front cover of The Construction of Meaning
The Construction of Meaning
Edited by David I. Beaver, Luis D. Casillas Martinez, Brady Z. Clark, and Stefan
CSLI, 2002
This volume collects leading-edge work on the semantics and pragmatics of natural language, including contributions from Eve Clark, Paul Kiparsky, Stanley Peters, Dag Westerstahl, and Arnold Zwicky. The research covers a number of languages—English, Mandarin, Japanese, Korean, and Quechua—and phenomena, including adverbial modification, classifiers, constructional meaning, control phenomena, evidentiality, events semantics, focus, presupposition, and quantification. This is an essential volume for anyone interested in the latest developments in the study of meaning.
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front cover of Presupposition and Assertion in Dynamic Semantics
Presupposition and Assertion in Dynamic Semantics
A Critical Review of Linguistic Theories of Presupposition and a Dynamic Alternative
David I. Beaver
CSLI, 2001
Russell and Strawson sparked a well known debate on the subject of Linguistic Presupposition inspiring many linguists and philosophers to follow suit, including Frege, whose work initiated the modern study in this area. Beaver begins with the most comprehensive overview and critical discussion of this burgeoning field published to date. He then goes on to motivate and develop his own account based on a Dynamic Semantics. This account is a recent line of theoretical work in which the Tarskian emphasis on truth conditions is questioned. The central plank of the theory of meaning is a formal account of the change in information effected by use of language on hearers or readers. The proposal thus consolidates ideas of Stalnaker, Karttunen and Heim, all of whom had suggested that such an account was needed. At the same time it provides a new impulse and motivation to Dynamic Semantics itself.
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