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  1. (6 other versions)Logic and Conversation.H. Paul Grice - 1975 - In Donald Davidson (ed.), The logic of grammar. Encino, Calif.: Dickenson Pub. Co.. pp. 64-75.
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  • (4 other versions)Meaning.S. R. Schiffer - 1973 - Tijdschrift Voor Filosofie 35 (3):669-671.
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  • (1 other version)Scorekeeping in a Language Game.David Lewis - 1979 - Journal of Philosophical Logic 8 (3):339.
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  • (2 other versions)Truth and Other Enigmas.Michael Dummett - 1978 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 32 (4):419-425.
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  • (1 other version)Evolution of the Social Contract.Brian Skyrms - 1999 - Philosophical and Phenomenological Research 59 (1):229-236.
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  • Language, Thought, and Other Biological Categories.Ruth Garrett Millikan - 1984 - Behaviorism 14 (1):51-56.
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  • Color, context, and compositionality.Christopher Kennedy & Louise Mcnally - 2010 - Synthese 174 (1):79-98.
    Color adjectives have played a central role in work on language typology and variation, but there has been relatively little investigation of their meanings by researchers in formal semantics. This is surprising given the fact that color terms have been at the center of debates in the philosophy of language over foundational questions, in particular whether the idea of a compositional, truth-conditional theory of natural language semantics is even coherent. The challenge presented by color terms is articulated in detail in (...)
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  • (1 other version)Literal Meaning.François Récanati - 2002 - New York: Cambridge University Press.
    According to the dominant position among philosophers of language today, we can legitimately ascribe determinate contents to natural language sentences, independently of what the speaker actually means. This view contrasts with that held by ordinary language philosophers fifty years ago: according to them, speech acts, not sentences, are the primary bearers of content. François Recanati argues for the relevance of this controversy to the current debate about semantics and pragmatics. Is 'what is said' determined by linguistic conventions, or is it (...)
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  • Coordination, Triangulation, and Language Use.Josh Armstrong - 2016 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 59 (1):80-112.
    In this paper, I explore two contrasting conceptions of the social character of language. The first takes language to be grounded in social convention. The second, famously developed by Donald Davidson, takes language to be grounded in a social relation called triangulation. I aim both to clarify and to evaluate these two conceptions of language. First, I propose that Davidson’s triangulation-based story can be understood as the result of relaxing core features of conventionalism pertaining to both common-interest and diachronic stability—specifically, (...)
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  • The Interactive Stance: Meaning for Conversation.Jonathan Ginzburg - 2012 - Oxford University Press UK.
    This book presents one of the first attempts at developing a precise, grammatically rooted, theory of conversation motivated by data from real conversations. The theory has descriptive reach from the micro-conversational - e.g. self-repair at the word level - to macro-level phenomena such as multi-party conversation and the characterization of distinct conversational genres. It draws on extensive corpus studies of the British National Corpus, on evidence from language acquisition, and on computer simulations of language evolution. The theory provides accounts of (...)
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  • (1 other version)Foundations of Language: Brain, Meaning, Grammar, Evolution.Ray Jackendoff - 2002 - Oxford University Press UK.
    Presenting a landmark in linguistics and cognitive science, Ray Jackendoff proposes a new holistic theory of the relation between the sounds, structure, and meaning of language and their relation to mind and brain. Foundations of Language exhibits the most fundamental new thinking in linguistics since Noam Chomsky's Aspects of the Theory of Syntax in 1965—yet is readable, stylish, and accessible to a wide readership. Along the way it provides new insights on the evolution of language, thought, and communication.
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  • (1 other version)Foundations of Language: Brain, Meaning, Grammar, Evolution.Ray Jackendoff - 2002 - Oxford University Press UK.
    Already hailed as a masterpiece, Foundations of Language offers a brilliant overhaul of the last thirty-five years of research in generative linguistics and related fields. "Few books really deserve the cliché 'this should be read by every researcher in the field'," writes Steven Pinker, author of The Language Instinct, "but Ray Jackendoff's Foundations of Language does." Foundations of Language offers a radically new understanding of how language, the brain, and perception intermesh. The book renews the promise of early generative linguistics: (...)
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  • Semantics and Context-Dependence: Towards a Strawsonian Account.Richard Heck - 2014 - In Alexis Burgess & Brett Sherman (eds.), Metasemantics: New Essays on the Foundations of Meaning. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 327-364.
