Context and Coherence

The Logic and Grammar of Prominence

Inbunden, Engelska, 2021

AvUna Stojnić,Princeton University) Stojnic, Una (Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Assistant Professor of Philosophy,Stojnic,STOJNIC

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Natural languages are riddled with context-sensitivity. One and the same string of words can express many different meanings on occasion of use, and yet we understand one another effortlessly, on the fly. How do we do so? What fixes the meaning of context-sensitive expressions, and how are we able to recover the meaning so effortlessly? This book offers a novel response: we can do so because we draw on a broad array of subtle linguistic conventions that determine the interpretation of context-sensitive items. Contrary to the dominant tradition, which maintains that the meaning of context-sensitive language is underspecified by grammar and that interpretation relies on non-linguistic cues and speakers' intentions, this book argues that meaning is determined entirely by discourse conventions, rules of language that have largely been missed and the effects of which have been mistaken for extra-linguistic effects of an utterance situation on meaning. The linguistic account of context developed here sheds a new light on the nature of linguistic content and the interaction between content and context. At the same time, it provides a novel model of context that should constrain and help evaluate debates across many subfields of philosophy where appeal to context has been common, often leading to surprising conclusions such as epistemology, ethics, value theory, metaphysics, metaethics, and logic.

Produktinformation

Utgivningsdatum2021-02-25
Mått163 x 240 x 12 mm
Vikt484 g
FormatInbunden
SpråkEngelska
Antal sidor240
FörlagOUP OXFORD
ISBN9780198865469

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Una Stojnić is an assistant professor of philosophy in the Department of Philosophy, Princeton University. Prior to joining Princeton, she was an assistant professor in the Department of Philosophy at Columbia University, a Bersoff assistant professor and faculty fellow in Philosophy at NYU, and a research fellow in philosophy in the School of Philosophy at ANU. She earned her PhD in Philosophy and a Certificate in Cognitive Science from Rutgers University in 2016.

1: IntroductionPart I: So, What is Context and How Does it Work?2: The Model of a True Demonstrative: Extra-linguistic Effects on Situated Meaning3: An Alleged Ambiguity and the Dynamics of Context Change4: Pointing Things Out: Prominence and the Attentional State of a Discourse5: Context and Discourse Conventions6: Interlude: Context and Common GroundPart II: Contextualizing Content7: Content in Context8: The Challenge: Non-propositionalism9: Dynamic PropositionalismPart III: The Logic of Prominence10: Content, Context and Logic11: Prominence Semantics for ModalityPart IV: Conclusions and Directions12: The Grammar of ProminencePart V: AppendicesAppendix A: Formal Definitions for the Attention-Coherence Approach to Pronoun ResolutionAppendix B: A Formal Language for Modality with Coherence

Context and Coherence exhibits the virtues of good writing in philosophy. Pragmaticians in particular will learn a great deal of formal semantics and will be pressed to ponder deep issues in philosophy of language and philosophical logic. They'll also learn, more concretely, lots of new lessons about how some kinds of pronoun resolution happen and relatedly, about unnoticed conventions governing discourse prominence.