This category needs an editor. We encourage you to help if you are qualified.
Volunteer, or read more about what this involves.
Related
Siblings

Contents
102 found
Order:
1 — 50 / 102
  1. Covert Mixed Quotation.Cameron Domenico Kirk-Giannini - manuscript
    The term 'covert mixed quotation' describes cases in which linguistic material is interpreted in the manner of mixed quotation — that is, used in addition to being mentioned — despite the superficial absence of any commonly recognized conventional devices indicating quotation. After developing a novel theory of mixed quotation, I show that positing covert mixed quotation allows us to give simple and unified treatments of a number of puzzling semantic phenomena, including the projective behavior of conventional implicature items embedded in (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  2. Positive gradable adjective ascriptions without positive morphemes.Fabrizio Cariani, Paolo Santorio & Alexis Wellwood - forthcoming - Proceedings of Sinn Und Bedeutung 2023.
    A long-standing tension in semantic theory concerns the reconciliation of positive gradable adjective (GA) ascriptions and comparative GA ascriptions. Vagueness-based ap- proaches derive the comparative from the positive, and face non-trivial challenges with incommensurability and non-GA comparatives. Classic degree-based approaches effectively derive the positive from the comparative, out of sync with the direction of evidence from morphology, and create some difficulties in accounting for GA scale-mates with differing thresholds (e.g., cold ∼ warm ∼ hot). We propose a new reconciliation that (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  3. Meaning and Racial Slurs: Derogatory Epithets and the Semantics/Pragmatics Interface.Joseph A. Hedger - forthcoming - Language and Communication.
    The semantics of racial slurs has recently become a locus of debate amongst philosophers. While everyone agrees that slurs are offensive, there is disagreement about the linguistic mechanism responsible for this offensiveness. This paper places the debate about racial slurs into the context of a larger issue concerning the interface between semantics and pragmatics, and argues that even on minimalist assumptions, the offensiveness of slur words is more plausibly due to their semantic content rather than any pragmatic mechanism. Finally, I (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   7 citations  
  4. Desambiguación de presuposiciones anafóricas: el caso de ‘también’.William Jimenez Leal & Tomas Barrero - forthcoming - Signos.
    Este trabajo analiza los patrones de desambiguación de presuposiciones que se pueden considerar anafóricas y son generadas por partículas indexicales. En contraste con teorías recientes sobre la presuposición que privilegian la información lexical proponemos un análisis perspectivo de la presuposición según el cual la inferencia por defecto sobre este tipo de información hace uso de la perspectiva de los hablantes. En dos estudios exploramos el patrón de desambiguación de oraciones que contienen la palabra ‘también’ en contextos donde se usa el (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  5. Busting the Ghost of Neutral Counterparts.Jen Foster - 2023 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 10 (42):1187-1242.
    Slurs have been standardly assumed to bear a very direct, very distinctive semantic relationship to what philosophers have called “neutral counterpart” terms. I argue that this is mistaken: the general relationship between paradigmatic slurs and their “neutral counterparts” should be assumed to be the same one that obtains between ‘chick flick’ and ‘romantic comedy’, as well a huge number of other more prosaic pairs of derogatory and “less derogatory” expressions. The most plausible general relationship between these latter expressions — and (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  6. Vanilla Rules: the "No Ice Cream" Construction.Felix Frühauf, Hadil Karawani, Todor Koev, Natasha Korotkova, Doris Penka & Daniel Skibra - 2023 - Proceedings of Sinn Und Bedeutung 27:209-227.
    This paper is about what we call Deontically-flavored Nominal Constructions (DNCs) in English, such as "No ice cream" or "Dogs on leash only". DNCs are often perceived as commands and have been argued to be a type of non-canonical imperative, much like root infinitives in German or Russian. We argue instead that DNCs at their core are declaratives that cite a rule but can be used performatively in the right context. We propose that DNCs contain an elided deontic modal, i.e., (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  7. 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 (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (4 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  8. Lying, Misleading, and Fairness.Emanuel Viebahn - 2022 - Ethics 132 (3):736-751.
