Reliability in Pragmatics

Eric McCready (Associate Professor, Department of English, Aoyama Gakuin University)

ISBN 10: 0198702833 / ISBN 13: 9780198702832

Published by b10701, 2014

About this Item

This book considers how observations about the past influence future behaviour, as expressed in language. Focusing on information gathered from speech and other evidence sources, the author offers a model of how judgements about reliability can be made, and how such judgements factor into how people treat information they acquire via those sources.

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Bibliographic Details

• Title: Reliability in Pragmatics
• Publisher: b10701
• Publication Date: 2014
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0198702833
• ISBN 13: 9780198702832
• Binding: Hardcover
• Condition: Brand New

About this title

Synopsis

This book is an exploration of how knowledge about the reliability of information sources manifests itself in linguistic phenomena and use. It focuses on cooperation in language use and on how considerations of reliability influence what is done with the information acquired through language. Elin McCready provides a detailed account of the phenomena of hedging and evidentiality and analyses them using tools from game theory, dynamic semantics, and formal epistemology. Hedging is argued to be a mechanism used by speakers to protect their reputations for cooperativity from damage inflicted by infelicitous discourse moves. The pragmatics of evidential use is also discussed in terms of the histories of interaction that influence reputation: the author argues that past experience with the evidence source indexed by the evidential determines how the process of adding information will proceed.

The book makes many new connections between seemingly disparate aspects of linguistic meaning and practice. It will be of interest to specialists in semantics, pragmatics, and philosophy of language, as well as those in the fields of philosophy and cognitive science with an interest in language and epistemology.

About the Author

Elin McCready is an Associate Professor at Aoyama Gakuin University in Tokyo, Japan. Her research interests include formal semantics and pragmatics, the semantics-pragmatics interface, Japanese and its dialects, philosophy of language and epistemology, modal and dynamic logics, and game theory. Her articles have appeared in journals including Semantics and Pragmatics, Linguistic Inquiry, and Journal of Pragmatics.