"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"--
Inhaltsverzeichnis
Preface and tips on how to read this book; Acknowledgements; List of abbreviations and symbols; Stage 1. Introduction: meaning - what it is and where to find it: 1. 1 How (not) to study meaning; 1. 2 Semantics, pragmatics, and philosophy (and why they are best done together); 1. 3 Proposition: a flexible unit for studying meaning? ; 1. 4 Meaning and its correlates; Stage 2. word meaning and concepts: 2. 1 Harnessing word meaning; 2. 2 The 'concept' commotion; 2. 3 Language and thought; 2. 4 Lexicon and pragmatics; 2. 5 The role of reference; Stage 3. Composing sentence meaning: tools and their purpose: 3. 1 Truth in service of meaning: truth conditions and truth-value judgements; 3. 2 The metalanguage for the logical form; 3. 3 Possible worlds and models; 3. 4 Semantic composition and semantic types; 3. 5 Type-theoretic metalanguage and lambda abstraction; 3. 6 Formal tools and cognitive reality; Stage 4. Operations on sentences: 4. 1 Sentential connectives and propositional logic; 4. 2 Conjunction; 4. 3 Disjunction; 4. 4 Conditional and biconditional; 4. 5 Negation; 4. 6 Linguistic diversity: snakes and ladders, cluedo, and monopoly; Stage 5. Inside the sentence: 5. 1 Limitations of the metalanguage; 5. 2 Quantification; 5. 3 Representing time; 5. 4 Modality; 5. 5 Propositional attitude reports; 5. 6 Interim conclusions: semantic tools for formal cognitive representations? ; Stage 6. Conveying information: 6. 1 From sentences to discourses: dynamic semantics for dynamic meaning; 6. 2 Referring and its tools; 6. 3 Organizing information in discourse; Stage 7. Utterance meaning, or what lurks under the surface: 7. 1 Saying, implicating and inferring; 7. 2. Truth-conditional vs. non-truth-conditional, semantic vs. pragmatic: what to include and what to leave out; 7. 3 Keeping semantics and pragmatics apart; Stage 8. Meaning in service of its makers: 8. 1 Who needs literal meanings? ; 8. 2 What makes a metaphor; 8. 3. Speech and action; 8. 4 At a crossroads with ethical and social debates; Stage 9. Conclusion: the future of meaning? ; Index.
