Online research in philosophy

This paper presents a comprehensive pragmatic theory of contrastive topic and its relation to focus in English. In discussing various constructions involving contrastive topics, it argues that they make reference to complex, hierarchical aspects of discourse structure. In this, it follows and spells out a proposal sketched in Roberts (1996, p. 121ff),using the formal tools found in Büring (1994,1997b). It improves on existing accounts in the accuracy with which it predicts the non-occurrence of the accent patterns associated with focus and contrastive topic, and locates the analysis of contrastive topicswithin a broader picture of discourse and information structure.

This volume addresses current issues in the semantics and the pragmatics of discourse and dialogue. Collected papers aim at providing insights on different theoretical approaches, all of them in the dynamic semantics tradition, such as Dynamic Predicate Logic (DPL), Discourse Representation Theory (DRT), and Segmented Discourse Representation Theory (SDRT). They reflect the current move of formal semantics from short multisentential texts towards structured discourses and dialogues, accounting for more and more phenomena at the semantics-pragmatics interface (e.g., subtleties of anaphora and presupposition, the role of temporal connectives in discourse or the establishment of common references in dialogue).

Insensitive Semantics is an overview of and contribution to the debates about how to accommodate context sensitivity within a theory of human communication, ...

Machine generated contents note: 1. Introduction; 2. A short history of reference; 3. Acts, roles and singular reference; 4. Elements of reference; 5. Demonstratives; 6. Context sensitivity and indexicals; 7. Names; 8. Definite descriptions; 9. Implicit reference and unarticulated constituents; 10. Locutionary content and speech acts; 11. Reference and implicature; 12. Semantics, pragmatics and critical pragmatics; 13. Harnessing information; 14. Examples.

INTRODUCTION The four papers in this book are slightly revised and updated versions of papers I wrote in the period 1973-77, while I was coming to terms ...

This volume examines explicitly the question of how the semantics and pragmatics of a number of expressions might be responsibly discussed. In the past, the temptation has been for the expressions in question to be discussed either in terms of the semantics, or in terms of the pragmatics, but extremely rarely in terms of both. This book shows how revealing analyses for this interface can be provided for the expressions in question. In specially commissioned chapters from leading authors, the points of view represented include linguistics, logic, computational linguistics, and philosophy.

This is a collection of papers that resulted from the Third International Conference on Contrastive Semantics and Pragmatics that was held at Shanghai ...