A remarkable thing about natural language is that we can use it to share our beliefs and thoughts about the world with other speakers of our language. In cases of successful communication, beliefs seem to be transferred from speakers to hearers by means of the hearer recovering the contents of the speaker’s utterances. This is so natural to us that we take it for granted in our everyday life, and rarely stop to think about how it's is possible. Nevertheless, it's (...) a phenomenon that calls for explanation. It is natural to expect that natural language semantics has a key explanatory role to play here. In order to understand this role, we must relate the semantic values assigned to sentences by semantic theory with the content of our speech acts. The simplest possible relation would be identity; the meaning of a sentence is simply the belief expressed by an assertion of the sentence in a given context of utterance. However, a number of problem cases in the literature suggest that this cannot be the case. This dissertation offers a critical assessment of the arguments for distinguishing the semantic value of a sentence from it's so called assertoric content, focusing on problems arising from the analysis of tense and temporal expressions. I conclude that they are indeed distinct, and offer a constructive account of how they must be related in order to allow for an explanation of communicative success. (shrink)

Linguistic expressions frequently make reference to the situation in which they are uttered. In fact, there are expressions whose whole point of use is to relate to their context of utterance. It is such expressions that this article is primarily about. However, rather than presenting the richness of pertinent phenomena (cf. Anderson & Keenan 1985), it concentrates on the theoretical tools provided by the (standard) two-dimensional analysis of context dependence, essentially originating with Kaplan (1989)--with a little help from Stalnaker (1978) (...) and Lewis (1979a, 1980), and various predecessors including Kamp (1971) and Vlach (1973). The current article overlaps in content with the account in Zimmermann (1991), which is however much broader (and at times deeper).. (shrink)

All sorts of things are context-dependent in one way or another. What it is appropriate to wear, to give, or to reveal depends on the context. Whether or not it is all right to lie, harm, or even kill depends on the context. If you google the phrase ‘depends on the context’, you’ll get several hundred million results. This chapter aims to narrow that down. In this context the topic is context dependence in language and its use. It is commonly (...) observed that the same sentence can be used to convey different things in different contexts. That is why people complain when something they say is ‘taken out of context’ and insist that it be ‘put into context’, because ‘context makes it clear’ what they meant. Indeed, it is practically a platitude that what a speaker means in uttering a certain sentence, as well as how her audience understands her, ‘depends on the context’. But just what does that amount to, and to what extent is it true? (shrink)

A number of distinct (though related) issues are raised in the debate over Contextualism in the philosophy of language. My aim in this chapter for the Cambridge Handbook of Pragmatics is to disentangle them, so as to get a clearer view of the positions available (where a 'position' consists of a particular take on each of the relevant issues simultaneously).

This paper considers a now familiar argument that the ubiquity of context -dependence threatens the project of natural language semantics, at least as that project has usually been conceived: as concerning itself with `what is said' by an utterance of a given sentence. I argue in response that the `anti-semantic' argument equivocates at a crucial point and, therefore, that we need not choose between semantic minimalism, truth-conditional pragmatism, and the like. Rather, we must abandon the idea, familiar from Kaplan and (...) others, that utterances express propositions `relative to contexts' and replace it with the Strawonian idea that speakers express propositions by making utterances in contexts. The argument for this claim consists in a detailed investigation of the particular case of demonstratives, which I argue demand such a Strawsonian treatment. I then respond to several objections, the most important of which allege that the Strawsonian account somehow undermines the project of natural language semantics, or threatens the semantics -pragmatics distinction. Please note that the paper posted here is an extended version of what was published. (shrink)

Segundo a tese minimalista, todo efeito contextual sobre a avaliação de uma dada sentença resulta ou bem de uma variação nos parâmetros contextuais selecionados por morfemas indexicais, ou bem de uma mu- dança nas circunstâncias de avaliação. O contextualismo coloca dois tipos de desafio a esta tese. Por um lado, em pelo menos alguns casos, diferentes ocorrências de uma mesma sentença parecem ter avaliações divergentes que não podem ser explicadas pela tese minimalista. Por outro, parece haver asserções que são avaliadas (...) relativamente a parâ- metros que não são selecionados pelos morfemas utilizados pelo falan- te. As motivações contextualistas não se limitam a estes desafios. Uma motivação positiva é a associação de diferentes esquemas conceituais a um mesmo lexema. Outra motivação reside na dimensão implícita do pensamento e da ação, o que se traduz em elementos não articulados de asserções. Em ambos os casos, o contexto desempenha um papel na determinação da proposição expressa. (shrink)

In this paper I discuss the idea of a semantic code in the contemporary debate between contextualism and minimalism. First, I identify historical sources of these positions in Grice’s pragmatics and in Davidson’s theory of meaning in order to sketch the role of a semantic code there. Then I argue that contextualism is committed to the idea of an ad hoc code, while minimalism involves a persistent code. However, the latter approach to a code requires disambiguation which must be carried (...) out in the early stages of speech act processing. I raise a concern that primary pragmatic processes may be active here, especially in the case of disambiguating polysemous expressions, which could be problematic or even devastating for the minimalist program. At the end I evaluate a possible minimalist way out by examining the minimalist account of metaphor, which lies at the root of polysemy. If a code robust enough to deal with polysemy could be created, minimalist conceptions would present a new impetus to understand language as a code. Without such a code, very little would be left of the notion of a persistent code and hence of minimalism itself. (shrink)