    Sam Berstler defends a general moral advantage for misleading over lying by arguing that liars, but not misleaders, act unfairly toward the other members of their linguistic community. This article spells out three difficulties for Berstler’s account. First, though Berstler aims to avoid an error theory, it is dubitable that her account fits with intuitions on the matter. Second, there are some lies that do not exhibit the unfairness Berstler identifies. Third, fairness is not the only morally relevant difference between (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (4 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  9. Pronouns as Demonstratives.Kyle Blumberg - 2021 - Philosophers' Imprint 21 (35).
    In this paper, I outline a novel approach to the semantics of natural language pronouns. On this account, which I call 'demonstrativism', pronouns are semantically equivalent to demonstratives. I begin by presenting some contrasts that provide support for demonstrativism. Then I try to explain these contrasts by developing a particular demonstrativist proposal. I build on the "hidden argument" theory of demonstratives. On this theory, demonstratives are semantically similar to definite descriptions, with one important difference: demonstratives take two arguments, rather than (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  10. The Derogatory Force and the Offensiveness of Slurs.Chang Liu - 2021 - Organon F: Medzinárodný Časopis Pre Analytickú Filozofiu 28 (3):626–649.
    Slurs are both derogatory and offensive, and they are said to exhibit “derogatory force” and “offensiveness.” Almost all theories of slurs, except the truth-conditional content theory and the invocational content theory, conflate these two features and use “derogatory force” and “offensiveness” interchangeably. This paper defends and explains the distinction between slurs’ derogatory force and offensiveness by fulfilling three goals. First, it distinguishes between slurs’ being derogatory and their being offensive with four arguments. For instance, ‘Monday’, a slur in the Bostonian (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  11. Orgasm and art.Karl Pfeifer - 2021 - Academic Voices 2021:18-20.
    Karl Pfeifer argues against the view that an aesthetic experience must be a uniquely special kind of experience by means of an analogy with sexual experiences. Nonetheless, he leaves open the possibility that some aesthetic experiences might still be of a special kind.
    Remove from this list   Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  12. Context and Coherence: The Logic and Grammar of Prominence.Una Stojnić - 2021 - Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
    Natural languages are riddled with context-sensitivity. One and the same string of words can express many different meanings on occasion of use, and yet we understand one another effortlessly, on the fly. How do we do so? What fixes the meaning of context-sensitive expressions, and how are we able to recover the meaning so effortlessly? -/- This book offers a novel response: we can do so because we draw on a broad array of subtle linguistic conventions that determine the interpretation (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   5 citations  
  13. Demonstratives, definite descriptions and non-redundancy.Kyle Hammet Blumberg - 2020 - Philosophical Studies 177 (1):39-64.
    In some sentences, demonstratives can be substituted with definite descriptions without any change in meaning. In light of this, many have maintained that demonstratives are just a type of definite description. However, several theorists have drawn attention to a range of cases where definite descriptions are acceptable, but their demonstrative counterparts are not. Some have tried to account for this data by appealing to presupposition. I argue that such presuppositional approaches are problematic, and present a pragmatic account of the target (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  14. Slurs and register: A case study in meaning pluralism.Justina Diaz-Legaspe, Chang Liu & Robert J. Stainton - 2020 - Mind and Language 35 (2):156-182.
    Most theories of slurs fall into one of two families: those which understand slurring terms to involve special descriptive/informational content (however conveyed), and those which understand them to encode special emotive/expressive content. Our view is that both offer essential insights, but that part of what sets slurs apart is use-theoretic content. In particular, we urge that slurring words belong at the intersection of a number of categories in a sociolinguistic register taxonomy, one that usually includes [+slang] and [+vulgar] and always (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (4 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   18 citations  
  15. Roads to Reference: An Essay on Reference Fixing in Natural Language.Mario Gomez-Torrente - 2019 - Oxford, Reino Unido: Oxford University Press.
