Announcing: PRESUPPOSITION AND ASSERTION IN DYNAMIC SEMANTICS

[Christine Sosa]

CSLI Publications is pleased to announce the availability of:

PRESUPPOSITION AND ASSERTION IN DYNAMIC SEMANTICS;  David I.
Beaver;paper ISBN: 1-57586-120-8, $24.95, cloth ISBN: 1-57586-121-6,
$64.95, 325 pages. CSLI Publications 2001.
http://cslipublications.stanford.edu , email: pubs at csli.stanford.edu.

To order this book, contact The University of Chicago Press. Call
their toll free order number 1-800-621-2736  (U.S. & Canada only)  or
order online at http://www.press.uchicago.edu/ (use the search
feature to locate the book, then order).

Book description:

This book presents a comprehensive overview and discussion of the
burgeoning field of presupposition theory, introducing a wealth of
new data and critical commentary. Working within the recently
developed framework of Dynamic Semantics, the author develops his own
account of presupposition and solves some well-known problems of
other accounts. According to the view developed, while semantics is
concerned with information update, there is one part of the meaning
of an utterance which requires no update: the utterance's
presupposition.
Although this book assumes general understanding of pragmatics and
semantics, the reader needs no prior familiarity with presupposition
theory or recent dynamic approaches to the study of meaning.


"This book is an excellent up-to-date introduction to the study of
presupposition and presupposition projection. Technically
sophisticated, Beaver's work does justice to the empirical and
conceptual complexities of its subject matter, along with presenting
many original ideas. If you suspect that presupposition was exhausted
by the work of linguists and philosophers in the 1970's, this book
shows why the topic has become fresh and exciting again."
-Irene Heim, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

"This book provides an excellent overview of the issues and
controversies of the field. The dynamic semantics developed in the
second half of the book follows the direction charted by Karttunen
and Heim in their early work, and gives an elegant solution to many
problems that have plagued previous theories. Many books about
presupposition have been written. This is the book to read."
-Lauri Karttunen, Xerox Palo Alto Research Center


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