This book offers a semantic and metasemantic inquiry into the representation of meaning in linguistic interaction. Kasia Jaszczolt offers a new contextualist take on the semantics/pragmatics boundary, and argues that this is the only promising stance on meaning. This approach allows the selection of the cognitively plausible object of enquiry - namely the intended, primary meaning - and its adoption as a unit of semantic analysis despite the varying provenance of the contributing information. The analysis transcends the said/implicated (...) distinction and heavily relies on the dynamic construction of meaning in discourse, using truth conditions as a tool and at the same time conforming to pragmatic compositionality. Meaning in Linguistic Interaction builds on the author's earlier work on Default Semantics, and adds new arguments in favour of radical contextualism, particularly with regard to the role of salience, the dynamic nature of the unit that forms a basis of the interpretation process, and the flexibility of word meaning. It is illustrated with examples from a variety of languages and offers formal representations of meaning in the metalanguage of Default Semantics. (shrink)

This book offers a new approach to the representation of meaning of temporally-located utterances and discourses. Temporality, the author suggests, should be taken to mean degrees of certainty, understood in turn as degrees of acceptability concerning the eventuality referred to in the speaker's utterance.

Humans are complex systems, ‘macro-entities’, whose existence, behaviour and consciousness stem out of the configurations of physical entities on the micro-level of the physical world. But an explanation of what humans do and think cannot be found through ‘tracking us back’, so to speak, to micro-particles. So, in explaining human behaviour, including linguistic behaviour on which this paper focuses, emergentism opens up a powerful opportunity to explain what it is exactly that emerged on that level, bearing in mind the end (...) product in the form of the intra- and inter-cultural diversity. Currently there is a gap in emergentism research. On one hand, there are discussions in philosophy of the emergent human reality; on the other, there are discussions of social, cultural, or individual variation of these emergent aspects of humanity in the fields of anthropology, sociology, linguistics or psychology. What I do in this paper is look for a way to ‘trace’ some such diversified emergents from what is universal about their ‘coming to being’, all the way through to their diversification. My chosen emergent is human time, my domain of inquiry is natural-language discourse, and the drive behind this project is to understand the link between ‘real’ time of spacetime on the micro-level from which we emerged and the human time devised by us, paying close attention to the overwhelming diversity in which temporal reference is expressed in human languages. The main question is, where does this diversity fit in? Does understanding of this diversity, as well as of what lurks under the surface of this diversity, aid the emergentism story? My contribution to this volume on ‘the nature of structure and the structure of nature’ thus takes the following take on the title. The structure of human communication is at the same time uniform, universal, and relative to culture, in that it is emergent as a human characteristic, and as such compatible with the micro-level correlates in some essential ways, but also free to fly in different directions that are specific to societies and cultures. I explore here the grey area between the micro-level and the linguistic reflections of time—the middle ground that is emergent itself but that tends to be by-passed by those who approach the question of human flowing time from either end: metaphysics and the philosophy of time on the one hand, and contrastive linguistics, anthropological linguistics and language documentation on the other. I illustrate the debate with examples from tensed and tenseless languages from different language families, entertaining the possibility of a conceptual universal pertaining to time as degrees of epistemic modality. Needless to say, putting the question in this way also sets out my (not unassailable) methodology. (shrink)

Linguists and philosophers examine the representation of temporal reference; the interaction of the temporal information from tense, aspect, modality, and context; and the representation of the temporal relations between facts, events, states, propositions, and utterances. They link this to current research in psychology and anthropology.

The book addresses different linguistic and philosophical aspects of referring to the self in a wide range of languages from different language families. It offers an interdisciplinary understanding of expressing the self that comprises philosophy of mind at one end of the spectrum and cross-cultural pragmatics of self-expression at the other.

