Language, Meaning and Context

Language, Meaning and Context
Title Language, Meaning and Context PDF eBook
Author John Lyons
Publisher Fontana Press
Pages 262
Release 1981
Genre Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN

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Lexical Meaning in Context

Lexical Meaning in Context
Title Lexical Meaning in Context PDF eBook
Author Nicholas Asher
Publisher Cambridge University Press
Pages 345
Release 2011-03-17
Genre Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN 1139501313

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This is a book about the meanings of words and how they can combine to form larger meaningful units, as well as how they can fail to combine when the amalgamation of a predicate and argument would produce what the philosopher Gilbert Ryle called a 'category mistake'. It argues for a theory in which words get assigned both an intension and a type. The book develops a rich system of types and investigates its philosophical and formal implications, for example the abandonment of the classic Church analysis of types that has been used by linguists since Montague. The author integrates fascinating and puzzling observations about lexical meaning into a compositional semantic framework. Adjustments in types are a feature of the compositional process and account for various phenomena including coercion and copredication. This book will be of interest to semanticists, philosophers, logicians and computer scientists alike.

Meaning in Context

Meaning in Context
Title Meaning in Context PDF eBook
Author Jonathan J. Webster
Publisher A&C Black
Pages 320
Release 2008-04-21
Genre Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN 1441156445

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Meaning in Context collects some of the biggest names in systemic functional linguistics in one volume, and shows how this theory can be applied to language studies 'intelligently', in order to arrive at a better understanding of how meaning is constructed in language. The chapters use systemic functional theory to examine a range of issues including corpus linguistics, multimodality, language technology, world Englishes and language evolution. This forward-thinking volume will be of interest to researchers in applied linguistics and systemic functional linguistics.

Meaning, Context and Methodology

Meaning, Context and Methodology
Title Meaning, Context and Methodology PDF eBook
Author Sarah-Jane Conrad
Publisher Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Pages 212
Release 2017-10-23
Genre Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN 1501504231

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What methodological impact does Contextualism have on the philosophy of language? This collection sets out to provide some answers. The authors in this volume question three ultimately connected assumptions of the philosophy of language. The first assumption relates to the predominant status of referential semantics and its power to explain truth-conditional meaning. This assumption has come under attack by the context thesis and a number of papers pursue the question of whether this is justified. The second assumption gives priority to assertive sentences when considering language use. The context thesis changes our understanding of language use altogether; possible implications from this methodological shift are addressed in this volume. According to the third assumption, philosophical analysis amounts to nothing more than conceptual analysis. The context thesis risks undermining this project. Whether conceptual analysis can still be defended as a methodological tool is discussed in this volume.

Context-Dependence in the Analysis of Linguistic Meaning

Context-Dependence in the Analysis of Linguistic Meaning
Title Context-Dependence in the Analysis of Linguistic Meaning PDF eBook
Author Hans Kamp
Publisher BRILL
Pages 566
Release 2021-10-01
Genre Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN 9004487220

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This collection of papers addresses context-dependence and methods for dealing with it. The book also records comments to the papers and the authors' replies to the comments. In this way, the contributions themselves are contextually dependent. It represents an inquiry into the activities on the semantics side of the pragmatics boundary.

Context in the System and Process of Language

Context in the System and Process of Language
Title Context in the System and Process of Language PDF eBook
Author Ruqaiya Hasan
Publisher Equinox
Pages 416
Release 2012-11-30
Genre Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN 9781904768395

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The concept "context of situation" introduced by Malinowski some eighty years ago has now become an essential element of the vocabulary of any linguistic theory whose aim is to reveal the nature of language. With the abandonment of the spurious distinction between competence and performance, the process of language, i.e., language use, has claimed its rightful place in the study of language. The chapters of this book focus on the relations of context and text, conceptualising the latter as language operative in some recognizable social context. It is argued that context is not simply a backdrop for the occurrence of words; rather, it is an active element which on the one hand plays a crucial role in the progression of human discourse and on the other enters into and shapes the very nature of language as process and as system, furnishing the foundation for functionality in language. Acting as the interface between language and society, context analysis reveals the power of language for creating, maintaining and changing human relationships.

Language in Context

Language in Context
Title Language in Context PDF eBook
Author Jason Stanley
Publisher Clarendon Press
Pages 288
Release 2007-07-05
Genre Philosophy
ISBN 0191527556

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Natural languages all contain constructions the interpretation of which depends upon the situation in which they are used. In Language and Context, Jason Stanley presents a series of essays which develop a theory of how the situation in which we speak interacts with the words we use to help produce what we say. The reason we can so smoothly operate with sentences that can be used to express very different items of information, Stanley argues, is that there are linguistically mandated constraints on the effects of the situation on what we say. These linguistically mandated constraints are most evident in the cases of sentences containing explicit pronouns, such as 'She is a mathematician', where interpretation of the information expressed is guided by the use of the pronoun 'she'. But even when such explicit pronouns are lacking, our sentences provide similar cues to allow our interlocutors to determine the information expressed. We are, in the main, confident that our interlocutors will smoothly grasp what we say, because the grammar and meaning of our sentences encodes these constraints. In defending this theory, Stanley pays close attention to specific cases of context-sensitive constructions, such as quantified noun phrases, comparative adjectives, and conditionals. Philosophers and cognitive scientist have appealed to the dependence of what is intuitively said by a sentence on the situation in which it is uttered to argue against the possibility of a systematic theory of meaning for natural language. The theory developed in this book is a vigorous defence of the possibility of a systematic theory of meaning for natural language against these influential tendencies.