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Scalar Implicature
In pragmatics, scalar implicature, or quantity implicature, is an implicature that attributes an ''implicit'' meaning beyond the explicit or ''literal'' meaning of an utterance, and which suggests that the utterer had a reason for not using a more informative or ''stronger'' term on the same scale. The choice of the weaker characterization suggests that, as far as the speaker knows, none of the stronger characterizations in the scale holds. This is commonly seen in the use of 'some' to suggest the meaning 'not all', even though 'some' is logically consistent with 'all'. If Bill says 'I have some of my money in cash', this utterance suggests to a hearer (though the sentence uttered does not logically imply it) that Bill does not have all his money in cash. Origin Scalar implicatures typically arise where the speaker qualifies or scales their statement with language that conveys to the listener an inference or implicature that indicates that the speaker had reasons not to use a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Pragmatics
In linguistics and related fields, pragmatics is the study of how context contributes to meaning. The field of study evaluates how human language is utilized in social interactions, as well as the relationship between the interpreter and the interpreted. Linguists who specialize in pragmatics are called pragmaticians. Pragmatics encompasses phenomena including implicature, speech acts, relevance and conversation,Mey, Jacob L. (1993) ''Pragmatics: An Introduction''. Oxford: Blackwell (2nd ed. 2001). as well as nonverbal communication. Theories of pragmatics go hand-in-hand with theories of semantics, which studies aspects of meaning, and syntax which examines sentence structures, principles, and relationships. The ability to understand another speaker's intended meaning is called ''pragmatic competence''. Pragmatics emerged as its own subfield in the 1950s after the pioneering work of J.L. Austin and Paul Grice. Origin of the field Pragmatics was a reaction to structuralist l ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Focus (linguistics)
In linguistics, focus (abbreviated ) is a grammatical category that conveys which part of the sentence contributes new, non-derivable, or contrastive information. In the English sentence "Mary only insulted BILL", focus is expressed prosodically by a pitch accent on "Bill" which identifies him as the only person Mary insulted. By contrast, in the sentence "Mary only INSULTED Bill", the verb "insult" is focused and thus expresses that Mary performed no other actions towards Bill. Focus is a cross-linguistic phenomenon and a major topic in linguistics. Research on focus spans numerous subfields including phonetics, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and sociolinguistics. Functional approaches Information structure has been described at length by a number of linguists as a grammatical phenomenon. Lexicogrammatical structures that code prominence, or focus, of some information over other information has a particularly significant history dating back to the 19th century. Recent attempts to ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Semantics
Semantics (from grc, σημαντικός ''sēmantikós'', "significant") is the study of reference, meaning, or truth. The term can be used to refer to subfields of several distinct disciplines, including philosophy Philosophy (from , ) is the systematized study of general and fundamental questions, such as those about existence, reason, knowledge, values, mind, and language. Such questions are often posed as problems to be studied or resolved. Some ..., linguistics and computer science. History In English, the study of meaning in language has been known by many names that involve the Ancient Greek word (''sema'', "sign, mark, token"). In 1690, a Greek rendering of the term ''semiotics'', the interpretation of signs and symbols, finds an early allusion in John Locke's ''An Essay Concerning Human Understanding'': The third Branch may be called [''simeiotikí'', "semiotics"], or the Doctrine of Signs, the most usual whereof being words, it is aptly enough ter ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Pragmatics
In linguistics and related fields, pragmatics is the study of how context contributes to meaning. The field of study evaluates how human language is utilized in social interactions, as well as the relationship between the interpreter and the interpreted. Linguists who specialize in pragmatics are called pragmaticians. Pragmatics encompasses phenomena including implicature, speech acts, relevance and conversation,Mey, Jacob L. (1993) ''Pragmatics: An Introduction''. Oxford: Blackwell (2nd ed. 2001). as well as nonverbal communication. Theories of pragmatics go hand-in-hand with theories of semantics, which studies aspects of meaning, and syntax which examines sentence structures, principles, and relationships. The ability to understand another speaker's intended meaning is called ''pragmatic competence''. Pragmatics emerged as its own subfield in the 1950s after the pioneering work of J.L. Austin and Paul Grice. Origin of the field Pragmatics was a reaction to structuralist l ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Laurence Horn
Laurence Robert Horn (born 1945) is an American linguist. He is Professor Emeritus of Linguistics in the Department of Linguistics at Yale University with specialties in pragmatics and semantics. He received his doctorate in 1972 from UCLA and formerly served as Director of Undergraduate Studies, Director of Graduate Studies, and Chair of the Yale Department of Linguistics. In 2021, he served as President of the Linguistic Society of America. Horn's primary research program lies in classical logic, lexical semantics, and neo- Gricean pragmatic theory. He mainly focused on the exploration of natural language negation and its relation to other operators. His work in pragmatics, in particular his innovation in the theory of scalar implicature, is widely influential. He is one of the group known as ''radical pragmaticists'' in the 1970s (along with Jerrold Sadock and others) and is a veteran of the linguistics wars over generative semantics. The Horn scales are named after him (a pr ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Robyn Carston
