the case for centuries. She begins by examining the basic issue of how far reference is a two place (words-world) or a three place (speakers-words-world) relation. She then discusses the main aspects of the field and the issues associated with them, including those concerning proper names; direct reference and individual concepts; the difference between referential and quantificational descriptions; pronouns and indexicality; concepts like definitenes...
'The Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Interfaces' explores how the core components of the language faculty interact. This book shows how these interactions are reflected in linguistic and cognitive theory, considers what they reveal, and looks at their reflections in expression and communication.
This book investigates the syntactic and semantic development of a selection of indefinite pronouns and determiners between Latin and the Romance languages. It uses data from Classical and Late Latin texts and from electronic corpora of early Romance to propose a new account of the similarities in the grammar of indefinites across Romance.
The integrated theory of dynamic interpretation set out here will be a surprise to advanced researchers in linguistics. It combines classical formal semantics and modern dynamic semantics without altering the fundamental paradigm. At the book’s core lies a pragmatically motivated notion of a dynamic conjunction of meanings, an idea that is worked out in full formal detail. This is applied to linguistic phenomena that involve anaphora, quantification and modality. The author demonstrates that in each area of application existing data can be neatly combined with new dynamic insights, but more importantly, there is a genuine further pay-off: the work generates treatments of phenomena that were not initially intended, with functional readings of pronouns and quantifiers, ‘Hob-Nob’ sentences, and insights into what we now call ‘Pierce’s Puzzle’. The outcome of a decade of work by the Amsterdam School of dynamic semantics, this volume condenses and reflects upon a vital body of research.
This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 12th International Tbilisi Symposium on Logic, Language and Computation, TbiLLC 2017, held in Lagodekhi, Georgia, in September 2017. The volume contains 17 full revised papers presented at the conference from 22 submissions. The aim of this conference series is to bring together researchers from a wide variety of fields in Natural language syntax, Linguistic typology, Language evolution, Logics for artificial intelligence and much more.
The volume Questions in Discourse - Vol. 1 Semantics contains a comprehensive overview of the semantic analysis of questions and their role in structuring discourse, next to a series of in-depth contributions on individual aspects of question meanings. The expert contributions offer novel accounts of semantic phenomena such as negation and biased questions, question embedding, exhaustivity, disjunction in alternative questions, and superlative quantification particles in questions. Some accounts are modelled in the framework of inquisitive semantics, whereas others employ alternative semantics, and yet others point to the discourse-structuring potential of marked questions. All contributions are easily accessible against the background of the general introduction. Together, they give an excellent overview of current trends in question semantics.