Semantics and Pragmatics

This book proposes a novel, interface-based analysis of patterns of wh-movement in English in which constraints are stated over both syntactic and semantic representations. Firstly, a theory is presented of the internal structure of events as perceptual and cognitive units. The key question concerns the circumstances in which multiple smaller events, or subevents, can be perceived as jointly forming a single macroevent. Macroevent formation is possible if the subevents in question are perceived as related by one of two contingent relations, namely direct causation and enablement, where the latter is a relation holding among events that form part of an agent's plan. There is no single phrase-structural configuration which corresponds to enablement, so cognitive and semantic representations of event structure differ from syntactic representations of phrase structure in nontrivial ways. Certain patterns of extraction from adjuncts in English are amenable to simple descriptions stated over event-structural units and relations, but exhibit substantial differences from the patterns typically described by syntactic theories of locality. However, syntactic locality theories, as elaborated over the past 50 years, remain essential to an accurate description of the distribution of movement relations. The central challenge addressed by this work is therefore to allow syntactic and nonsyntactic factors to act jointly to constrain the syntactic operation of wh-movement without vitiating necessary assumptions about the modularity of the language faculty.

This book is based on two ideas: first, that any language—English no less than any other—represents a universe of meaning, shaped by the history and experience of the men and women who have created it; and second, that in any language certain culture-specific words act as linchpins for whole networks of meanings, and that penetrating the meanings of those key words can therefore open our eyes to an entire cultural universe. This book demonstrates that three uniquely English words—evidence, experience, and sense—are exactly such linchpins. Using a rigorous plain language approach to meaning analysis, the book unpackages the dense cultural meanings of these key words, disentangles their multiple meanings, and traces their origins back to the tradition of British empiricism. In so doing the book reveals much about cultural attitudes embedded not only in British and American English, but other global varieties of English.

This book presents a critical overview of current work on linguistic features and establishes new bases for their use in the study and understanding of language. Features are fundamental components of linguistic description: they include gender (feminine, masculine, neuter); number (singular, plural, dual); person (1st, 2nd, 3rd); tense (present, past, future); and case (nominative, accusative, genitive, ergative). Despite their ubiquity and centrality in linguistic description, much remains to be discovered about them: there is, for example, no readily available inventory showing which features are found in which of the world's languages; there is no consensus about how they operate across different components of language; and there is no certainty about how they interact. This book seeks both to highlight and to tackle these problems. It brings together perspectives from phonology to formal syntax and semantics, expounding the use of linguistic features in typology, computer applications, and logic. Linguists representing different standpoints spell out clearly the assumptions they bring to different kinds of features and describe how they use them. Their contrasting contributions highlight the areas of difference and the common ground between their perspectives. The book brings together original work by leading international scholars. It will appeal to linguists of all theoretical persuasions.

This book provides an up-to-date introduction to the study of generics and pursues the enterprise of the influential Generic Book edited by Gregory Carlson and Jeffry Pelletier, which was published in 1995. Genericity is a key notion in the study of human cognition as it reveals our capacity to organize our perceived reality into classes and to describe regularities. The generic can be expressed at the level of a word or phrase (i.e., the potato in The Irish economy became dependent upon the potato) or an entire sentence (e.g., in John smokes a cigar after dinner, the generic aspect is a property of the expression, rather than any single word or phrase within it). This book gathers new work from senior and young researchers to reconsider the notion of genericity, examining the distinct contributions made by the determiner phrase (e.g., the notions of kind/individual) and the verbal predicate (e.g., the notions of permanency, disposition, ability, habituality, and plurality). Finally, in connection with the whole sentence, the analytic/synthetic distinction is discussed as well as the notion of normality.

This book sets out to reconcile our picture of the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) verbal system with the evidence of Hittite and the other early Anatolian languages. The discovery that Hittite was an Indo-European (IE) language had dramatic consequences for our conception of the IE parent language. For most of the 20th century, attention focused mainly on the peculiarities of Hittite phonology, especially the consonant h and its implications for the evolving laryngeal theory. Yet the morphological ‘disconnects’ between Hittite and the other early languages are more profound than the phonological differences. The Hittite verbal system lacks most of the familiar tense-aspect categories of Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin. On the other hand, it presents the novelty of the hi-conjugation, a purely formal conjugation class to which nearly half of all Hittite active verbs belong. Repeated attempts to explain the hi-conjugation on the basis of the classical model of the PIE verbal system have failed. This book takes the alternative view that the hi-conjugation — in the form here called the ‘h e-conjugation’ — was an inherited category of the parent language. Separate chapters are devoted to showing how the individual classes of Hittite hi-verbs can be identified with well-known present and aorist types in the ‘classical’ IE languages and derived from preforms which, though grammatically active, inflected with the ‘perfect’ (=h e-conjugation) endings. In the course of the survey, many seemingly independent peculiarities of the PIE verbal system are systematically explained for the first time.

