Machery et al.’s 2004 x-phi project has been widely criticised for ambiguities contained in the expression ‘talk about’. Interestingly, although ‘about’ plays a prominent part in the debate, aboutness has not been a topic. This paper discusses this aspect. Alas, it must thereby add a further ambiguity to the list, the ambiguity between aboutness and reference, and thus also between subject matter and referent. It explains the distinction between intra-categorical aboutness which makes no ontological demands, and cross-categorical reference which requires (...) the referent to exist. It then analyses the 4-fold embedding contained in Machery et al.’s study and shows how the aboutness-reference distinction bears on it. (shrink)

The aim of the paper is to defend the view according to which all simple fictional sentences are meaningless. If their assertions seem to convey some truth evaluable information, and fictional sentences themselves seem to be true or false, it is because some pragmatic mechanisms are operative, enabling the expression of propositions not encoded in the semantic content of these sentences. According to some theorists, the mechanisms responsible for that process are the same as those responsible for generating conversational implicatures. (...) I argue against that claim and maintain that to comprehend the information conveyed by a fictional assertion, one must determine what kind of fictional assertion it is and only then apply the relevant interpretative rule adjusted to the fictional sentence used in that act. (shrink)

In this article we would like to examine an area of onomastics that has not received much scholarly attention. We aim to provide an adequate linguistic analysis of the place-names found in The Elder Scrolls (ES) video game series. For our analysis, we rely chiefly on the methods of linguistic statistics, which have not yet gained widespread use in onomastic research. Our goal is to give a boost to linguistic and onomastic research into video games and to develop related aspects (...) of its research methodology. Two main methods of place-name formation can be observed in our results: one is when the fictional names are coined on the basis of the lexical elements of already existing non-fictional languages (we call these mimetic names), and the other is when the game developers create so-called speaking names. In our article we demonstrate that the toponyms of the ES universe in part conform to the conventions of non-fictional place-name formation (e.g. they can be sorted into the two main categories of habitative names and topographical names), and in part they contradict such conventions, because around 14 percent of the names we analyzed are purposefully coined as semantically obscure toponyms, which does not happen in the case of non-fictional names. (shrink)

In this paper, we focus on some misconceptions about Critical Pragmatics, what it is, what it assumes and what it proposes. Doubtless, some of these misconceptions are due to clumsy writing on our part; perhaps others are due to inattentive reading. And some may be due to an effort to shield us from the apparent implausibility of what we said—and in fact meant. It does not matter much. We focus on those misunderstandings that most matter to us, either because, by (...) repetition, they have ended up being annoying, even if they are not, perhaps, that important; or because they are substantial enough to represent a distortion of the basic picture of Critical Pragmatics and its theoretical foundations, namely, Critical Referentialism—also known as the Reflexive-referential Theory—and, more generally, Perry’s fundamental views on meaning and content(s). (shrink)