    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 (...)
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  • The Metasemantics of Contextual Sensitivity.Jeffrey C. King - 2014 - In Alexis Burgess & Brett Sherman (eds.), Metasemantics: New Essays on the Foundations of Meaning. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 97-118.
    Some contextually sensitive expressions are such that their context independent conventional meanings need to be in some way supplemented in context for the expressions to secure semantic values in those contexts. As we’ll see, it is not clear that there is a paradigm here, but ‘he’ used demonstratively is a clear example of such an expression. Call expressions of this sort supplementives in order to highlight the fact that their context independent meanings need to be supplemented in context for them (...)
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  • The gap between meaning and assertion: Why what we literally say often differs from what our words literally mean.Scott Soames - 2008 - In Philosophical Essays, Volume 1: Natural Language: What It Means and How We Use It. Princeton University Press. pp. 278-297.
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  • Thoughts and Utterances: The Pragmatics of Explicit Communication.Robyn Carston (ed.) - 2002 - Oxford: Blackwell.
    _Thoughts and Utterances_ is the first sustained investigation of two distinctions which are fundamental to all theories of utterance understanding: the semantics/pragmatics distinction and the distinction between what is explicitly communicated and what is implicitly communicated.
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  • (1 other version)Speech Acts.J. Searle - 1969 - Foundations of Language 11 (3):433-446.
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  • Meaning, Creativity, and the Partial Inscrutability of the Human Mind.Julius M. Moravcsik - 1998 - Stanford: Center for the Study of Language and Inf.
    In this book, Julius M. Moravcsik disputes that a natural language is not and should not be represented as a formal language. The book criticizes current philosophy of language as having an altered focus without adjusting the needed conceptual tools. It develops a new theory of lexical meaning, a new conception of cognition-humans not as information processing creatures but as primarily explanation and understanding seeking creatures-with information processing as a secondary, derivative activity. In conclusion, based on the theories of lexical (...)
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  • Living Words: Meaning Underdetermination and the Dynamic Lexicon.Peter Ludlow - 2014 - Oxford, GB: Oxford University Press.
    Peter Ludlow shows how word meanings are much more dynamic than we might have supposed, and explores how they are modulated even during everyday conversation. The resulting view is radical, and has far-reaching consequences for our political and legal discourse, and for enduring puzzles in the foundations of semantics, epistemology, and logic.
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  • (1 other version)Pragmatism and Binding.Stephen Neale - 2004 - In Zoltan Gendler Szabo (ed.), Semantics Versus Pragmatics. Oxford, GB: Oxford University Press UK. pp. 165-285.
    Names, descriptions, and demonstratives raise well-known logical, ontological, and epistemological problems. Perhaps less well known, amongst philosophers at least, are the ways in which some of these problems not only recur with pronouns but also cross-cut further problems exposed by the study in generative linguistics of morpho-syntactic constraints on interpretation. These problems will be my primary concern here, but I want to address them within a general picture of interpretation that is required if wires are not to be crossed. That (...)
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  • (1 other version)The faculty of language: what's special about it?Steven Pinker & Ray Jackendoff - 2005 - Cognition 95 (2):201-236.
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  • On Social Facts.Margaret Gilbert - 1989 - Routledge.
    This book offers original accounts of a number of central social phenomena, many of which have received little if any prior philosophical attention. These phenomena include social groups, group languages, acting together, collective belief, mutual recognition, and social convention. In the course of developing her analyses Gilbert discusses the work of Emile Durkheim, Georg Simmel, Max Weber, David Lewis, among others.
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  • A theory of truth and semantic representation, 277-322, JAG Groenendijk, TMV Janssen and MBJ Stokhof, eds.H. Kamp - 1981 - In Jeroen A. G. Groenendijk (ed.), Formal methods in the study of language. U of Amsterdam.
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  • Pursuing Meaning.Emma Borg - 2012 - Oxford, GB: Oxford University Press.
    Emma Borg examines the relation between semantics and pragmatics, and assesses recent answers to fundamental questions of how and where to draw the divide between the two. She argues for a minimal account of the interrelation between them--a 'minimal semantics'--which holds that only rule-governed appeals to context can influence semantic content.
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  • Saying what you mean in dialogue: A study in conceptual and semantic co-ordination.Simon Garrod & Anthony Anderson - 1987 - Cognition 27 (2):181-218.