This book is concerned with word meaning, and the role of words in meaning construction. The specific problem addressed concerns how best to account for the inherent variation of word meaning in language use. That is, the books seeks to provide an account for the way in which the meaning associated with any given word form appears to vary each time it is used, in terms of the conceptualization that it, in part, gives rise to. The book develops a new theoretical synthesis building upon developments in cognitive science: in particular cognitive linguistics and cognitive psychology. The model proposed is termed the Theory of Lexical Concepts and Cognitive Models, or LCCM Theory for short. The theory is based upon two central theoretical constructs: the lexical concept and the cognitive model. The essential insight of the theory is that meaning construction in language understanding relies upon the interaction between distinct types of knowledge representation — units of semantic structure: lexical concepts, and units of conceptual structure: cognitive models — which inhere in distinct representational systems that evolved for different purposes: the conceptual system and the linguistic system. The book provides a joined-up account of lexical semantics and semantic compositionality which is at once descriptively adequate and psychologically plausible.

The fine structure of conversational interaction is of significant interest for wide swathes of the behavioural sciences: linguists, philosophers, psychologists, sociologists, literary scholars, artificial intelligence researchers must all contend with issues relating to the nature of meaning and its sharing among interlocuters, the possibility of repair — the wide range of corrective actions that occur when ‘trouble’ arises in interaction — and the characterization of coherence in interaction. This book presents the results of attempting to create a precise, grammatically rooted, theory of conversation motivated by data from real conversations. It develops KoS, one of the most detailed theories of context in conversation, and uses this to analyze a variety of linguistic constructions characteristic of spoken interaction, many of which have not been previously analyzed formally. KoS has descriptive reach from the micro-conversational (e.g., self-repair at the word level) to macro-level phenomena such as multi-party conversation and the characterization of distinct conversational genres. It draws on extensive corpus studies of the British National Corpus, on evidence from language acquisition, and on computer simulations of language evolution. KoS provides accounts of the opening, middle game, and closing stages of conversation. KoS also offers a new perspective on traditional semantic concerns such as quantification and anaphora. It suggests a new methodological criterion — stronger than traditional compositionality — regulating allowable semantic denotations. All in all, KoS provides a highly detailed theory of relevance, taking in the illocutionary, metacommunicative, metadiscursive, and genre-based components of this complex notion. This book challenges orthodox views of grammar by arguing that grammar and interaction are intrinsically bound. It argues that, unless we wish to exclude from analysis a large body of frequently occurring words and constructions, the right way to construe grammar is as a system that characterizes types of talk in interaction.

Natural language allows for efficient communication of elaborate descriptions of movement without requiring precise specification of the motion. Interpreting Motion is the first book to analyze the semantics of motion expressions in terms of the formalisms of qualitative spatial reasoning, mapping motion descriptions in language to trajectories of moving entities based on qualitative spatio-temporal relationships. The book provides an extensive discussion of prior research on spatial prepositions and motion verbs, and devotes chapters to the compositional semantics of motion sentences, the formal representations needed for computers to reason qualitatively about time, space, and motion, and the methodology for annotating corpora with linguistic information in order to train computer programs to reproduce the annotation. The applications they illustrate include route navigation, the mapping of travel narratives, question-answering, image and video tagging, and graphical rendering of scenes from textual descriptions. The book is written accessibly for a broad scientific audience of linguists, cognitive scientists, computer scientists, and those working in fields such as artificial intelligence and geographic information systems.

This book argues that language is based on the human construal of reality. Humans refer to and quantify over virtual entities with the same ease as they do over actual entities: the natural ontology of language, the book argues, must therefore comprise both actual and virtual entities and situations. The book reformulates speech act theory, suggesting that the primary function of language is less the transfer of information than the establishing of socially binding commitments or appeals based on the proposition expressed. This leads the book first to a new analysis of the systems and structures of cognitive language machinery and their ecological embedding, and finally to a reformulation of the notion of meaning, in which sentence meaning is distinguished from lexical meaning and the vagaries and multifarious applications of lexical meanings may be explained and understood. The book discusses and analyses such apparently diverse issues as the ontology underlying the semantics of language, speech act theory, intensionality phenomena, the machinery and ecology of language, sentential and lexical meaning, the natural logic of language and cognition, and the intrinsically context-sensitive nature of language—and shows them to be intimately linked.

This book revives the study of conventional implicatures in natural language semantics. The label ‘conventional implicature’ dates back to H. Paul Grice’s early work on the foundations of linguistic semantics and pragmatics. Since its introduction, it has seen many diverse applications, but it has never enjoyed a stable place in linguistic theory. This book seeks to change that. Grice’s original discussion is used as a key into two presently understudied areas of natural language: supplements (appositives, parentheticals, utterance modifiers) and expressives (epithets, honorifics). The account of both depends on a multidimensional theory in which individual sentences can express more than one independent meaning. The theory is logically and intuitively compositional, and it minimally extends a familiar kind of intensional logic, thereby providing an adaptable tool for general semantic analysis. The result is a linguistic theory that is accessible not only to linguists of all stripes, but also to philosophers of language, logicians, and computer scientists who have linguistic applications in mind.