Does context and context-dependence belong to the research agenda of semantics - and, specifically, of formal semantics? Not so long ago many linguists and philosophers would probably have given a negative answer to the question. However, recent developments in formal semantics have indicated that analyzing natural language semantics without a thorough accommodation of context-dependence is next to impossible. The classification of the ways in which context and context-dependence enter semantic analysis, though, is (...) still a matter of much controversy and some of these disputes are ventilated in the present collection. This book is not only a collection of papers addressing context-dependence and methods for dealing with it: it also records comments to the papers and the authors' replies to the comments. In this way, the contributions themselves are contextually dependent. In view of the fact that the contributors to the volume are such key figures in contemporary formal semantics as Hans Kamp, Barbara Partee, Reinhard Muskens, Nicholas Asher, Manfred Krifka, Jaroslav Peregrin and many others, the book represents a quite unique inquiry into the current activities on the semantics side of the semantics/pragmatics boundary. (shrink)

Nonindexical Context-Dependence and the Interpretation as Abduction Approach Inclusive nonindexical context-dependence occurs when the preferred interpretation of an utterance implies its lexically-derived meaning. It is argued that the corresponding processes of free or lexically mandated enrichment can be modeled as abductive inference. A form of abduction is implemented in Simple Type Theory on the basis of a notion of plausibility, which is in turn regarded a preference relation over possible worlds. Since a preordering of doxastic alternatives (...) taken for itself only amounts to a relatively vacuous ad hoc model, it needs to be combined with a rational way of learning from new evidence. Lexicographic upgrade is implemented as an example of how an agent might revise his plausibility ordering in light of new evidence. Various examples are given how this apparatus may be used to model the contextual resolution of context-dependent or semantically incomplete utterances. The described form of abduction is limited and merely serves as a proof of concept, but the idea in general has good potential as one among many ways to build a bridge between semantics and pragmatics since inclusive context-dependence is ubiquitous. (shrink)

Linguistic expressions frequently make reference to the situation in which they are uttered. In fact, there are expressions whose whole point of use is to relate to their context of utterance. It is such expressions that this article is primarily about. However, rather than presenting the richness of pertinent phenomena (cf. Anderson & Keenan 1985), it concentrates on the theoretical tools provided by the (standard) two-dimensional analysis of context dependence, essentially originating with Kaplan (1989)--with a little (...) help from Stalnaker (1978) and Lewis (1979a, 1980), and various predecessors including Kamp (1971) and Vlach (1973). The current article overlaps in content with the account in Zimmermann (1991), which is however much broader (and at times deeper).. (shrink)

This paper argues that truth values of sentences containing predicates of “personal taste” such as fun or tasty must be relativized to individuals. This relativization is of truth value only, and does not involve a relativization of semantic content: If you say roller coasters are fun, and I say they are not, I am negating the same content which you assert, and directly contradicting you. Nonetheless, both our utterances can be true (relative to their separate contexts). A formal semantic theory (...) is presented which gives this result by introducing an individual index, analogous to the world and time indices commonly used, and by treating the pragmatic context as supplying a particular value for this index. The context supplies this value in the derivation of truth values from content, not in the derivation of content from character. Predicates of personal taste therefore display a kind of contextual variation in interpretation which is unlike the familiar variation exhibited by pronouns and other indexicals. (shrink)

This paper discusses the semantics of bare existentials , i.e. existentials in which nothing follows the post copular NP (e.g. There are four sections ). While it has sometimes been recognized that the interpretation of such sentences depends in some way on context, the exact nature of the context dependence involved has not been properly understood. It is shown that the meaning of bare existentials involves a set-denoting implicit argument, and that the range of interpretations found with (...) bare existentials is predictable from the general properties of implicit arguments. An explicit analysis within a dynamic setting is presented. (shrink)

Aims and Scope -/- This volume brings together original papers by linguists and philosophers on the role of context and perspective in language and thought. Several contributions are concerned with the contextualism/relativism debate, which has loomed large in recent philosophical discussions. In a substantial introduction, the editors survey the field and map out the relevant issues and positions.

Drawing upon research in philosophical logic, linguistics and cognitive science, this study explores how our ability to use and understand language depends upon our capacity to keep track of complex features of the contexts in which we converse.

