Use-Conditional Meaning: Studies in Multidimensional Semantics (Oxford Studies in Semantics and Pragmatics, 6)

Oversized paperback, xvii + 304 pages, NOT ex-library. A touch of wear to tips of corners, minor internal creasing. Book is clean and bright with unmarked text, free of inscriptions and stamps, firmly bound. A long gentle crease on the spine. -- This book develops a formal semantic framework that systematically integrates non-truth-conditional aspects of meaning, proposing a 'hybrid semantics' that operates with two distinct but interacting dimensions: truth conditions and use conditions. The central argument is that the conventional meaning of many expressions - such as expressives like 'damn' or colored terms like 'cur' - is best captured not by their contribution to a proposition's truth value, but by the conditions under which they can be felicitously uttered. The work first provides a conceptual and empirical foundation, categorizing various use-conditional items (UCIs) and outlining a denotational system for use-conditional content based on sets of contexts. It then undertakes a critical assessment of previous multidimensional logics, notably Potts's L_CI and its extensions, identifying key limitations in their handling of mixed content and their 'interpretational' rather than 'compositional' approach to multidimensionality. Building on this critique, the book introduces a novel formal logic, L_TU, which implements 'true multidimensionality' by assigning a three-dimensional meaning profile to every expression from the outset. This system avoids the compositionality problems of its predecessors and simplifies the combinatorics by shifting restrictions to the lexicon-semantics interface, managed by lexical extension rules. The framework's analytical power is demonstrated through two detailed case studies: an analysis of sentence mood as a use-conditional operator and an account of German modal particles, whose peculiar syntactic and semantic properties are shown to derive naturally from their use-conditional status.…