Formal Approaches to Semantics and Pragmatics

This volume presents an exploration of a wide variety of new formal methods from computer science, biology and economics that have been applied to problems in semantics and pragmatics in recent years. Many of the contributions included focus on data from East Asian languages, particularly Japanese and Korean. The collection reflects on a range of new empirical issues that have arisen, including issues related to preference, evidentiality and attention. Separated into several sections, the book presents discussions on: information structure, speech acts and decisions, philosophical themes in semantics and new formal approaches to semantic and pragmatic theory. Its overarching theme is the relation between different kinds of content, from a variety of perspectives. The discussions presented are both theoretically innovative and empirically motivated.

Includes a variety of papers by leading researchers working at the cutting edge of formal semantics and pragmatics Contains both foundational and empirical work, all from scholars well-informed both about formal and philosophical work and natural language Will be useful for researchers working on a wide range of problems in formal semantics and pragmatics and at their interface Includes supplementary material: sn.pub/extras

Inhalt

1. Introduction.- 2. The Noncooperative Basis of Implicatures.- 3. Meta-Lambda-Calculus: Syntax and Semantics.- 4. Coordinating and Subordinating Binding Dependencies.- 5. What is a universal? On the explanatory potential of evolutionary game theory in linguistics.- 6. Continuation Hierarchy and Quantifier Scope.- 7. Japanese Reported Speech: Towards an account of perspective shift as mixed quotation.- 8. What is Evidence in Natural Language?.- 9. A Categorial Grammar Account of Information Packaging in Japanese.- 10. A Note on the Projection of Appositives.- 11. Towards Computational Non-Associative Lambek Lambda-Calculi for Formal Pragmatics.- 12. On the functions of the Japanese discourse particle yo in declaratives.- 13. A Question of Priority.- 14.Measurement-Theoretic Foundations of Dynamic Epistemic Preference Logic.- 15. A Modal Scalar-Presuppositional Analysis of Only.- 16. Floating Quantifiers in Japanese as Adverbial Anaphora.