In this pioneering book Kasia Jaszczolt lays down the foundations of an original theory of meaning in discourse, reveals the cognitive foundations of discourse interpretation, and puts forward a new basis for the analysis of discourse processing. She provides a step-by-step introduction to the theory and its application, and explains new terms and formalisms as required. Dr Jaszczolt unites the precision of truth-conditional, dynamic approaches with insights from neo-Gricean pragmatics into the role of speaker's intentions in communication. (...) She shows that the compositionality of meaning may be understood as merger representations combining information from various sources including word meaning and sentence structure, various kinds of default interpretations, and conscious pragmatic inference. Among the applications the author discusses are constructions that pose problems in semantic analysis such as referring expressions, propositional attitude constructions, presupposition, modality, numerals, and sentential connectives. She proposes solutions to cutting edge problems in the semantics/pragmatics interface - for example, how many levels of meaning should be distinguished; the status of underspecification; how much contextual information should be placed in the representation of the speaker's meaning; whether there are default interpretations; the stage of utterance interpretation at which pragmatic inference begins; and whether compositionality is a necessary feature of the theory of meaning and if so how it is to be defined.The book is for students and researchers in semantics, pragmatics, computational linguistics, and philosophy of language at advanced undergraduate level and above. (shrink)

This paper is a voice in the ongoing discussion on the source and properties of pragmatic inference that contributes to the representation of discourse meaning. I start off from the contextualist standpoint of truth-conditional pragmatics and develop a proposal of representations of utterance meaning, the so-called merger representations, that incorporate the output of pragmatic inference. The move from TCP to pragmatics-rich semantics of acts of communication is facilitated by rethinking the compositionality of meaning and predicating compositionality of such pragmatics-rich structures. (...) I argue that the advantage of 'semanticizing' the output of pragmatic sources of meaning is that we can relax the view on compositionality of meaning and offer an algorithm of the interaction of such sources where the requirement of compositionality is imposed on the output of the interaction rather than on the output of the syntactic processing of the sentence. This proposal is applied to belief reports for which it offers representations of their various readings. (shrink)

The current study examines patterns of attachment/self-protective strategies and rates of unresolved loss/trauma in children and adolescents presenting to a multidisciplinary gender service. Fifty-seven children and adolescents (8.42–15.92 years; 24 birth-assigned males and 33 birth-assigned females) presenting with gender dysphoria participated in structured attachment interviews coded using dynamic-maturational model (DMM) discourse analysis. The children with gender dysphoria were compared to age- and sex-matched children from the community (non-clinical group) and a group of school-age children with mixed psychiatric disorders (mixed psychiatric (...) group). Information about adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), mental health diagnoses, and global level of functioning was also collected. In contrast to children in the non-clinical group, who were classified primarily into the normative attachment patterns (A1-2, B1-5, and C1-2) and who had low rates of unresolved loss/trauma, children with gender dysphoria were mostly classified into the high-risk attachment patterns (A3-4, A5-6, C3-4, C5-6, and A/C) (χ2= 52.66;p< 0.001) and had a high rate of unresolved loss/trauma (χ2= 18.64;p< 0.001). Comorbid psychiatric diagnoses (n= 50; 87.7%) and a history of self-harm, suicidal ideation, or symptoms of distress were also common. Global level of functioning was impaired (range 25–95/100; mean = 54.88;SD= 15.40; median = 55.00). There were no differences between children with gender dysphoria and children with mixed psychiatric disorders on attachment patterns (χ2= 2.43;p= 0.30) and rates of unresolved loss and trauma (χ2= 0.70;p= 0.40).Post hocanalyses showed that lower SES, family constellation (a non-traditional family unit), ACEs—including maltreatment (physical abuse, sexual abuse, emotional abuse, neglect, and exposure to domestic violence)—increased the likelihood of the child being classified into a high risk attachment pattern. Akin to children with other forms of psychological distress, children with gender dysphoria present in the context of multiple interacting risk factors that include at-risk attachment, unresolved loss/trauma, family conflict and loss of family cohesion, and exposure to multiple ACEs. (shrink)