    How is it that words come to stand for the things they stand for? Is the thing that a word stands for - its reference - fully identified or described by conventions known to the users of the word? Or is there a more roundabout relation between the reference of a word and the conventions that determine or fix it? Do words like 'water', 'three', and 'red' refer to appropriate things, just as the word 'Aristotle' refers to Aristotle? If so, (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   24 citations  
  16. Derogatory Words and Speech Acts: An Illocutionary Force Indicator Theory of Slurs.Chang Liu - 2019 - Dissertation, University of Western Ontario
    Slurs are derogatory words; they seem to express contempt and hatred toward marginalized groups. They are used to insult and derogate their victims. Moreover, slurs give rise to philosophical questions. In virtue of what is the word “chink,” unlike “Chinese,” a derogatory word? Does “chink” refer to the same group as “Chinese”? If “chink” is a derogatory word, how is it possible to use it in a non-derogatory way (e.g., by Chinese comedians or between Chinese friends)? Many theories of slurs (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  17. Slurs and the Type-Token Distinction of Their Derogatory Force.Chang Liu - 2019 - Rivista Italiana di Filosofia del Linguaggio 13 (2):63-72.
    Slurs are derogatory, and theories of slurs aim at explaining their “derogatory force”. This paper draws a distinction between the type derogatory force and the token derogatory force of slurs. To explain the type derogatory force is to explain why a slur is a derogatory word. By contrast, to explain the token derogatory force is to explain why an utterance of a slur is derogatory. This distinction will be defended by examples in which the type and the token derogatory force (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  18. The acquaintance inference with 'seem'-reports.Rachel Etta Rudolph - 2019 - Proceedings of the Chicago Linguistics Society 54:451-460.
    Some assertions give rise to the acquaintance inference: the inference that the speaker is acquainted with some individual. Discussion of the acquaintance inference has previously focused on assertions about aesthetic matters and personal tastes (e.g. 'The cake is tasty'), but it also arises with reports about how things seem (e.g. 'Tom seems like he's cooking'). 'Seem'-reports give rise to puzzling acquaintance behavior, with no analogue in the previously-discussed domains. In particular, these reports call for a distinction between the specific acquaintance (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  19. Pejoratives as Fiction.Christopher Hom & Robert May - 2018 - In David Sosa (ed.), Bad Words. Oxford University Press.
    Fictional terms are terms that have null extensions, and in this regard pejorative terms are a species of fictional terms: although there are Jews, there are no kikes. That pejoratives are fictions is the central consequence of the Moral and Semantic Innocence (MSI) view of Hom et al. (2013). There it is shown that for pejoratives, null extensionality is the semantic realization of the moral fact that no one ought to be the target of negative moral evaluation solely in virtue (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   20 citations  
  20. Token-Reflexivity and Repetition.Alexandru Radulescu - 2018 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 5:745-763.
    The classical rule of Repetition says that if you take any sentence as a premise, and repeat it as a conclusion, you have a valid argument. It's a very basic rule of logic, and many other rules depend on the guarantee that repeating a sentence, or really, any expression, guarantees sameness of referent, or semantic value. However, Repetition fails for token-reflexive expressions. In this paper, I offer three ways that one might replace Repetition, and still keep an interesting notion of (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  21. The phrasal implicature theory of metaphors and slurs.Alper Yavuz - 2018 - Dissertation, University of St. Andrews
    This thesis develops a pragmatic theory of metaphors and slurs. In the pragmatic literature, theorists mostly hold the view that the framework developed by Grice is only applicable to the sentence-level pragmatic phenomena, whereas the subsentential pragmatic phenomena require a different approach. In this thesis, I argue against this view and claim that the Gricean framework, after some plausible revisions, can explain subsentential pragmatic phenomena, such as metaphors and slurs. In the first chapter, I introduce three basic theses I will (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  22. Investigating the form-meaning mapping in the acquisition of English and Japanese measure phrase comparatives.Tomoe Arii, Kristen Syrett & Takuya Goro - 2017 - Natural Language Semantics 25 (1):53-90.
