A collection of invited papers that intends to explore the nature of the semantics/pragmatics interface by examining the extent to which the analysis of certain expressions or constructions can be pragmaticised. It contains papers that address the topic of 'making pragmatics semantic'.

This is a collection of papers by leading scholars in the philosophy of language and theoretical linguistics on how semantics and pragmatics embed into a larger theory of interpretation and also on the disputed territories between these disciplines.

Robert Bran­dom’s Making it Explicit (1994) marks a Copernican turn in the philosophy of mind and language, as this collection of critical essays together with Brandom’s enlightening answers convincingly shows. Though faithful to Witt­genstein’s prag­ma­tic turn in spirit, Brandom gives a systematic account of human sapience as a whole – by grounding our relation to the world by words on our discursive practice, assessing its nor­mative basis, which is instituted by scorekeeping activities and sanctioning attitudes, and thus trying to avoid mystifying mentalism as well as dogmatic naturalism in our account of the human spirit. The topics emphasized in this volume concern the place of Brandom’s inferentialist and normative semantics in 20th century philosophy of language (Frege, Carnap, Quine), also in comparison to cognitive linguistics (Chomsky), instrumentalist pragmatism and functionalist understanding of the use of signs (Sellars), deflation of intentionality (Brentano), the logical analysis of predicative structures (Kant), the role of constructions for understanding, the constitution of objectivity by de-re-ascriptions and the problem of anti-representationalism, or how to treat malapropisms (Davidson).This volume was originally published as a Special Issue of Pragmatics & Cognition (13:1, 2005)

The Current Research in the Semantic / Pragmatics Interface series has carved out a new and vibrant area of research. This volume offers the reader a state-of-the-art record of new and established research in this area. Von Heusinger and Turner's careful selection of topics and contributors ensures that each chapter integrates semantic and pragmatic facts into a single theory, that each finds an adequate division of theoretical labour and that each attempts to design and corroborate an elegant account of meaning and use that would be compatible with other aspects of human behaviour. Importantly, each paper in the volume focuses on linguistic detail, not merely abstract discussions of a theoretical nature. Thus each paper makes extensive reference to the semantic and pragmatic facts of English and also other languages. This reference gives each of the proposed analyses a more adequate empirical edge and a sharper theoretical focus. This book is a must for all scholars and students interested in the new and vibrant discipline of semantics-pragmatics and to anyone who is fascinated by the prospect of working beyond the traditional disciplinary boundaries of linguistics and the philosophy of language. The chapters in this volume originate from a workshop at the Linguistic Society of America Summer Institute, held at Michigan State University.

Explains the phenomena, theoretical debates, experiments and historical development of experimental pragmatics, which investigates how utterances communicate a speaker's intended meaning.

The essays in this collection are the outgrowth of a workshop, held in June 1976, on formal approaches to the semantics and pragmatics of natural languages. They document in an astoundingly uniform way the develop ments in the formal analysis of natural languages since the late sixties. The avowed aim of the' workshop was in fact to assess the progress made in the application of formal methods to semantics, to confront different approaches to essentially the same problems on the one hand, and, on the other, to show the way in relating semantic and pragmatic explanations of linguistic phenomena. Several of these papers can in fact be regarded as attempts to close the 'semiotic circle' by bringing together the syntactic, semantic and pragmatic properties of certain constructions in an explanatory framework thereby making it more than obvious that these three components of an integrated linguistic theory cannot be as neatly separated as one would have liked to believe. In other words, not only can we not elaborate a syntactic description of (a fragment of) a language and then proceed to the semantics (as Montague pointed out already forcefully in 1968), we cannot hope to achieve an adequate integrated syntax and semantics without paying heed to the pragmatic aspects of the constructions involved. The behavior of polarity items, 'quantifiers' like any, conditionals or even logical particles like and and or in non-indicative sentences is clear-cut evidence for the need to let each component of the grammar inform the other.

The volume on Semantics and Pragmatics presents a collection of studies on linguistic meaning in Japanese, either as conventionally encoded in linguistic form (the field of semantics) or as generated by the interaction of form with context (the field of pragmatics), representing a range of ideas and approaches that are currently most influentialin these fields. The studies are organized around a model that has long currency in traditional Japanese grammar, whereby the linguistic clause consists of a multiply nested structure centered in a propositional core of objective meaning around which forms are deployed that express progressively more subjective meaning as one moves away from the core toward the periphery of the clause. The volume seeks to achieve a balance in highlighting both insights that semantic and pragmatic theory has to offer to the study of Japanese as a particular language and, conversely, contributions that Japanese has to make to semantic and pragmatic theory in areas of meaning that are either uniquely encoded, or encoded to a higher degree of specificity, in Japanese by comparison to other languages, such as conditional forms, forms expressing varying types of speaker modality, and social deixis.

Explores the language behaviour of speakers of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF), through the lens of Gricean pragmatics. It will be of interest to a wide range of scholars across the fields of pragmatics, language contact, world Englishes, second language acquisition, and English as a second language.

First published in 1988, this book examines the aspects of pragmatic competence involving the class of preposing constructions in English. By limiting the scope of investigation to particular grammatical categories, the author argues previous studies have failed to capture significant pragmatic generalisations. The author asserts what distinguishes one preposing type from another are the semantic and pragmatic properties of the referent of that constituent. After a review of the past literature on preposing, the book goes on to present a pragmatic theory in which two discourse functions of preposing are proposed. It then provides a functional taxonomy of the various preposing types which the theory is designed to account for. One type of preposing, Topicalization, and two of its subtypes, Proposition Affirmation and Ironic Preposing, are discussed in detail in the subsequent chapters before the book concludes with a summary along with directions for future research.

This book provides an introduction to the study of meaning in human language, from a linguistic perspective. It covers a fairly broad range of topics, including lexical semantics, compositional semantics, and pragmatics. The chapters are organized into six units: (1) Foundational concepts; (2) Word meanings; (3) Implicature (including indirect speech acts); (4) Compositional semantics; (5) Modals, conditionals, and causation; (6) Tense & aspect. Most of the chapters include exercises which can be used for class discussion and/or homework assignments, and each chapter contains references for additional reading on the topics covered. As the title indicates, this book is truly an INTRODUCTION: it provides a solid foundation which will prepare students to take more advanced and specialized courses in semantics and/or pragmatics. It is also intended as a reference for fieldworkers doing primary research on under-documented languages, to help them write grammatical descriptions that deal carefully and clearly with semantic issues. The approach adopted here is largely descriptive and non-formal (or, in some places, semi-formal), although some basic logical notation is introduced. The book is written at level which should be appropriate for advanced undergraduate or beginning graduate students. It presupposes some previous coursework in linguistics, but does not presuppose any background in formal logic or set theory.