This paper revisits a challenge for contextualist approaches to paradoxes such as the Liar paradox and Russell’s paradox. Contextualists argue that these paradoxes are to be resolved by appeal to context dependence. This can offer some nice and effective ways to avoid paradox. But there is a problem. Context dependence is, at least to begin with, a phenomenon in natural language. Is there really such context dependence as the solutions to paradoxes require, and is (...) it really just a familiar linguistic phenomenon at work? Not so clearly. In earlier work, I argued that the required form of context dependence does not look like our most familiar instances of context dependence in natural language. I called this extraordinary context dependence. In this paper, I shall explore, somewhat tentatively, a way that we can see the context dependence needed to address paradoxes as not so extraordinary. Doing so will also allow us to connect thinking about the context dependence of quantifier domains with some interesting ideas about the distinctive semantic properties of certain quantifiers. (shrink)

This paper revisits a challenge for contextualist approaches to paradoxes such as the Liar paradox and Russell’s paradox. Contextualists argue that these paradoxes are to be resolved by appeal to context dependence. This can offer some nice and effective ways to avoid paradox. But there is a problem. Context dependence is, at least to begin with, a phenomenon in natural language. Is there really such context dependence as the solutions to paradoxes require, and is (...) it really just a familiar linguistic phenomenon at work? Not so clearly. In earlier work, I argued that the required form of context dependence does not look like our most familiar instances of context dependence in natural language. I called this extraordinary context dependence. In this paper, I shall explore, somewhat tentatively, a way that we can see the context dependence needed to address paradoxes as not so extraordinary. Doing so will also allow us to connect thinking about the context dependence of quantifier domains with some interesting ideas about the distinctive semantic properties of certain quantifiers. (shrink)

Several philosophers offer explanations of linguistic vagueness by appealing to the referential context-dependence of vague terms. Timothy Williamson argues pre-emptively that any such approach must fail, on the grounds that context-dependence is neither necessary nor sufficient for vagueness. He supports this claim, in turn, by example. This paper argues that his examples fail to show that context-dependence is either unnecessary or insufficient for vagueness, and hence that he has failed by his own lights (...) to show that it cannot explain vagueness. (shrink)

This article aims to expand the concept of fixedness in language from stable autonomous structures to socially shared patterns of communication. The study examined conversational utterances that sounded strange or ‘unnatural’ to members of a speech community and explored the reasons behind such intuitive perceptions. Some of these utterances contradicted the community members’ expectations based on sedimented patterns of linguistic resources of various sizes and associated conventional meanings beyond dictionary definitions. Others challenged their expectations concerning positional fitness and socio-relational (...) concerns. The observed expectations for sedimented patterns of communication likely result from a lifetime of experience talking and hearing about the world around them in ways that are accepted by other members of the speech community. The dynamic perspective on fixedness is particularly meaningful for context-dependent languages like Japanese that rely heavily on unexpressed shared knowledge in co-constructing meanings and actions. (shrink)

Sensitivity to the extra-linguistic context, as exhibited by indexical and demonstrative expressions, and sensitivity to the linguistic context, as exhibited by, for example, anaphoric uses of third person pronouns, are regularly regarded as different and independent phenomena. The data on indexicals, demonstratives, and third person pronouns, however, call for a more unified notion of context and of context sensitivity. This paper aims to develop such a unified picture by generalizing the notion of anaphora to (...) encompass extra-linguistic context dependency and generalizing the notion of a structured discourse context so that contexts contain antecedents for expressions that refer to entities in the extra-linguistic context. (shrink)

Since language is the collective focus of this series, the present paper follows both historiographical and theoretical perspectives. The first deals with Prague as a Middle-European town, with a German and Czech University from 1882, where a philosopher, Anton Marty, from the Brentano school, focuses on language and semasiology in the framework of a psychology from an empirical standpoint. He cites Christian von Ehrenfels, and underscores the relational approach to psychic dynamism but, crucially, he emphasises the oscillations between linguistic (...) “sketches” and semantic comprehension. Sprache ist eine Skizze, listeners are lead through suggestions, Nebenvorstellungen, to grasp meanings, Bedeutungen which do not coincide with the mere addition of explicit, variable components. Simultaneously, Vilém Mathesius, forthcoming founder (1926) of the Prague Linguistic Circle, dealing with English language and literature, enquires into the spontaneous ability of listeners to grasp, infer, integrate ellipsis in a sentence, consisting of a missing word, in omissione vocabuli, quod non dictum tamen cogitatur. Language enquiries will then require psychology, will aim to explain inferences, to infer implicit from explicit. The effort to obtain the whole, via super- or even subsummativity processes, has been a special topic for Gestalt psychology. Context being the proper habitat for both language and mind, we follow the fil rouge which leads directly to Gestalt contributions and further developments, e.g., inferential semantics and pragmatics. In conversation, as in architecture, less is more. We strive to prove this. (shrink)

