Use-Conditional Meaning (Paperback)

Daniel Gutzmann

ISBN 10: 0198723830 / ISBN 13: 9780198723837

Published by Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2015

About this Item

Paperback. This book seeks to bring together the pragmatic theory of 'meaning as use' with the traditional semantic approach that considers meaning in terms of truth conditions. Daniel Gutzmann adopts core ideas by the philosopher David Kaplan in assuming that the meaning of expressions such as oops or damn can be captured by giving the conditions under which they can be felicitously used. He develops a multidimensional approach to meaning, called hybridsemantics, that incorporates use conditions alongside truth conditions in a unified framework. This new system overcomes the empirical gaps and conceptual problems associated with previous multidimensional systems; it alsolessens the burden on the compositional system by shifting restrictions on the combination of use-conditional expressions to the lexicon-semantics interface instead of building them directly into the combinatoric rules. The approach outlined in this book can capture the entire meaning of complex expressions, and also has natural applications in the analysis of sentence mood and modal particles in German, as Gutzmann's two detailed case studies demonstrate. The book will be a valuable resourcefor linguists working in the fields of semantics, pragmatics, and philosophy of language, as well as to philosophers and cognitive scientists with an interest in meaning in language. This book seeks to bring together the pragmatic theory of 'meaning as use' with the traditional semantic approach that considers meaning in terms of truth conditions. Daniel Gutzmann's new approach captures the entire meaning of complex expressions and overcomes the empirical gaps and conceptual problems associated with previous analyses. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.

Seller Inventory # 9780198723837

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Use-Conditional Meaning (Paperback)
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, Oxford
• Publication Date: 2015
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0198723830
• ISBN 13: 9780198723837
• Binding: Paperback
• Condition: new

About this title

Synopsis

This book seeks to bring together the pragmatic theory of 'meaning as use' with the traditional semantic approach that considers meaning in terms of truth conditions. Daniel Gutzmann adopts core ideas by the philosopher David Kaplan in assuming that the meaning of expressions such as oops or damn can be captured by giving the conditions under which they can be felicitously used. He develops a multidimensional approach to meaning, called hybrid semantics, that incorporates use conditions alongside truth conditions in a unified framework. This new system overcomes the empirical gaps and conceptual problems associated with previous multidimensional systems; it also lessens the burden on the compositional system by shifting restrictions on the combination of use-conditional expressions to the lexicon-semantics interface instead of building them directly into the combinatoric rules. The approach outlined in this book can capture the entire meaning of complex expressions, and also has natural applications in the analysis of sentence mood and modal particles in German, as Gutzmann's two detailed case studies demonstrate. The book will be a valuable resource for linguists working in the fields of semantics, pragmatics, and philosophy of language, as well as to philosophers and cognitive scientists with an interest in meaning in language.

About the Author

Daniel Gutzmann is a Visiting Professor in German linguistics at the University of Cologne. His research interests are semantics, pragmatics, and philosophy of language. He has worked and published on the semantics of various kinds of non-truth conditional meaning, including expressives, modal particles, personal datives, sentence mood, and verum focus, as well as on the pragmatics of quotation. He is the co-editor of Beyond Expressives: Explorations in Use-Conditional Meaning (Brill, 2013) and of Approaches to Meaning: Composition, Values, and Interpretation (Brill, 2014). Gutzmann won the 2014 Humboldt award of the DGfS (German Linguistics Society) for the best dissertation on which his book is based. His theory integrates meaning and use-conditions of utterances in a unifying framework, and the high accessibility of his monograph was honourably mentioned by the jury.