Investigation into the reality of time can be pursued within the ontological domain or it can also span human thought and natural language. I propose to approach time by correlating three domains of inquiry: metaphysical time, the human concept of time, and temporal reference in natural language, entertaining the possibility of what I call a ‘horizontal reduction’ and ‘vertical reduction’. I present a view of temporalityL/E as epistemic modality, drawing on evidence from the L domain and its correlates in the (...) E and M domains. On this view, the human concept of time is a complex, ‘molecular’ concept and can be broken down into primitive concepts that are modal in nature, featuring as degrees of epistemic commitment to representations of states of affairs. I present evidence from tensed and tenseless languages and point out its compatibility with the view of real time as metaphysical modality. (shrink)

The article is a response to Lepore and Stone 2015 and offers a critical discussion of their claims that various aspects of discourse meaning can be ascribed togrammar and that the concept of semantic ambiguity can be defended in the light of the current debates on the semantics/pragmatics interface. It also addresses the question of the understanding of conventions and inferences and their place in the above interface. It ends with the claim that the role Lepore and Stone ascribe to (...) grammar cannot be defended. (shrink)

This is an interdisciplinary volume that focuses on the central topic of the representation of events, namely cross-cultural differences in representing time and space, as well as various aspects of the conceptualisation of space and time.

Vagueness in event times pertains to the observation that one usually finds it difficult to slice the continuous flux of space-time into a series of events with clear-cut temporal boundaries. I argue that such vagueness originates from our ignorance of discrete changing points wherein states of affairs begin or cease to obtain. Applying the epistemic view on vagueness (Williamson 1994) to vagueness in event times, I contend that the lagging nature of knowledge prevents one from knowing the abrupt changes taking (...) place between contiguous minimal time intervals. In turn, vagueness in the conception of event times is construed in terms of epistemic modality (Jaszczolt 2009), viz. a gradation of a thinker’s epistemic certainty towards the occurrence of a physical change. (shrink)

(No abstract is available for this citation).

This book is about meaning - not the meaning of certain concepts such as the meaning of life or the meaning of freedom but about what it means for linguistic expressions to mean something. It is also a book about meaning for humans. The qualification 'human meaning' is not yet common in linguistics book titles but it is increasingly important to add it. We are already experiencing fundamental differences in how, and what kind of, meaning is approached in computational linguistics (...) and computer science in general on the one hand, and in philosophy of language or sociopragmatics on the other. (shrink)

This book is about beliefs, language, communication and cognition. It deals with the fundamental issue of the interpretation of the speaker's utterance expressing a belief and reporting on beliefs of other people in the form of oratio obliqua. The main aim of the book is to present a new account of the problem of interpreting utterances expressing beliefs and belief reports in terms of an approach called Default Semantics.

Recent empirical work has offered strong support for ‘biased pluralism’ and ‘economic elite’ accounts of political power in the United States, according a central role to ‘business interest groups’ as a mechanism through which corporate influence is exerted. Here, we propose an additional channel of influence for corporate interests: the ‘policy-planning network,’ consisting of corporate-dominated foundations, think tanks, and elite policy-discussion groups. To evaluate this assertion, we consider one key policy-discussion group, the Council on Foreign Relations. We first briefly review (...) the origins of this organization and then review earlier findings on its influence. We then code CFR policy preferences on 295 foreign policy issues during the 1981–2002 period. In logistic regression analyses, we find that the preferences of more affluent citizens and the CFR were positive, statistically significant predictors of foreign policy outcomes while business interest group preferences were not. These findings are discussed with a consideration of the patterns of CFR ‘successes’ and ‘failures’ for the issues in our dataset. Although a full demonstration of a causal connection between corporate interests, the policy-planning network and policy outcomes requires further research, we conclude that this has been shown to be a plausible mechanism through which corporate interests are represented and that ‘biased pluralism’ researchers should include it in their future investigations. (shrink)

This is a collection of nine papers dealing with the topic of reporting on beliefs and other attitudes, and in particular with the issue of the semantics-pragmatics boundary dispute which is the core topic of research in the field.

v. 1. Meanings and representations -- v. 2. Discourse strategies.