Limited distribution phenomena related to negation and negative polarity are usually thought of in terms of affectivity where affective is understood as negative or downward entailing. In this paper I propose an analysis of affective contexts as nonveridical and treat negative polarity as a manifestation of the more general phenomenon of sensitivity to (non)veridicality (which is, I argue, what affective dependencies boil down to). Empirical support for this analysis will be provided by a detailed examination of affective dependencies in Greek, (...) but the distribution of any will also be shown to follow from (non)veridicality. (shrink)

This chapter provides some tentative conclusions about the likely linguistic status of context‐sensitive semantic properties. It argues that pragmatism is fully aligned with a standard approach to syntax, and should be the default view of the notion of a linguistic 'context', viz., context is not a well‐behaved linguistic notion. But rather a potentially open‐ended way of marking the role extra‐linguistic factors can play in fixing what is said on an occasion of the use (...) of a linguistic type. Context sensitivity is not restricted to the construal of overt linguistic material. It also appears that the construal of tokens of many constructions depends upon contextual factors that are not explicitly encoded in linguistic material; that is, if pronouns are explicit variables, then there appear to be implicit or covert variables as well. Truth‐value of a sentence in context is assigned relative to the value a coordinate of the index takes under the scope of the operator. (shrink)

We examine metonymy at psycho- and neurolinguistic levels, seeking to adjudicate between two possible processing implementations. We compare highly conventionalized systematic metonymy to lesser-conventionalized circumstantial metonymy. Whereas these two metonymy types differ in terms of contextual demands, they each reveal a similar dependency between the named and intended conceptual entities. We reason that if each metonymy yields a distinct processing time course and substantially non-overlapping preferential localization pattern, it would not only support a two-mechanism view but would suggest that conventionalization (...) acts as a linguistic categorizer. By contrast, a similar behavior in time course and localization would support a one-mechanism view and the inference that conventionalization acts instead as a modulator of contextual felicitousness, and that differences in interpretation introduced by conventionalization are of degree, not of kind. Results from three paradigms: self-paced reading, event-related potentials, and functional magnetic resonance imaging, reveal the following: no main effect by condition for either metonymy type immediately after the metonymy trigger, and a main effect for only the Circumstantial metonymy one word post-trigger ; a N400 effect across metonymy types and a late positivity for Circumstantial metonymy ; and a highly overlapping activation connecting the left ventrolateral prefrontal cortex and the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. Altogether, the pattern observed does not reach the threshold required to justify a two-mechanism system. Instead, the pattern is more naturally understood as resulting from the implementation of a generalized referential dependency mechanism, modulated by degree of context dependence/conventionalization, thus supporting architectures of language whereby “lexical” and “pragmatic” meaning relations are encoded along a cline of contextual underspecification. (shrink)

This unique volume explores what ethics has to offer the practicing physician, nurse, and allied health care worker. The authors introduce the basic vocabulary of ethics and present and discuss the most commonly used ethical theories, using case studies to illustrate how ethics work within the context of health care. Newcomers to the field will learn what ethics is all about and how it relates to the pragmatic concerns of the health care professional. Those who already have a working (...) knowledge of the field will find a new approach to ethical theory--personalism--which the authors believe can make the practical use of ethics more effective and reliable. (shrink)

Distributed Cognition and Integrational Linguistics have much in common. Both approaches see communicative activity and intelligent behaviour in general as strongly con- text-dependent and action-oriented, and brains as permeated by history. But there is some ten- sion between the two frameworks on three important issues. The majority of theorists of distributed cognition want to maintain some notions of mental representation and computa- tion, and to seek generalizations and patterns in the various ways in which creatures like us couple with technologies, (...) media, and other agents; many also want to offer explanations at subpersonal levels which may undercut the autonomy of personal-level accounts. In contrast, dominant views in integrational linguistics reject all invocation of representation, resist the explanatory search for similarity across contexts and moments, and see linguistics as a lay dis- cipline which should not offer explanations in terms alien to ordinary agents. On each of these issues, I argue that integrationists could move closer to the distributed cognition frame- work without losing the most important aspects of their view: integrationist criticisms of mainstream or classical theories can be respected while alliances with revised cognitivist views about representation, context, and explanation are developed. Ó 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. (shrink)

In this article some phenomena of linguistic context-dependence are investigated from the perspective of regarding context as being constituted by the assumptions of individual discourse participants.