    We present a set of experiments investigating how English- and Japanese-speaking children interpret Measure Phrase comparatives. We show that despite overt cues to the comparative interpretation, children representing both languages diverge from their adult counterparts in that they access a non-adult-like ‘absolute measurement’ interpretation. We propose to account for their response pattern by appealing to proposals by Svenonius and Kennedy and Sawada and Grano that Meas in the head of the DegP, which houses the differential, selects for an absolute minimal (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  23. The Pragmatics of Slurs.Renée Jorgensen Bolinger - 2017 - Noûs 51 (3):439-462.
    I argue that the offense generation pattern of slurring terms parallels that of impoliteness behaviors, and is best explained by appeal to similar purely pragmatic mechanisms. In choosing to use a slurring term rather than its neutral counterpart, the speaker signals that she endorses the term. Such an endorsement warrants offense, and consequently slurs generate offense whenever a speaker's use demonstrates a contrastive preference for the slurring term. Since this explanation comes at low theoretical cost and imposes few constraints on (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (4 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   83 citations  
  24. Oraciones normativas y sensibilidad a la evaluación.Justina Diaz Legaspe - 2017 - Revista Latinoamericana de Filosofia 43 (1):29-47.
    Nuestro lenguaje no solo describe el mundo que nos rodea: muchas expresiones que usamos habitualmente (desde predicados de gusto a expresiones como “interesante” o “divertido”) tienen por función valorar los objetos que constituyen nuestro entorno. Las oraciones que las contienen son sensibles a la evaluación: su valor de verdad depende del estándar evaluativo saliente en contexto y su emisión puede dar lugar a desacuerdos duros. El presente trabajo examina la ex- tensión de esta categoría a oraciones con predicados y verbos (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  25. Contextualism about Epistemic Reasons.Daniel Fogal & Kurt Sylvan - 2017 - In Jonathan Jenkins Ichikawa (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Epistemic Contextualism. Routledge.
    This paper surveys some ways in which epistemic reasons ascriptions (or ERAs) appear to be context-sensitive, and outlines a framework for thinking about the nature of this context-sensitivity that is intimately related to ERAs' explanatory function.
    Remove from this list   Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  26. Semantics vs. Pragmatics in Impure Quotation.Mario Gomez-Torrente - 2017 - In Paul Saka & Michael Johnson (eds.), The Semantics and Pragmatics of Quotation. Cham: Springer. pp. 135-167.
    I defend a semantic theory of quotation marks, according to which these are ambiguous, as they have several different acceptations involving corresponding different conventional indications. In particular, in allusion (“mixed”) uses, the corresponding conventional indication is one with an adverbial or prepositional content, roughly equivalent to “using the quoted expression or an appropriate version of it”. And in “scare” uses, the corresponding conventional indication is that the enclosed expression should be used not plainly but in some broadly speaking distanced way, (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   5 citations  
  27. Counterfactual theories of knowledge and the notion of actuality.Jan Heylen - 2016 - Philosophical Studies 173 (6):1647-1673.
    The central question of this article is how to combine counterfactual theories of knowledge with the notion of actuality. It is argued that the straightforward combination of these two elements leads to problems, viz. the problem of easy knowledge and the problem of missing knowledge. In other words, there is overgeneration of knowledge and there is undergeneration of knowledge. The combination of these problems cannot be solved by appealing to methods by which beliefs are formed. An alternative solution is put (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (6 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  28. Semantik, Pragmatik und Ontologie: Felka über spezifizierende Sätze und einfache Argumente.Barbara Vetter - 2016 - Zeitschrift für Philosophische Forschung 70 (3):406-411.
    This paper critically comments on Katharina Felka's book "Talking about numbers". I question her assumption that specifying sentences are a semantically unified class. The paper is part of a symposium on the book (in German).
    Remove from this list   Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  29. A Semantic Solution to the Problem with Aesthetic Testimony.James Andow - 2015 - Acta Analytica 30 (2):211-218.
