Meaning - Birner, Betty J.

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Résumé :

List of boxes

List of figures

List of truth tables

Preface

Acknowledgments

1. What is language?

Linguistics

The rules of language

Language change

Research in linguistics

Philosophy of language: How meaning works

Types of meaning

Where is meaning located?

The philosophers weigh in, beginning with: Frege

Russell

Strawson

Donnellan

The upshot

Semantics and pragmatics

Discourse models and possible worlds

Exercises

2. Semantics I: Word meaning

What is a word?

Where words come from

Historical descent

Other sources of new words

Lexical relations

Approaches to word meaning

Componential analysis

Other primitive-based approaches

Prototype theory and The Great Sandwich Controversy

Exercises

3. Semantics II: Sentence meaning

Truth and meaning

Sentential relations

Logical operators

Negation

Conjunction

Disjunction

The conditional

The biconditional

Propositional logic

Analytic statements

Synthetic statements

Predicate logic

Predicates and constants

Variables

Quantifiers

Ambiguity and scope

Exercises

4. Pragmatics I: The Cooperative Principle

Reprise: Semantics vs. pragmatics

The Cooperative Principle

The maxims

The maxim of Quantity

The maxim of Quality

The maxim of Relation

The maxim of Manner

Revisiting Grice's problem

Tests for conversational implicature

Implicature and pragmatic theory

Conventional implicature

The Gricean world view

Pragmatics after Grice

Explicature

Impliciture

Neo-Gricean theory

Relevance theory

Boundary disputes

Exercises

5. Pragmatics II: Speech acts

Speech acts

Performatives

Constatives

Types of speech acts: first pass

Indirect speech acts

Felicity conditions

Felicity conditions, speech acts, and the Cooperative Principle

Types of speech acts: second pass

Politeness theory

Exercises

6. Language structure

The Chomskyan revolution

Sound structure

Word structure

Morphemes

Allomorphs

Words

Parts of speech

Structure and function

Representing word structure

Other ways of building words

Sentence structure

Ambiguity and constituency

Representing sentence structure

Expanding our grammar

Structural ambiguity

So what's the point?

Exercises

7. Interfaces I: Semantics, pragmatics, and philosophy

Reference and the semantics/pragmatics boundary

What do we refer to when we refer?

Deixis and anaphora

Indexicals

Deixis

Personal deixis

Spatial deixis

Temporal deixis

Discourse deixis

Anaphora

Reference resolution

Cataphora

Anaphora and phrase types

Definiteness

Definiteness as uniqueness

Definiteness as familiarity

Presupposition

Testing for presupposition

Presupposition triggers

Theories of presupposition

Accommodation

Exercises

8. Interfaces II: Structure and meaning

Semantic roles

Argument-structure alternations

Information structure

Biographie:

Betty J. Birner is a professor of Linguistics and Cognitive Science in the Department of English at Northern Illinois University, DeKalb, IL. She received her Ph.D. in 1992 from Northwestern University, and has written extensively on pragmatics, the semantics/pragmatics interface, and information structure.