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Communication and Content
Communication and content presents a comprehensive and foundational account of meaning based on new versions of situation theory and game theory. The literal and implied meanings of an utterance are derived from first principles assuming little more than the partial rationality of interacting agents. New analyses of a number of diverse phenomena – a wide notion of ambiguity and content encompassing phonetics, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and beyond, vagueness, convention and conventional meaning, indeterminacy, universality, the role of truth in communication, semantic change, translation, Frege’s puzzle of informative identities – are developed. Communication, speaker meaning, and r...
Practical Theories and Empirical Practice
There is a perceived tension between empirical and theoretical approaches to the study of language. Many recent works in the discipline emphasise that linguistics is an 'empirical science'. This volume argues for a nuanced view, highlighting that theory and practice necessarily and as a matter of fact complement each other in linguistic research. Its contributions ranging from experimental studies in psychology via linguistic fieldwork and cross-linguistic comparisons to the application of formal and logical approaches to language exemplify the mutual relationship between empirical and theoretical work. The volume illustrates how selected topics are addressed by different contributions and methodological stances. Topics include the cognitive grounding of language, social cognition and the construction of meaning in interaction, and, closely related, pragmatics from a typological perspective and beyond. Anyone interested in these topics and more generally in meta-theoretical considerations will find great value in this volume.
Situation Theory and Its Applications: Volume 1
Situation Theory grew out of attempts by Jon Barwise in the late 1970s to provide a semantics for 'naked-infinitive' perceptual reports such as 'Claire saw Jon run'. Barwise's intuition was that Claire didn't just see Jon, an individual, but Jon doing something, a situation. Situations are individuals having properties and standing in relations. A theory of situations would allow us to study and compare various types of situations or situation-like entitles, such as facts, events, and scenes. One of the central themes of situation theory of meaning and reference should be set within a general theory of information, one moreover that is rich enough to do justice to perception, communication, and thought. By now many people have contributed by the need to give a rigorous mathematical account of the principles of information that underwrite the theory.
A Gash in the World
A Gash in the World is an intellectual mystery set in India and the US. A murder following his lecture at the Asia Society in New York draws Harold Stone, a professor of Indian Studies at Harvard, into an ancient argument involving literature, religion, and politics. His colleague and former student Asha Raman, and journalist Samir Khanna, join Stone in his quest to solve the mystery and resolve the argument¬¬ one with a critical relevance to modern times. The novel's wide sweep, shifting perspectives, and taut pace make it a dazzling and kaleidoscopic page-turner about a murder in the name of religion.
Language, Games, and Evolution
Recent years witnessed an increased interest in formal pragmatics and especially the establishment of game theory as a new research methodology for the study of language use. Game and Decision Theory (GDT) are natural candidates if we look for a theoretical foundation of linguistic pragmatics. Over the last decade, a firm research community has emerged with a strong interdisciplinary character, where economists, philosophers, and social scientists meet with linguists. Within this field of research, three major currents can be distinguished: one is closely related to the Gricean paradigm and aims at a precise foundation of pragmatic reasoning, the second originates in the economic literature ...
Bridging Inferences
This book presents work on bridging inferences in discourse interpretation. It develops a formalization that permits integrating indirect anaphora in the construction of a structured discourse representation. From a broader perspective, it provides a suitable dynamic-logic framework which can account for underspecifications in cohesion and coherence of discourses by either inferentially resolving or contextually constraining them. Special attention is given to the resolution of bridging anaphora by means of integrating encyclopedic knowledge encoded in FrameNet into a formal theory of discourse structure as provided by Segmented Discourse Representation Theory. A second focus lies on the dis...