    There is something peculiar about aesthetic testimony. It seems more difficult to gain knowledge of aesthetic properties based solely upon testimony than it is in the case of other types of property. In this paper, I argue that we can provide an adequate explanation at the level of the semantics of aesthetic language, without defending any substantive thesis in epistemology or about aesthetic value/judgement. If aesthetic predicates are given a non-invariantist semantics, we can explain the supposed peculiar difficulty with aesthetic (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (7 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  30. in defense of a presuppositional account of slurs.Bianca Cepollaro - 2015 - Language Sciences 52:36-45.
    Abstract In the last fifteen years philosophers and linguists have turned their attention to slurs: derogatory expressions that target certain groups on the basis of race, gender, sexual orientation, nationality and so on. This interest is due to the fact that, on the one hand, slurs possess puzzling linguistic properties; on the other hand, the questions they pose are related to other crucial issues, such as the descriptivism/expressivism divide, the semantics/pragmatics divide and, generally speaking, the theory of meaning. Despite these (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   25 citations  
  31. The Meaning of Imperatives.Nate Charlow - 2014 - Philosophy Compass 9 (8):540-555.
    This article surveys a range of current views on the semantics of imperatives, presenting them as more or less conservative with respect to the Truth-Conditional Paradigm in semantics. It describes and critiques views at either extreme of this spectrum: accounts on which the meaning of an imperative is a modal truth-condition, as well as various accounts that attempt to explain imperative meaning without making use of truth-conditions. It briefly describes and encourages further work on a family of views lying somewhere (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   15 citations  
  32. Pejorative Language.Ralph DiFranco - 2014 - Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    Pejorative Language Some words can hurt. Slurs, insults, and swears can be highly offensive and derogatory. Some theorists hold that the derogatory capacity of a pejorative word or phrase is best explained by the content it expresses. In opposition to content theories, deflationism denies that there is any specifically derogatory content expressed by pejoratives. As … Continue reading Pejorative Language →.
    Remove from this list  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  33. Pejoratives.Ralph DiFranco - 2014
    Pejorative Language Some words can hurt. Slurs, insults, and swears can be highly offensive and derogatory. Some theorists hold that the derogatory capacity of a pejorative word or phrase is best explained by the content it expresses. In opposition to content theories, deflationism denies that there is any specifically derogatory content expressed by pejoratives. As […].
    Remove from this list  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  34. Cat Got Your Tongue? Using the Tip‐of‐the‐Tongue State to Investigate Fixed Expressions.Emily Nordmann, Alexandra A. Cleland & Rebecca Bull - 2013 - Cognitive Science 37 (8):1553-1564.
    Despite the fact that they play a prominent role in everyday speech, the representation and processing of fixed expressions during language production is poorly understood. Here, we report a study investigating the processes underlying fixed expression production. “Tip-of-the-tongue” (TOT) states were elicited for well-known idioms (e.g., hit the nail on the head) and participants were asked to report any information they could regarding the content of the phrase. Participants were able to correctly report individual words for idioms that they could (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  35. It’s Not What You Said, It’s the Way You Said It: Slurs and Conventional Implicatures.Daniel Whiting - 2013 - Analytic Philosophy 54 (3):364-377.
    In this paper, I defend against a number of criticisms an account of slurs, according to which the same semantic content is expressed in the use of a slur as is expressed in the use of its neutral counterpart, while in addition the use of a slur conventionally implicates a negative, derogatory attitude. Along the way, I criticise competing accounts of the semantics and pragmatics of slurs, namely, Hom's 'combinatorial externalism' and Anderson and Lepore's 'prohibitionism'.
    Remove from this list   Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   45 citations  
  36. DegP scope revisited.Sigrid Beck - 2012 - Natural Language Semantics 20 (3):227-272.
    The semantic literature takes degree operators like the comparative, but also measure phrases, the equative, the superlative and so on, to be quantifiers over degrees. This is well motivated by their semantic contribution, but leads one to expect far more scope interaction than is actually observed. This paper proposes an alternative-semantic analysis of certain degree constructions, in particular constructions with little and other negative antonyms. Restrictions on scope can then be explained as intervention effects.
    Remove from this list   Direct download (6 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  37. Pluractional comparisons.Sigrid Beck - 2012 - Linguistics and Philosophy 35 (1):57-110.
