17 found
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  1. Emojis as Pictures.Emar Maier - 2023 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 10.
    I argue that emojis are essentially little pictures, rather than words, gestures, expressives, or diagrams. ???? means that the world looks like that, from some viewpoint. I flesh out a pictorial semantics in terms of geometric projection with abstraction and stylization. Since such a semantics delivers only very minimal contents I add an account of pragmatic enrichment, driven by coherence and nonliteral interpretation. The apparent semantic distinction between emojis depicting entities (like ????) and those depicting facial expressions (like ????) I (...)
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  2. Extracting fictional truth from unreliable sources.Emar Maier & Merel Semeijn - 2021 - In Emar Maier & Andreas Stokke (eds.), The Language of Fiction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
    A fictional text is commonly viewed as constituting an invitation to play a certain game of make-believe, with the individual sentences written by the author providing the propositions we are to imagine and/or accept as true within the fiction. However, we can’t always take the text at face value. What narratologists call ‘unreliable narrators’ may present a confused or misleading picture of the fictional world. Meanwhile there has been a debate in philosophy about so-called ‘imaginative resistance’ in which we are (...)
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  3. Quotation and Unquotation in Free Indirect Discourse.Emar Maier - 2015 - Mind and Language 30 (3):345-373.
    I argue that free indirect discourse should be analyzed as a species of direct discourse rather than indirect discourse. More specifically, I argue against the emerging consensus among semanticists, who analyze it in terms of context shifting. Instead, I apply the semantic mechanisms of mixed quotation and unquotation to offer an alternative analysis where free indirect discourse is essentially a quotation of an utterance or thought, but with unquoted tenses and pronouns.
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  4. Fictional names in psychologistic semantics.Emar Maier - 2017 - Theoretical Linguistics 43 (1-2):1-46.
    Fictional names pose a difficult puzzle for semantics. We can truthfully maintain that Frodo is a hobbit, while at the same time admitting that Frodo does not exist. To reconcile this paradox I propose a way to formalize the interpretation of fiction as ‘prescriptions to imagine’ (Walton 1990) within an asymmetric semantic framework in the style of Kamp (1990). In my proposal, fictional statements are analyzed as dynamic updates on an imagination component of the interpreter’s mental state, while plain assertions (...)
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  5. Parasitic attitudes.Emar Maier - 2015 - Linguistics and Philosophy 38 (3):205-236.
    Karttunen observes that a presupposition triggered inside an attitude ascription, can be filtered out by a seemingly inaccessible antecedent under the scope of a preceding belief ascription. This poses a major challenge for presupposition theory and the semantics of attitude ascriptions. I solve the problem by enriching the semantics of attitude ascriptions with some independently argued assumptions on the structure and interpretation of mental states. In particular, I propose a DRT-based representation of mental states with a global belief-layer and a (...)
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  6. Shifting perspectives in pictorial narratives.Emar Maier & Sofia Bimpikou - 2018 - In Uli Sauerland & Stephanie Solt (eds.), Proceeding of Sinn und Bedeutung 23. Berlin, Germany: Leibniz-Centre General Linguistics (ZAS).
    We propose an extension of Discourse Respresentation Theory (DRT) for analyzing pictorial narratives. We test drive our PicDRT framework by analyzing the way authors represent characters’ mental states and perception in comics. Our investigation goes beyond Abusch and Rooth (2017) in handling not just free perception sequences, but also a form of apparent perspective blending somewhat reminiscent of free indirect discourse.
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  7. Unreliability and Point of View in Filmic Narration.Emar Maier - 2022 - Epistemology and Philosophy of Science 59 (2):23-37.
    Novels like Fight Club or American Psycho are said to be instances of unreliable narration: the first person narrator presents an evidently distorted picture of the fictional world. The film adaptations of these novels are likewise said to involve unreliable narration. I resist this extension of the term ‘unreliable narration’ to film. My argument for this rests on the observation that unreliable narration requires a personal narrator while film typically involves an impersonal narrator. The kind of ambiguous story-telling that we (...)
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  8.  88
    Reporting, telling, and showing dreams.Emar Maier - manuscript
    Dreams are not real, so when we recount them we prefix an intensional operator like “I dreamed that…”. Linguists will analyze this construction in terms of clausal complementation syntax and possible worlds semantics. But talking about a dream is often more like telling a story, with a potentially complex discourse structure (involving propositional discourse units connected by coherence relations like NARRATION, BACKGROUND, and EXPLANATION) that is hard to fit inside a single syntactically embedded that-clause (or a sequence of independently embedded (...)
