Linguistic Meaning and Non-Truth-Conditionality

This book offers a new perspective on current semantic theory by analysing key aspects of linguistic meaning and non-truth-conditional semantics. It applies non-truth-conditional semantics to various areas of language and critically considers earlier approaches to the study of semantic meaning, such as truth-conditional semantics, Speech Act theory and Gricean conventional implicatures. The author argues that those earlier approaches to linguistic semantics do not stand up to close scrutiny and are subject to a number of counterexamples, indicating that they are insufficient for a comprehensive and unified account of linguistic semantics. An alternative framework is then presented based on recent developments in the field, demonstrating that it is possible to provide a unified account of linguistic semantics by making two fundamental distinctions between (a) conceptual and procedural meaning and (b) explicit and implicit communication. These two distinctions, combined with the various levels of representation available in linguistic communication, allow researchers to capture the variety of linguistic meaning encountered in natural language. The study includes a discussion of a number of areas within linguistic semantics, including sentence adverbials, parentheticals, discourse/pragmatic connectives, discourse particles, interjections and mood indicators.

Autorentext

Xosé Rosales Sequeiros is Associate Professor of Linguistics at Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University. Previously, he taught widely in the United Kingdom, including at the Universities of Leicester, Greenwich and Portsmouth. His research interests include semantics, pragmatics and cognition.

Zusammenfassung
«This book is a valuable resource and highly recommended to researchers and novices in the fields of cognitive linguistics, cognitive science, philosophy of language, philosophy of the mind, pragmatics and discourse analysis.» (Fan Zhen-qiang, The Linguist List 10/2012)

Inhalt

Contents: Linguistic semantics and non-truth-conditional meaning - Traditional approaches to non-truth-conditional Meaning - Speech-acts, truth-conditional and non-truth-conditional meaning - New developments in linguistic semantics - Applications of semantic theory to non-truth-conditional meaning - Linguistic semantics and mood.