This article probes the usefulness of selected theories from Cognitive Linguistics in the context of statutory interpretation. The presumption of legal language is a well-established rule of statutory construction in Polish legal practice that comes from the internationally recognised theory by Jerzy Wróblewski. It rests on a controversial assumption that there are different levels of generality in legal language (i.e. the language of statutes) and a single term may be given different meanings depending on the level of generality that (...) is referred to. The authors use the notion of basic level categorisation from the cognitive theory of prototypes to explain this mechanism. Legal concepts, not unlike ordinary concepts, form hierarchical taxonomies. A single term may denote concepts that are situated at different levels in different conceptual taxonomies. In the absence of special circumstances, a legal term should be given the meaning that resides at a higher level of categorisation in the respective legal taxonomy. This way, the presumption of legal language is found to be justified on both linguistic and psychological grounds. (shrink)

In this paper, I defend the thesis that alleffects of extra-linguistic context on thetruth-conditions of an assertion are traceable toelements in the actual syntactic structure of thesentence uttered. In the first section, I develop thethesis in detail, and discuss its implications for therelation between semantics and pragmatics. The nexttwo sections are devoted to apparent counterexamples.In the second section, I argue that there are noconvincing examples of true non-sentential assertions.In the third section, I argue that there are noconvincing examples (...) of what John Perry has called`unarticulated constituents''. I conclude by drawingsome consequences of my arguments for appeals tocontext-dependence in the resolution of problems inepistemology and philosophical logic. (shrink)

The text aims at discussing the verbo-visual means of expression employed in three climate change-related campaigns in the context of their effectiveness. The chosen climate change awareness raising campaigns by two non-governmental organisations, EcoEduca and World Wide Fund for Nature Inc. (WWF), deal with the results of Arctic permafrost thaw resulting in the loss of sea ice dependent animals’ habitat. A cognitive linguistics oriented analysis refers to the theory of metaphor (Lakoff and Johnson 1980, Forceville 1996, Kövecses 2002, 2014), (...) conceptual blending (Fauconnier and Turner 2003), and construal (Langacker 1987, 2008). The visual layer will also be described with reference to a grammar approach to visual communication (Kress and Van Leeuwen 1996, 2001, Machin 2010). (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to establish a specific view of linguistic understanding based on the framework of normative inferentialism. Normative inferentialism is presented as an overspecification (rich) account of meaning—the meaning of a sentence is understood as a cluster of context‐dependent contents. The standard psychological mechanism responsible for reaching understanding of an utterance depends on the ability to eliminate contextually irrelevant aspects/parts of meaning. The advantages of the view are that the mechanism can (a) explain a (...) wide range of linguistic phenomena including polysemy, homonymy, and conversational implicatures, and (b) explain partial understanding of an utterance. (shrink)

In this paper we examine how English and Mandarin speakers think about time, and we test how the patterns of thinking in the two groups relate to patterns in linguistic and cultural experience. In Mandarin, vertical spatial metaphors are used more frequently to talk about time than they are in English; English relies primarily on horizontal terms. We present results from two tasks comparing English and Mandarin speakers’ temporal reasoning. The tasks measure how people spatialize time in three-dimensional space, (...) including the sagittal (front/back), transverse (left/right), and vertical (up/down) axes. Results of Experiment 1 show that people automatically create spatial representations in the course of temporal reasoning, and these implicit spatializations differ in accordance with patterns in language, even in a non-linguistic task. Both groups showed evidence of a left-to-right representation of time, in accordance with writing direction, but only Mandarin speakers showed a vertical top-to-bottom pattern for time (congruent with vertical spatiotemporal metaphors in Mandarin). Results of Experiment 2 confirm and extend these findings, showing that bilinguals’ representations of time depend on both long-term and proximal aspects of language experience. Participants who were more proficient in Mandarin were more likely to arrange time vertically (an effect of previous language experience). Further, bilinguals were more likely to arrange time vertically when they were tested in Mandarin than when they were tested in English (an effect of immediate linguistic context). (shrink)

This book proposes a semantic theory of conditionals that can account for (i) the variability in usages that conditional sentences can be put; and (ii) both conditional sentences of the form ‘if p, q’ and those conditional thoughts that are expressed without using ‘if’. It presents theoretical arguments as well as empirical evidence from English and other languages in support of the thesis that an adequate study of conditionals has to go beyond an analysis of specific sentence forms or lexical (...) items. The resulting perspective on conditionals is one in which conditionality is located at a higher level than that of the sentence; namely, at the level of thought. The author argues that it is only through adopting such a perspective, and with it, a commitment to context-dependent semantics, that we can successfully represent conditional utterances as they are used and understood by ordinary language users. It will be of interest to students and scholars working on the semantics of conditionals in the fields of linguistics (especially semantics and pragmatics) and philosophy of language. (shrink)