    This paper develops a semantic analysis of data like It is getting colder and colder. Their meaning is argued to arise from a combination of a comparative with pluractionality. The analysis is embedded in a general theory of plural predication and pluractionality. It supports a semantic theory involving a family of syntactic plural operators.
    Remove from this list   Direct download (6 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  38. Two takes on the De Se.Marina Folescu & James Higginbotham - 2012 - In Simon Prosser & Francois Recanati (eds.), Immunity to Error Through Misidentification: New Essays. Cambridge University Press.
    In this article we consider, relying in part upon comparative semantic evidence from English and Romanian, two contrasting dimensions of the sense in which our thoughts, including the contents of imagination and memory, and extending to objects of fear, enjoyment, and other emotions directed toward worldly happenings, may be distinctively first-personal, or "de se," to use the terminology introduced in Lewis (1979), and exhibit the phenomenon of immunity to error through misidentification (hereafter: IEM) in the sense of Shoemaker (1968) and (...)
    Remove from this list  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  39. Imperatives: a Judgemental Analysis.Chris Fox - 2012 - Studia Logica 100 (4):879-905.
    This paper proposes a framework for formalising intuitions about the behaviour of imperative commands. It seeks to capture notions of satisfaction and coherence. Rules are proposed to express key aspects of the general logical behaviour of imperative constructions. A key objective is for the framework to allow patterns of behaviour to be described while avoiding making any commitments about how commands, and their satisfaction criteria, are to be interpreted. We consider the status of some conundrums of imperative logic in the (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (4 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   6 citations  
  40. The semantics of racial slurs: Using kaplan’s framework to provide a theory of the meaning of derogatory epithets.Joseph A. Hedger - 2012 - Linguistic and Philosophical Investigations 11:74-84.
    In this paper I adopt Kaplan’s framework for distinguishing between descriptive and expressive content. Racial slurs are an especially difficult challenge for truth-conditional semantics because of their projection behaviors. That is to say, the offensive content of slurs “scopes out” of logical operators. I argue that racial slurs express contempt and lack descriptive content, so that many sentences containing slurs are not truth apt. My theory accounts for the intuition of the ordinary speaker who refuses to assent to the truth (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   15 citations  
  41. A puzzle about pejoratives.Christopher Hom - 2012 - Philosophical Studies 159 (3):383-405.
    Pejoratives are the class of expressions that are meant to insult or disparage. They include swear words and slurs. These words allow speakers to convey emotional states beyond the truth-conditional contents that they are normally taken to encode. The puzzle arises because, although pejoratives seem to be a semantically unified class, some of their occurrences are best accounted for truth-conditionally, while others are best accounted for non-truth-conditionally. Where current, non-truth-conditional, views in the literature fail to provide a unified solution for (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (5 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   51 citations  
  42. Solving the Color Incompatibility Problem.Sarah Moss - 2012 - Journal of Philosophical Logic 41 (5):841-851.
    It is commonly held that Wittgenstein abandoned the Tractatus largely because of a problem concerning color incompatibility. My aim is to solve this problem on Wittgenstein’s behalf. First I introduce the central program of the Tractatus (§1) and the color incompatibility problem (§2). Then I solve the problem without abandoning any Tractarian ideas (§3), and show that given certain weak assumptions, the central program of the Tractatus can in fact be accomplished (§4). I conclude by distinguishing my system of analysis (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (4 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   18 citations  
  43. Expressing Credences.Daniel Rothschild - 2012 - Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 112 (1pt1):99-114.
    After presenting a simple expressivist account of reports of probabilistic judgements, I explore a classic problem for it, namely the Frege-Geach problem. I argue that it is a problem not just for expressivism but for any reasonable account of ascriptions of graded judgements. I suggest that the problem can be resolved by appropriately modelling imprecise credences.
    Remove from this list   Direct download (4 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   51 citations  
  44. An analysis of three Japanese tags:ne,yone, anddaroo.Yuko Asano-Cavanagh - 2011 - Pragmatics and Cognition 19 (3):448-475.