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  9. Death on the Freeway: Imaginative resistance as narrator accommodation.Daniel Altshuler & Emar Maier - 2020 - In Ilaria Frana, Paula Menendez Benito & Rajesh Bhatt (eds.), Making Worlds Accessible: Festschrift for Angelika Kratzer. UMass ScholarWorks.
    We propose to analyze well-known cases of "imaginative resistance" from the philosophical literature (Gendler, Walton, Weatherson) as involving the inference that particular content should be attributed to either: (i) a character rather than the narrator or, (ii) an unreliable, irrational, opinionated, and/or morally deviant "first person" narrator who was originally perceived to be a typical impersonal, omniscient, "effaced" narrator. We model the latter type of attribution in terms of two independently motivated linguistic mechanisms: accommodation of a discourse referent (Lewis, Stalnaker, (...)
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  10. The pragmatics of attraction: Explaining unquotation in direct and free indirect discourse.Emar Maier - 2017 - In Paul Saka & Michael Johnson (eds.), The Semantics and Pragmatics of Quotation. Cham: Springer.
    The quotational theory of free indirect discourse postulates that pronouns and tenses are systematically unquoted. But where does this unquotation come from? Based on cases of apparent unquotation in direct discourse constructions (including data from Kwaza speakers, Catalan signers, and Dutch children), I suggest a general pragmatic answer: unquotation is essentially a way to resolve a conflict that arises between two opposing constraints. On the one hand, the reporter wants to use indexicals that refer directly to the most salient speech (...)
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  11. Denials in discourse.Rob van der Sandt & Emar Maier - manuscript
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  12. Why my I is your you: On the communication of de se attitudes.Emar Maier - 2016 - In Manuel García-Carpintero & Stephan Torre (eds.), About Oneself: De Se Thought and Communication. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
    The communication of de se attitudes poses a problem for “participant- neutral” analyses of communication in terms of propositions expressed or proposed updates to the common ground: when you tell me “I am an idiot”, you express a first person de se attitude, but as a result I form a different, second person attitude, viz. that you are an idiot. I argue that when we take seriously the asymmetry between speaker and hearer in semantics this problem disappears. To prove this (...)
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  13. Picturing words: The semantics of speech balloons.Emar Maier - 2019 - In Julian J. Schlöder, Dean McHugh & Floris Roelofsen (eds.), Proceedings of the 22nd Amsterdam Colloquium. pp. 584-592.
    Semantics traditionally focuses on linguistic meaning. In recent years, the Super Linguistics movement has tried to broaden the scope of inquiry in various directions, including an extension of semantics to talk about the meaning of pictures. There are close similarities between the interpretation of language and of pictures. Most fundamentally, pictures, like utterances, can be either true or false of a given state of affairs, and hence both express propositions (Zimmermann, 2016; Greenberg, 2013; Abusch, 2015). Moreover, sequences of pictures, like (...)
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  14. More on Fictional Names and Psychologistic Semantics: Replies to Comments.Emar Maier - 2017 - Theoretical Linguistics 43 (1-2):103-120.
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  15. Reported Speech in the Transition from Orality to Literacy.Emar Maier - 2015 - Glotta 91 (1):152-170.
    In ancient Greek the line between direct and indirect discourse appears blurred. In this essay I examine the tendency of Greek writers to slip from indirect into direct speech. I explain the apparent difference between modern English and ancient Greek speech reporting in terms of a development from orality to literacy.
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  16. Coping with imaginative resistance.Daniel Altshuler & Emar Maier - 2022 - Journal of Semantics 39 (2):523-549.
    We propose to characterize imaginative resistance as the failure or unwillingness of the reader to take a fictional description of a deviant reality at face value. The goal of the paper is to explore how readers deal with such a breakdown of the default Face Value interpretation strategy. We posit two distinct interpretative ‘coping’ strategies which help the reader engage with the resistance-inducing fiction by attributing the offending content to one of the fictional characters. We present novel empirical evidence that (...)
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  17.  54
    (1 other version)Lying and Fiction.Emar Maier - forthcoming - In Meibauer Jörg (ed.), Handbook of Lying. Oxford University Press.
    Lying and fiction both involve the deliberate production of statements that fail to obey Grice’s first Maxim of Quality (“do not say what you believe to be false”). The question thus arises if we can provide a uniform analysis for fiction and lies. In this chapter I discuss the similarities, but also some fundamental differences between lying and fiction. I argue that there’s little hope for a satisfying account within a traditional truth conditional semantic framework. Rather than immediately moving to (...)
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