Robyn Anne Carston, is a linguist and academic, who specialises in pragmatics, semantics, and the philosophy of language. Since 2005, she has been Professor of Linguistics at University College London. Early life and education Carston was born in New Zealand. She studied English literature at the University of Canterbury, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts (BA) 1975. She then studied for an honours degree in linguistics at Victoria University of Wellington, graduating with a BA (Hons) degree in 1976. She moved to England to study at University College London (UCL), graduating with a Master of Arts (MA) with Distinction in Phonetics and Linguistics in 1980. She remained at UCL to undertake postgraduate research under the supervision of Deirdre Wilson. and got her first job as a lecturer there in 1983. She completed her Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) degree in 1994. Her doctoral thesis was titled "Pragmatics and the explicit/implicit distinction". Academic career Carston has taug ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Intrinsic And Extrinsic Properties (philosophy)
An intrinsic property is a property that an object or a thing has of itself, including its context. An extrinsic (or relational) property is a property that depends on a thing's relationship with other things. For example, mass is an intrinsic property of any physical object, whereas weight is an extrinsic property that varies depending on the strength of the gravitational field in which the respective object is placed. The question of intrinsicality and extrinsicality in empirically observable objects is a significant field of study in ontology, the branch of philosophy concerned with explaining the fundamental nature of being. Criteria David Lewis offered a list of criteria that should condense the distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic properties (numbers and italics added): # A sentence or statement or proposition that ascribes intrinsic properties to something is entirely ''about that thing''; whereas an ascription of extrinsic properties to something is not entirely abo ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Implicate And Explicate Order
Implicate order and explicate order are ontological concepts for quantum theory coined by theoretical physicist David Bohm during the early 1980s. They are used to describe two different frameworks for understanding the same phenomenon or aspect of reality. In particular, the concepts were developed in order to explain the bizarre behaviors of subatomic particles which quantum physics describes and predicts with elegant precision but struggles to explain. In Bohm's '' Wholeness and the Implicate Order'', he used these notions to describe how the appearance of such phenomena might appear differently, or might be characterized by, varying principal factors, depending on contexts such as scales.David Bohm: ''Wholeness and the Implicate Order'', Routledge, 1980 (). The implicate (also referred to as the "enfolded") order is seen as a deeper and more fundamental order of reality. In contrast, the explicate or "unfolded" order includes the abstractions that humans normally perceive. As h ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Subtrigging
In formal semantics (natural language), formal semantics, subtrigging is the phenomenon whereby free choice items in episodic sentences require a modifier. For instance, the following sentence is not acceptable in English language, English. # *Any student signed the petition. However, the sentence can be repaired by adding a post-nominal modifier such as a relative clause, prepositional phrase, or locative. # Any student who went to the meeting signed the petition. (RC) # Any student at the meeting signed the petition. (PP) # Any student there. (locative) See also * Free choice inference * Linguistic modality * Negative polarity item Notes Semantics Formal semantics (natural language) {{semantics-stub ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Speech Act
In the philosophy of language and linguistics, speech act is something expressed by an individual that not only presents information but performs an action as well. For example, the phrase "I would like the kimchi; could you please pass it to me?" is considered a speech act as it expresses the speaker's desire to acquire the kimchi, as well as presenting a request that someone pass the kimchi to them. According to Kent Bach, "almost any speech act is really the performance of several acts at once, distinguished by different aspects of the speaker's intention: there is the act of saying something, what one does in saying it, such as requesting or promising, and how one is trying to affect one's audience". The contemporary use of the term goes back to J. L. Austin's development of performative utterances and his theory of locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary acts. Speech acts serve their function once they are said or communicated. These are commonly taken to include acts s ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Entailment (pragmatics)
Linguistic entailments are entailments which arise in natural language. If a sentence ''A'' entails a sentence ''B'', sentence ''A'' cannot be true without ''B'' being true as well. For instance, the English sentence "Pat is a fluffy cat" entails the sentence "Pat is a cat" since one cannot be a fluffy cat without being a cat. On the other hand, this sentence does not entail "Pat chases mice" since it is possible (if unlikely) for a cat to not chase mice. Entailments arise from the semantics of linguistic expressions. Entailment contrasts with the pragmatic notion of implicature. While implicatures are fallible inferences, entailments are enforced by lexical meanings plus the laws of logic. Entailments also differ from presuppositions, whose truth is taken for granted. The classic example of a presupposition is the existence presupposition which arises from definite descriptions. For instance, the sentence "The king of France is bald" presupposes that there is a king of France. Unl ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Downward Entailing
In linguistic semantics, a downward entailing (DE) propositional operator is one that constrains the meaning of an expression to a lower number or degree than would be possible without the expression. For example, "not," "nobody," "few people," "at most two boys." Conversely, an upward-entailing operator constrains the meaning of an expression to a higher number or degree, for example "more than one." A context that is neither downward nor upward entailing is ''non-monotone'', such as "exactly five." A downward-entailing operator reverses the relation of ''semantic strength'' among expressions. An expression like "run fast" is semantically ''stronger'' than the expression "run" since "John ran fast" entails "John ran," but not conversely. But a downward-entailing context reverses this strength; for example, the proposition "At most two boys ran" entails that "At most two boys ran fast" but not the other way around. An upward-entailing operator preserves the relation of semantic st ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
