Literal Meaning

New York: Cambridge University Press (2002)
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Abstract

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 an aspect of 'speaker's meaning'? Do we need pragmatics to fix truth-conditions? What is 'literal meaning'? To what extent is semantic composition a creative process? How pervasive is context-sensitivity? Recanati provides an original and insightful defence of 'contextualism', and offers an informed survey of the spectrum of positions held by linguists and philosophers working at the semantics/pragmatics interface.

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References found in this work

Elements of symbolic logic.Hans Reichenbach - 1947 - London: Dover Publications.
Thought without Representation.John Perry & Simon Blackburn - 1986 - Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 60 (1):137-166.
Elements of Symbolic Logic.Nelson Goodman - 1948 - Philosophical Review 57 (1):100.

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