Linguistic pragmatism claims that what we literally say goes
characteristically beyond what the linguistic properties themselves
mandate. In this book, John Collins provides a novel defence of this
doctrine, arguing that linguistic meaning alone fails to fix truth
conditions. While this position is supported by a range of theorists,
Collins shows that it naturally follows from a syntactic thesis
concerning the relative sparseness of what language alone can provide
to semantic interpretation. Language-and by extension meaning-provides
constraints upon what a speaker can literally say, but does not
characteristically encode any definite thing to say. Collins then
defends this doctrine against a range of alternatives and objections,
focusing in particular on an analysis of weather reports: 'it is
raining/snowing/sunny'. Such reporting is mostly location-sensitive in
the sense that the utterance is true or not depending upon whether it
is raining/snowing/sunny at the location of the utterance, rather than
some other location. Collins offers a full analysis of the syntax,
semantics, and pragmatics of weather reports, including many novel
data. He shows that the constructions lack the linguistic resources to
support the common literal locative readings. Other related phenomena
are discussed such as the Saxon genitive, colour predication,
quantifier domain restriction, and object deletion.
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Produktdetaljer
ISBN
9780192591807
Publisert
2020
Utgiver
Vendor
OUP Oxford
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Digital bok
Forfatter