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  • Speaker Intentions in Context.Jeffrey C. King - 2012 - Noûs 48 (2):219-237.
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  • Truth-Conditional Pragmatics.François Recanati - 2010 - Oxford, GB: Oxford University Press.
    This book argues against the traditional understanding of the semantics/pragmatics divide and puts forward a radical alternative. Through half a dozen case studies, it shows that what an utterance says cannot be neatly separated from what the speaker means. In particular, the speaker's meaning endows words with senses that are tailored to the situation of utterance and depart from the conventional meanings carried by the words in isolation. This phenomenon of ‘pragmatic modulation’ must be taken into account in theorizing about (...)
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  • On What Is Strictly Speaking True.Charles Travis - 1985 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 15 (2):187 - 229.
    Let us begin with a piece of intellectual history. The story begins in a period encapsulating the second world war – say the ‘40’s, give and take a bit. Around then, it began to be argued with force that an expression – e.g., an English one – while it well might mean something, does not say anything, and notably no one thing in particular. The principal behind the argument was surely J.L. Austin, though, I would claim, the same point was (...)
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  • Hard Words.Lila R. Gleitman, Anna Papafragou & John C. Trueswell - unknown
    How do children acquire the meaning of words? And why are words such as know harder for learners to acquire than words such as dog or jump? We suggest that the chief limiting factor in acquiring the vocabulary of natural languages consists not in overcoming conceptual difficulties with abstract word meanings but rather in mapping these meanings onto their corresponding lexical forms. This opening premise of our position, while controversial, is shared with some prior approaches. The present discussion moves forward (...)
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  • (1 other version)Assertion.Robert Stalnaker - 1978 - Syntax and Semantics (New York Academic Press) 9:315-332.
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  • A Theory of Truth and Semantic Representation.Hans Kamp - 2002 - In Paul H. Portner & Barbara H. Partee (eds.), Formal Semantics - the Essential Readings. Blackwell. pp. 189--222.
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  • A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs.Donald Davidson - 1986 - In Ernest LePore (ed.), Truth and Interpretation: Perspectives on the Philosophy of Donald Davidson. Cambridge: Blackwell. pp. 433--446.
    This essay argues that in linguistic communication, nothing corresponds to a linguistic competence as summarized by the three principles of first meaning in language: that first meaning is systematic, first meanings are shared, and first meanings are governed by learned conventions or regularities. There is no such a thing as a language, not if a language is anything like what many philosophers and linguists have supposed. We must give up the idea of a clearly defined shared structure which language users (...)
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  • The Pragmatics of What is Said.François Recanati - 1989 - Mind and Language 4 (4):295-329.
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  • (1 other version)The Causal Theory of Names.Gareth Evans - 1973 - Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 47 (1):187–208.
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  • Against Metaphorical Meaning.Ernest Lepore & Matthew Stone - 2010 - Topoi 29 (2):165-180.
    The commonplace view about metaphorical interpretation is that it can be characterized in traditional semantic and pragmatic terms, thereby assimilating metaphor to other familiar uses of language. We will reject this view, and propose in its place the view that, though metaphors can issue in distinctive cognitive and discourse effects, they do so without issuing in metaphorical meaning and truth, and so, without metaphorical communication. Our inspiration derives from Donald Davidson’s critical arguments against metaphorical meaning and Richard Rorty’s exploration of (...)
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  • Demonstratives: An Essay on the Semantics, Logic, Metaphysics and Epistemology of Demonstratives and other Indexicals.David Kaplan - 1989 - In Joseph Almog, John Perry & Howard Wettstein (eds.), Themes From Kaplan. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 481-563.
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  • (1 other version)Languages and language.David K. Lewis - 2010 - In Darragh Byrne & Max Kölbel (eds.), Arguing about language. New York: Routledge. pp. 3-35.
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  • (2 other versions)Speaker's reference and semantic reference.Saul A. Kripke - 1977 - In Peter A. French, Theodore Edward Uehling & Howard K. Wettstein (eds.), Studies in the philosophy of language. Morris: University of Minnesota, Morris. pp. 255-296.
    am going to discuss some issues inspired by a well-known paper ofKeith Donnellan, "Reference and Definite Descriptions,”2 but the interest—to me—of the contrast mentioned in my title goes beyond Donnellan's paper: I think it is of considerable constructive as well as critical importance to the philosophy oflanguage. These applications, however, and even everything I might want to say relative to Donnellan’s paper, cannot be discussed in full here because of problems of length. Moreover, although I have a considerable interest in (...)