Most people working on linguistic meaning or communication assume that semantics and pragmatics are distinct domains, yet there is still little consensus on how the distinction is to be drawn. The position defended in this paper is that the semantics/pragmatics distinction holds between encoded linguistic meaning and speaker meaning. Two other ‘minimalist’ positions on semantics are explored and found wanting: Kent Bach’s view that there is a narrow semantic notion of context which is responsible for providing semantic (...) values for a small number of indexicals, and Herman Cappelen and Ernie Lepore’s view that semantics includes the provision of values for all indexicals, even though these depend on the speaker’s communicative intentions. Finally, some implications are considered for the favoured semantics/pragmatics distinction of the fact that there are linguistic elements which do not contribute to truth-conditional content but rather provide guidance on pragmatic inference. (shrink)

Stefano Predelli comes to the defense of the traditional "formal" approach to natural-language semantics, arguing that it has been misrepresented not only by its critics, but also by its foremost defenders. In Contexts he offers a fundamental reappraisal, with particular attention to the treatment of indexicality and other forms of contextual dependence which have been the focus of much recent controversy. In the process, he presents original approaches to a number of important semantic issues, including the relationship between validity (...) and indexicality, the limits of token-reflexive systems, the significance of contextualist arguments, and the interpretation of attitude reports. Contexts will make invigorating reading for all philosophers of language and many linguists. (shrink)

Although epistemic possibility figures in several debates, those debates have had relatively little contact with one another. G. E. Moore focused squarely upon analyzing epistemic uses of the phrase, ‘It’s possible that p’, and in doing so he made two fundamental assumptions. First, he assumed that epistemic possibility statements always express the epistemic position of a community, as opposed to that of an individual speaker. Second, he assumed that all epistemic uses of ‘It’s possible that p’ are analyzable in terms (...) of knowledge, not belief. A number of later theorists, including Keith DeRose, provide alternative accounts of epistemic possibility, while retaining Moore’s two assumptions. Neither assumption has been explicitly challenged, but Jaakko Hintikka’s analysis provides a basis for doing so. Drawing upon Hintikka’s analysis, I argue that some epistemic possibility statements express only the speaker’s individual epistemic state, and that contra DeRose, they are not degenerate community statements but a class in their own right. I further argue that some linguistic contexts are belief- rather than knowledge-based, and in such contexts, what is possible for a speaker depends not upon what she knows, but upon what she believes. (shrink)

Color adjectives have played a central role in work on language typology and variation, but there has been relatively little investigation of their meanings by researchers in formal semantics. This is surprising given the fact that color terms have been at the center of debates in the philosophy of language over foundational questions, in particular whether the idea of a compositional, truth-conditional theory of natural language semantics is even coherent. The challenge presented by color terms is articulated in detail in (...) the work of Charles Travis. Travis argues that structurally isomorphic sentences containing color adjectives can shift truth value from context to context depending on how they are used and in the absence of effects of vagueness or ambiguity/polysemy, and concludes that a deterministic mapping from structures to truth conditions is impossible. The goal of this paper is to provide a linguistic perspective on this issue, which we believe defuses Travis’ challenge. We provide empirical arguments that color adjectives are in fact ambiguous between gradable and nongradable interpretations, and that this simple ambiguity, together with independently motivated options concerning scalar dimension within the gradable reading accounts for the Travis facts in a simpler, more constrained, and thus ultimately more successful fashion than recent contextualist analyses such as those in Szabó (Perspectives on semantics, pragmatics and discourse: A festschrift for Ferenc Kiefer, 2001) or Rothschild and Segal (Mind Lang, 2009). (shrink)

Cross-linguistic studies focus on inverse correlations (trade-offs) between linguistic variables that reflect different cues to linguistic meanings. For example, if a language has no case marking, it is likely to rely on word order as a cue for identification of grammatical roles. Such inverse correlations are interpreted as manifestations of language users’ tendency to use language efficiently. The present study argues that this interpretation is problematic. Linguistic variables, such as the presence of case, or flexibility of (...) word order, are aggregate properties, which do not represent the use of linguistic cues in context directly. Still, such variables can be useful for circumscribing the potential role of communicative efficiency in language evolution, if we move from cross-linguistic trade-offs to multivariate causal networks. This idea is illustrated by a case study of linguistic variables related to four types of Subject and Object cues: case marking, rigid word order of Subject and Object, tight semantics and verb-medial order. The variables are obtained from online language corpora in thirty languages, annotated with the Universal Dependencies. The causal model suggests that the relationships between the variables can be explained predominantly by sociolinguistic factors, leaving little space for a potential impact of efficient linguistic behavior. (shrink)

