Subjectivity and Perspective in Truth-Theoretic Semantics

Peter Lasersohn is Professor of Linguistics and Philosophy at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He completed his Ph.D. in Linguistics at Ohio State University in 1988, and taught at the University of Texas at Austin, the University of California at Santa Cruz, and the University of Rochester before his appointment at Illinois in 1996. He is the author of two previous books, A Semantics for Groups and Events (Garland, 1990), and Plurality, Conjunction and Events (Kluwer, 1995); and of shorter articles in journals including Language, Linguistics and Philosophy, Linguistic Inquiry, Journal of Semantics, Natural Language Semantics, Synthese, and Inquiry.

• Preface List of abbreviations 1: Subjectivity, disagreement, and content 2: Dismissing the easy alternatives 3: Setting the syntactic and semantic stage 4: Notes on the grammar of time and space 5: Basic relativist semantics 6: "Hidden" and "disguised" elements 7: Pragmatics of truth assessment 8: Attitude predicates in relativist semantics 9: Assertion and other speech acts 10: Between fact and opinion 11: Reliability, imagination, and the functional motivation for relativism References Index

this monograph represents a welcome contribution to the study of sentences concerning matters of opinion within the framework of logical semantics. As a result, it will be particularly appealing to specialists in formal linguistics and, more generally, scholars who are interested in the study of linguistic expressions of subjectivity.