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  • (1 other version)Meaning, expression, and thought.Wayne A. Davis - 2003 - New York: Cambridge University Press.
    This philosophical treatise on the foundations of semantics is a systematic effort to clarify, deepen, and defend the classical doctrine that words are conventional signs of mental states, principally thoughts and ideas, and that meaning consists in their expression. This expression theory of meaning is developed by carrying out the Gricean program, explaining what it is for words to have meaning in terms of speaker meaning, and what it is for a speaker to mean something in terms of intention. But (...)
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  • Minimal semantics.Emma Borg - 2004 - New York: Oxford University Press.
    Minimal Semantics asks what a theory of literal linguistic meaning is for - if you were to be given a working theory of meaning for a language right now, what would you be able to do with it? Emma Borg sets out to defend a formal approach to semantic theorising from a relatively new type of opponent - advocates of what she call 'dual pragmatics'. According to dual pragmatists, rich pragmatic processes play two distinct roles in linguistic comprehension: as well (...)
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  • Dynamic Montague grammar.Martin Stokhof - 1990 - In L. Kalman (ed.), Proceedings of the Second Symposion on Logic and Language, Budapest, Eotvos Lorand University Press, 1990, pp. 3-48. Budapest: Eotvos Lorand University Press. pp. 3-48.
    In Groenendijk & Stokhof [1989] a system of dynamic predicate logic (DPL) was developed, as a compositional alternative for classical discourse representation theory (DRT ). DPL shares with DRT the restriction of being a first-order system. In the present paper, we are mainly concerned with overcoming this limitation. We shall define a dynamic semantics for a typed language with λ-abstraction which is compatible with the semantics DPL specifies for the language of first-order predicate logic. We shall propose to use this (...)
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  • (1 other version)The faculty of language: what's special about it?Ray Jackendoff & Steven Pinker - 2005 - Cognition 95 (2):201-236.
    We examine the question of which aspects of language are uniquely human and uniquely linguistic in light of recent suggestions by Hauser, Chomsky, and Fitch that the only such aspect is syntactic recursion, the rest of language being either specific to humans but not to language (e.g. words and concepts) or not specific to humans (e.g. speech perception). We find the hypothesis problematic. It ignores the many aspects of grammar that are not recursive, such as phonology, morphology, case, agreement, and (...)
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  • Minding the gap.Kent Bach - 2004 - In Claudia Bianchi (ed.), the semantics/pragmatics distinction. CSLI. pp. 27--43.
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  • (1 other version)Literal meaning.John Searle - 1978 - Erkenntnis 13 (1):207 - 224.
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  • Communication and convention.Donald Davidson - 1984 - Synthese 59 (1):3 - 17.
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  • Common ground.Robert Stalnaker - 2002 - Linguistics and Philosophy 25 (5-6):701-721.
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  • (1 other version)Context and logical form.Jason Stanley - 2000 - Linguistics and Philosophy 23 (4):391--434.
    In this paper, I defend the thesis that alleffects of extra-linguistic context on thetruth-conditions of an assertion are traceable toelements in the actual syntactic structure of thesentence uttered. In the first section, I develop thethesis in detail, and discuss its implications for therelation between semantics and pragmatics. The nexttwo sections are devoted to apparent counterexamples.In the second section, I argue that there are noconvincing examples of true non-sentential assertions.In the third section, I argue that there are noconvincing examples of what (...)
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  • Actual-language relations.Stephen Schiffer - 1993 - Philosophical Perspectives 7:231-258.
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  • What malapropisms mean: A reply to Donald Davidson.Marga Reimer - 2004 - Erkenntnis 60 (3):317-334.
    In this paper, I argue against Davidson's (1986) view that our ability to understand malapropisms forces us to re-think the standard construal of literal word meaning as conventional meaning. Specially, I contend that the standard construal is not only intuitive but also well-motivated, for appeal to conventional meaning is necessary to understand why speakers utter the particular words they do. I also contend that, contra Davidson, we can preserve the intuitive distinction between what a speaker means and what his words (...)
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  • The non-uniqueness of semantic solutions: Polysemy. [REVIEW]Geoffrey Nunberg - 1979 - Linguistics and Philosophy 3 (2):143 - 184.
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