Current theories of context see context as composed of information that is localizable to individual utterances. Current theories of discourse grant that discourses have important global properties that are not so localizable. In this paper, I argue that context, even narrowly construed as whatever combines with a sentence to determine truth conditions, must have a discourse -global component. I identify a context-dependence phenomenon related to the linguistic concepts of topic and focus, isolate the pertinent (...) feature of context, and show that this feature must be discourse -global in nature. I thus argue that context is as complicated as an entire discourse. (shrink)

Limited distribution phenomena related to negation and negative polarity are usually thought of in terms of affectivity where affective is understood as negative or downward entailing. In this paper I propose an analysis of affective contexts as nonveridical and treat negative polarity as a manifestation of the more general phenomenon of sensitivity to (non)veridicality (which is, I argue, what affective dependencies boil down to). Empirical support for this analysis will be provided by a detailed examination of affective dependencies in Greek, (...) but the distribution of any will also be shown to follow from (non)veridicality. (shrink)

Current theories of context see context as composed of information that is localizable to individual utterances. Current theories of discourse grant that discourses have important global properties that are not so localizable. In this paper, I argue that context, even narrowly construed as whatever combines with a sentence to determine truth conditions, must have a discourse–global component. I identify a context–dependence phenomenon related to the linguistic concepts of topic and focus, isolate the pertinent feature (...) of context, and show that this feature must be discourse–global in nature. I thus argue that context is as complicated as an entire discourse. (shrink)

The paper emphasizes the inadequacy of formal semantics, the classical paradigm in semantics, in treating contextual dependence. Some phenomena of contextual dependence threaten one central assumption of the classical paradigm, namely the idea that linguistic expressions have a fixed meaning, and utterances have truth conditions well defined. It is possible to individuate three forms of contextual dependence: the one affecting pure indexicals, the one affecting demonstratives and "contextual expressions", and the one affecting all linguistic expressions. (...) The third type of dependence is top-down: context, and not only linguistic material, shows which variables must be instantiated, relying on context itself. The generalization of underdetermination to all linguistic expressions is in fact a kind of metadependence: the mode of dependence itself depends on context. (shrink)

Twitter is a linguistic marketplace in which the processes of self-branding and micro-celebrity depend on visibility as a means of increasing social and economic gain. Hashtags are a potent resource within this system for promoting the visibility of a Twitter update. This study analyses the frequency, types and grammatical context of hashtags which occurred in a dataset of approximately 92,000 tweets, taken from 100 publically available Twitter accounts, comparing the discourse styles of corporations, celebrity practitioners and ‘ordinary’ Twitter (...) members. The results suggest that practices of self-branding and micro-celebrity operate on a continuum which reflects and reinforces the social and economic hierarchies which exist in offline contexts. Despite claims that hashtags are ‘conversational’, this study suggests that participatory culture in Twitter is not evenly distributed, and that the discourse of celebrity practitioners and corporations exhibits the synthetic personalization typical of mainstream media forms of broadcast talk. (shrink)

This paper calls for a paradigm shift in studying academic dependency, towards the paradigm of brokered dependency. Using Chinese academia as an example, I demonstrate how the neocolonial condition of academic dependency is always mediated through blockage-brokerage mechanisms. The two most salient blockage-brokerage mechanisms of dependency in the Chinese context are linguistic barrier and authoritarian malepistemization, and the effects of the latter consist of three layers: institutional, informational and incorporational. On top of their domestic impacts, those mechanisms jointly (...) exacerbate spectacularized postcoloniality in anglophone-hegemonic global academic publishing. The paradigm of brokered dependency not only represents a more nuanced approach to the study of academic dependency, but also underscores the fact that the dismantling of the neocolonial condition cannot be conceived and pursued in isolation from comprehending and confronting the authoritarian condition, especially when the latter pertains under the disguise of anticolonialism. (shrink)

The research conducted in this article is aimed at analyzing color symbols in Russian, French and Chinese linguistic cultures using the analysis of phraseology and proverbs. The research methodology is based on a comparative analysis of phraseological units and proverbs containing color components in these languages. In the course of the study, both common and unique features in the color symbolism of each of the linguistic cultures under consideration were identified. Through a comparative analysis of phraseology and proverbs (...) in different languages, it was possible to better understand how color embodies cultural norms, worldview and historical contexts in each nation. This allowed us to see which aspects of color are particularly significant for each culture and what associations and symbolic meanings are associated with them. Special attention is paid to the analysis of differences and similarities in the interpretation of color in the idiomatic expressions of each language. This allows us to understand which cultural and historical factors form unique views and ideas about color in each of the linguistic cultures under consideration. The study also highlights that the interpretation of color symbols in idiomatic expressions depends on the cultural and historical contexts of each language. Idioms are a reflection of the collective consciousness and worldview of the people, and the study of color phenomena in idioms helps to better understand national identity and linguistic evolution. In addition, the study found that the red color can acquire different meanings and connotations in different languages, despite common dictionary definitions. This indicates that the use and attitude towards the color red depends on the cultural and historical characteristics of each language group. The scientific novelty of the work lies in the fact that it combines linguistic analysis with the analysis of cultural characteristics and uses the methodology of synergetic symbolism. This approach allows us to understand how the interaction of different colors creates new symbolic meanings and associations specific to each culture. (shrink)

