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.

This exceptional book of selected essays by the leading Czech linguist and member of the Prague Linguistic Circle contains 26 essays in English and 4 in German. It presents the wide scope of Sgall's interest and in six parts introduces the main spheres of author's interest - the first part of the book deals with general and theoretical questions, the second contains Sgall's contribution to syntax, the third covers the functional sentence perspective, the fourth sentences and discourse, the fifth language typology and the last part covers speech and writing

Outlandish as it may seem to the uninitiated, the meaning of English cardinal numbers has been the object of many heated and fascinating debates. Notwithstanding the numerous important objections that have been formulated in the last three decades, the (neo-)Gricean, scalar account is still the standard semantic description of numerals. In this book, Bultinck writes the history of this implicature-driven approach and demonstrates that it suffers from methodological insecurity and postulates highly non-conventional meanings of numerals as their "literal meaning", while it confuses the level of lexical semantics with that of utterances and cannot deal with a large number of counter-examples. Relying on the results of an extensive corpus-based analysis, an alternative account of the meaning of English cardinals and the ways in which their interpretation is influenced by other linguistic elements is presented. As such, this analysis constitutes a prism that offers todays linguist an iridescent history of one of the most fascinating, if often misconstrued, topics in contemporary meaning research: the conversational implicatures.

This book provides an in-depth view of the current issues, problems and approaches in the computation of meaning as expressed in language. Aimed at linguists, computer scientists, and logicians with an interest in the computation of meaning, this book focuses on two main topics in recent research in computational semantics. The first topic is the definition and use of underspecified semantic representations, i.e. formal structures that represent part of the meaning of a linguistic object while leaving other parts unspecified. The second topic discussed is semantic annotation. Annotated corpora have become an indispensable resource both for linguists and for developers of language and speech technology, especially when used in combination with machine learning methods. The annotation in corpora has only marginally addressed semantic information, however, since semantic annotation methodologies are still in their infancy. This book discusses the development and application of such methodologies.

The notions of reference and anaphoric relations have been discussed since antiquity and they are still one of the most challenging subjects in linguistics, logics and philosophy of language. The quest for a satisfying account of anaphoric reference has initiated a wide range of new and interesting approaches in formal semantics; and recent research confirms the old insight that reference and anaphoricity are closely interrelated issues. This volume brings together fifteen original research articles on the representation and interpretation of indefinite and definite noun phrases, anaphoric pronouns, and closely related issues such as scope and quantifier movement. The analyses are worked out within discourse representation theory, file change semantics, and dynamic logic, a family of recent frameworks developed for the formal analysis of discourse semantics. Particular attention is paid to E-type theories of pronouns and to the use of choice functions in the semantics of noun phrases. The papers collected in this volume shed light on the question of how linguistic expressions establish reference and anaphoric relations. The use of choice function approaches within dynamic semantics opens new research perspectives on these questions. Audience: This book will be of interest to scholars and students of linguistics, logicians, philosophers of language, computational linguists, and computer scientists with an interest in the semantics of natural language.

This study explores the grammar of focus particles in German. It gives a thorough description and analysis of focus particle constructions and links their syntactic, semantic, and information structural properties to their prosodic characteristics. The study also shows that focus particles present a particularly well-suited subject for the investigation of the modularity of grammar in general. The first part of the book deals with the syntax, semantics, and pragmatics of focus particle constructions and results in a modular account of the relation between their word order, information structure, and meaning. The second part presents a corpus study and several speech production and perception experiments investigating the prosodic realization of the constructions. The integration of these two lines of research results in a comprehensive theory of focus particles and of the interaction of grammar and information structure in German.

This collection of papers celebrates the work of Jeanette K. Gundel, who has contributed to the field of the grammar-pragmatics interface through her publications on the syntactic realization of topic and comment and the cognitive status of referring expressions, as well as by inspiring colleagues to make contributions to the overall field of pragmatics. This volume collects together papers from colleagues and former students on pragmatics and syntax, pragmatics and reference, and pragmatics and social variables. The volume includes papers devoted to explicating the grammar-pragmatics interface, with the focus of the papers ranging from Gricean and post-Gricean pragmatics, construction grammar, and genre theory to formal semantics, as well as papers devoted to expanding on Gundel's own original approach to factors such as the cognitive status decisions underlying speakers' choice of referring expression and the topic and focus decisions underlying speakers' choice of syntactic construction.

With input from a team of scholars, this book brings together linguistics and philosophy, empowering new conversations in the process.

Develops a highly original theory of accentuation in which accentuation serves the mere pragmatic function of making utterances well comprehensible. Semantic effects of accentuation are explained as epiphenomena of pragmatic accentuation. The theory is formally elaborated in a model-theoretic framework and experimentally justified.

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.