Words have meaning. Sentences also have meaning, but their meaning is different in kind from any collection of the meanings of the words they contain. I discuss two puzzles related to this difference. The first is how the meanings of the parts of a sentence combine to give rise to a unified sentential meaning, as opposed to a mere collection of disparate meanings (UP1). The second is why the formal ontology of linguistic meaning changes when grammatical structure is built up (...) (UP2). For example, the meaning of a sentence is a proposition evaluable for truth and falsity. In contrast, a collection of the meanings of its parts does not constitute a proposition and is not evaluable for truth. These two puzzles are closely related, since change in formal ontology is the clearest sign of the unity of meaning. The most popular strategy for answering them is taking the meanings of the parts as abstractions from primitive sentence meanings. However, I argue that, given plausible psychological constraints, sentence meanings cannot be taken as explanatory primitives. Drawing on recent work in Generative Grammar and its philosophy, I suggest that the key to both unity questions is to distinguish strictly between lexical and grammatical meaning. The latter is irreducible and determines how lexical content is used in referential acts. I argue that these referential properties determine a formal ontology, which explains why and how formal ontology changes when grammatical structure is built up (UP2). As for UP1, I suggest that, strictly speaking, lexical meanings never combine. Instead, whenever grammar specifies a formal ontology for the lexical meanings entering a grammatical derivation, further lexical (or phrasal) meanings can only specify aspects of this recursive grammatical process. In this way, contemporary grammatical theory can be used to address old philosophical problems. (shrink)

In this paper, I discuss how the principle of identifying knowledge which Strawson advances in ‘Singular Terms and Predication’ (1961), and in ‘Identifying Reference and Truth-Values’ (1964) turns out to constrain communication. The principle states that a speaker’s use of a referring expression should invoke identifying knowledge on the part of the hearer, if the hearer is to understand what the speaker is saying, and also that, in so referring, speakers are attentive to hearers’ epistemic states. In contrasting it with (...) Russell’s Principle (Evans 1982), as well as with the principle of identifying descriptions (Donnellan 1970), I try to show that the principle of identifying knowledge, ultimately a condition for understanding, makes sense only in a situation of conversation. This allows me to conclude that the cooperative feature of communication (Grice 1975) and reference (Clark andWilkes-Gibbs 1986) holds also at the understanding level. Finally, I discuss where Strawson’s views seem to be unsatisfactory, and suggest how they might be improved. (shrink)

The goal of this paper is to propose an account of the notion of semantic content. I will try to show that my account has some advantages over the existing accounts, and that, at the same time, it captures the most valuable insights behind both parties involved in the contextualism-minimalism debate. The proposed account of semantic content differs from the more traditional ones in that it puts more burden on the parameters of the point of evaluation, leaving very little in (...) the content itself. In particular, even in the case of indexical and demonstrative pronouns, the semantic content is, I suggest, stable across contexts, and does not include the reference of the pronoun. In a nutshell, the semantic content associated with (an utterance of) a sentence that contains one or more pronouns is a function that asks not only for a world and a time of evaluation, but also one or more individuals, before it can return a truth value. (shrink)

The received view about meteorological predicates like ‘rain' is that they carry an argument slot for a location which can be filled explicitly or implicitly. The view assumes that ‘rain', in the absence of an explicit location, demands that the context provide a specific location. In an earlier article, I have provided a counter-example to that claim, viz. a context in which ‘it is raining' receives a location-indefinite interpretation. On the basis of that example, I have argued that when there (...) is tacit reference to a location, it takes place for pragmatic reasons and casts no light on the semantics of meteorological predicates. But several authors have reanalysed the counter-example, so as to make it compatible with the standard view. I discuss those attempts, and argue that my account is better. Methodological considerations concerning the relations between pragmatics and logical form are offered along the way. (shrink)

In this paper, I will first try to provide a new argument in favour of the contextualist position on the semantics/pragmatics divide. I will argue that many puns, notably multi-stable ones, cannot be dealt with in the non-contextualist way, i.e., as displaying a phenomenon that effectively involves wide context, the concrete situation of discourse, yet only in a pre-, or at least inter-, semantic sense. For, insofar as they involve ambiguous utterances rather than ambiguous sentences, these puns show that the (...) wide context affecting them has a semantic role: it provides many truth-conditions for a single utterance. Moreover, I will try to show that the contextualist can provide a unitary account of the general phenomenon of puns. On the one hand, this account explains multi-stable puns as well as those puns the non-contextualist claims to deal with successfully, i.e., the ones involving a speaker-induced removal of a well-grounded misunderstanding. On the other hand, it also explains zeugmatic puns, i.e., those involving an ‘impossible’ meaning. (shrink)