When “Sinning Against Frege” was published in 1979 I thought it should have given a real turn in the discussion on Frege’s ideas. Actually the impact was less then I imagined, and the problem was that – at the end of the story – Tyler Burge’s interpretation should have posed a shadow on the direct reference theories and the Millean criticism of descriptivist theories of proper names, based on the criticism of the identification of Frege’s notion of sense with (...) class='Hi'>linguistic meaning or connotation1. In fact Burge (1979) claims that the identification of Frege’s notion of sense with the notion of linguistic meaning is a «basic misunderstanding» of Frege’s work2. This claim implies that Fregean senses are not like Mill’s connotations; therefore many direct-reference criticisms against Frege, which are grounded on Mill’s claims that proper names have no connotation, lose their efficacy. Burge, in giving specifications3, apparently accepts at least the idea that sense is an aspect of meaning, in particular «the aspect of meaning relevant to fixing the truth value of sentences». This feature is the “harmless” part of the assimilation of sense and linguistic meaning; but this assimilation becomes dangerous when context dependence is concerned. Revisiting Burge (1979), after more than two decades of debate on indexicals, may help to better understand the originality and the limitation of his claims. (shrink)

Context and Communication offers an introduction to a central theme in the study of language: the various ways in which what we say depends on the context of speech and thought. The period since 1970 has produced a vast literature on this topic, both by philosophers and by linguists. This book explores key data, questions, concepts, and theories of context sensitivity. It is written to be accessible to someone with no prior knowledge of the material or, indeed, (...) any prior knowledge of philosophy, and is ideal for use as part of a philosophy of language course by students of philosophy or linguistics. (shrink)

Introduction. PHilosophy of Language and Linguistics: The Formal Turn Piotr Stalmaszczyk Gottlob Frege, Philosophy of Language, and Predication Piotr Stalmaszczyk Philosophy, Linguistics and Semantic Interpretation Christian Bassac An Unresolved Issue: Nonsense in Natural Language and Non-Classical Logical and Semantic Systems Elzbieta Chrzanowska-Kluczewska Varieties of Context-Dependence Tadeusz Ciecierski The Logos of Semantic Structure Marie Du í, Bjørn Jespersen and Pavel Materna The Good Samaritan and the Hygienic Cook: A Cautionary Tale About Linguistic Data Chris Fox The Meaning of (...) Multiple Quantified Sentences: Where Formal Semantics Meets Psycholinguistics Justyna Grudzinska The Hybrid Theory of Reference for Proper Names Filip Kawczynski On the Nature of Statistical Language Laws Agnieszka Kulacka Vagueness and Contextualism Joanna Odrowaz-Sypniewska The Myth of Semantic Structure Jaroslav Peregrin Scalar Implicatures, Communication and Language Evolution Salvatore Pistoia Reda Semantics and Contextuality: The Case of Pia s Leaves Stefano Predelli Is Logico-Semantical Analysis of Natural Language Expressions a Translation? Jirí Raclavský Beyond the Fregean Myth: The Value of Logical Values Fabien Schang Modal Calculus of Illocutionary Logic Andrew Schumann Subjectivity in Philosophy and Linguistics Barbara Sonnenhauser Asymmetrical Semantics Mieszko Talasiewicz Truth: An Anti-realist Adequacy Condition Luca Tranchini Belief Reports: Defaults, Intentions and Scorekeeping Giacomo Turbanti On Truth in Time Bartosz Wieckowski Order William J. SUllivan Indexes. (shrink)

This paper proposes a formalization of ability that is motivated in part by linguistic considerations and by the philosophical literature in action theory and the logic of ability, but that is also meant to match well with planning formalisms, and so to provide an account of the role of ability in practical reasoning. Some of the philosophical literature concerning ability, and in particular [Austin, 1956], suggests that some ways of talking about ability are context-dependent. I propose a way (...) of formalizing this dependency. (shrink)