    This paper presents an analysis of three Japanese words — ne, yone, and daroo. These three expressions are often interpreted as tag questions in English. Although these words are semantically closely related, they are not always interchangeable. The subtle differences between them are difficult to grasp, especially for language learners. Numerous studies have been undertaken in order to clarify the meanings of ne, yone, and daroo. However, opinions vary among different scholars, and definitions for these markers are not fully established. (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  45. On identification and transworld identity in natural language: the case of -ever free relatives. [REVIEW]Daphna Heller & Lynsey Wolter - 2011 - Linguistics and Philosophy 34 (2):169-199.
    An -ever free relative is felicitous only when the speaker doesn’t know, or doesn’t care about, the identity of the entity denoted. In this paper we investigate what it means to identify an entity by examining the non-identification condition on -ever free relatives. Following Dayal (In A. Lawson (Ed.), Proceedings of SALT VII, 1997 ), we analyze -ever free relatives as definites with a modal dimension. We show that the variation in the identity of the entity across the possible worlds (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (5 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  46. Slurs & Thick Concepts-is the New Expressivism Tenable?Nenad Miščević - 2011 - Croatian Journal of Philosophy 11 (2):159-182.
    Mark Richard in his book offers a new and challenging expressivist theory of the use and semantics of slurs (pejoratives). The paper argues that in contrast, the central and standard uses of slurs are cognitive. It does so from the role of stereotypes in slurring, from fi gurative slurs and from the need for cognitive effort (or simple of knowledge of relevant presumed properties of the target). Since cognition has to do with truth and falsity, and since the cognitive task (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   6 citations  
  47. Sub-sentential speech and the traditional view.Stefano Predelli - 2011 - Linguistics and Philosophy 34 (6):571-588.
    This essay argues that cases of apparently sub-sentential speech, such as Charles’ utterance of ‘a world famous topologist’ in the presence of a suitably salient woman, are unproblematic from the viewpoint of the Traditional View of meaning and truth-conditions. My argument is grounded on the distinction between different senses of ‘truth-conditions’ in double-index semantics, and on an understanding of semantic inputs as constraints on logical forms. Given these conceptual resources, I argue that an utterly traditional understanding of the relationships between (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (6 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  48. The fuzzy logic of socialised attitudes in Liangshan Nuosu.Matthias Gerner - 2010 - Journal of Pragmatics 42 (11):3031-3046.
    Liangshan Nuosu (Tibeto-Burman: P.R. China) exhibits two cross-linguistically rare attitude particles which ascribe wishes and fears to an impersonal socialised agent serving as a speaker-hedge. Linguistic properties of these particles not covered by (Potts, 2007a) and (Potts, 2007b) features of expressive content are elaborated upon. It is proposed to analyse the Nuosu attitude operators as illocutionary force indicating devices (IFIDs, see Searle and Vanderveken, 1985) and the utterances which host them as speech acts of the expressive type. Success conditions for (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  49. Pejoratives.Christopher Hom - 2010 - Philosophy Compass 5 (2):164-185.
    The norms surrounding pejorative language, such as racial slurs and swear words, are deeply prohibitive. Pejoratives are typically a means for speakers to express their derogatory attitudes. As these attitudes vary along many dimensions and magnitudes, they initially appear to be resistant to a truth-conditional, semantic analysis. The goal of the paper is to clarify the essential linguistic phenomena surrounding pejoratives, survey the logical space of explanatory theories, evaluate each with respect to the phenomena and provide a preliminary assessment of (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   64 citations  
  50. The antinomy of the variable.Aleksandar Kellenberg - 2010 - Dialectica 64 (2):225-236.
    There is a solution to the antinomy of the variable that does not call for semantic relationism. I argue that if we carefully distinguish between variable types and variable tokens or occurrences, and if we take the number of variable types involved properly into account, then coordination among variable tokens or occurrences is reducible to an intrinsic semantic feature of those tokens or occurrences. The fact that two tokens or occurrences of the same variable type contained in the same sentence (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
1 — 50 / 102