This paper argues that many philosophical arguments within the education discourse are too little embedded in their own historical contexts. Starting out from the obvious fact that philosophers of education use sources from the past, the paper asks how we can deal with the arguments that these sources contain. The general attitude within philosophy of education, which views arguments as timeless, is being challenged by the insight that arguments always depend upon their own contexts. For this reason, citing past authors, (...) heroes, or enemies without respecting the context says more about our interest at the present time than it does about the times of the authors examined. Conversely, the contextual approach helps us to avoid believing that ‘timeless truths’ are to be found in different texts of different ages. However, the present contribution in no way advocates a total relativization of statements. Quite the contrary; it claims that the contextual approach helps us to understand the traditions and contexts within which we ourselves, as researchers, are positioned. And this self‐awareness is believed to be the proper starting position for theoretical statements about education. (shrink)

Physical dimensions like “mass”, “length”, “charge”, represented by the symbols [M], [L], [Q], are not numbers, but used as numbers to perform dimensional analysis in particular, and to write the equations of physics in general, by the physicist. The law of excluded middle falls short of explaining the contradictory meanings of the same symbols. The statements like “m tends to 0”, “r tends to 0”, “q tends to 0”, used by the physicist, are inconsistent on dimensional grounds because “m”, “r”, (...) “q” represent quantities with physical dimensions of [M], [L], [Q] respectively and “0” represents just a number—devoid of physical dimension. Consequently, due to the involvement of the statement “q tends to 0'', where q is the test charge” in the definition of electric field leads to either circular reasoning or a contradiction regarding the experimental verification of the smallest charge in the Millikan–Fletcher oil drop experiment. Considering such issues as problematic, by choice, I make an inquiry regarding the basic language in terms of which physics is written, with an aim of exploring how truthfully the verbal statements can be converted to the corresponding physico-mathematical expressions, where “physico-mathematical” signifies the involvement of physical dimensions. Such investigation necessitates an explanation by demonstration of “self inquiry”, “middle way”, “dependent origination”, “emptiness/relational existence”, which are certain terms that signify the basic tenets of Buddhism. In light of such demonstration I explain my view of “definition”; the relations among quantity, physical dimension and number; meaninglessness of “zero quantity” and the associated logico-linguistic fallacy; difference between unit and unity. Considering the importance of the notion of electric field in physics, I present a critical analysis of the definitions of electric field due to Maxwell and Jackson, along with the physico-mathematical conversions of the verbal statements. The analysis of Jackson’s definition points towards an expression of the electric field as an infinite series due to the associated “limiting process” of the test charge. However, it brings out the necessity of a postulate regarding the existence of charges, which nevertheless follows from the definition of quantity. Consequently, I explain the notion of undecidable charges that act as the middle way to resolve the contradiction regarding the Millikan–Fletcher oil drop experiment. In passing, I provide a logico-linguistic analysis, in physico-mathematical terms, of two verbal statements of Maxwell in relation to his definition of electric field, which suggests Maxwell’s conception of dependent origination of distance and charge ) and that of emptiness in the context of relative vacuum. This work is an appeal for the dissociation of the categorical disciplines of logic and physics and on the large, a fruitful merger of Eastern philosophy and Western science. Nevertheless, it remains open to how the reader relates to this work, which is the essence of emptiness. (shrink)

This essay, published originally in 2002, is reprinted in “Contextualism—The Next Generation: Symposium on the Future of a Methodology,” because of its impact on the thinking that informs and has led to this new symposium. Burke's argument is that the term context has become “an intellectual slogan or shibboleth” and that “there is a price to pay” for its “more and more frequent use... in a number of disciplines—among them, anthropology, archaeology, art history, geography, intellectual history, law, linguistics, literary (...) criticism, philosophy, politics, psychology, sociology, and theology.” A brief history of the uses of the term and its cognates in these disciplines is provided, along with an examination of “recent interest in the phenomenology of recontextualism or ‘reframing,’” which “depends on agency, creativity, and the power to adapt” and which, indeed, almost defines what is meant by “originality, innovation, invention, or creativity.” The essay concludes that context ought to be used mainly in the plural to indicate that no topic is properly interpretable in any single framework. (shrink)

This essay aims at neutralizing the contextualist challenge against traditional semantics. According to contextualism, utterances of non-elliptical, non-ambiguous, and non-indexical sentences may be associated with contrasting truth-conditions. In this essay, I grant the contextualist analysis of the sentences in question, and the contextualist assessment of the truth-conditions for the corresponding utterances. I then argue that the resulting situation is by no means incompatible with the traditional approach to semantics, and that the evidence put forth by the contextualists may easily be (...) taken into account by the customary treatment of natural languages. (shrink)