16.1589, Review: Semantics: Davis & Gillon (2004)

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Subject: 16.1589, Review: Semantics: Davis & Gillon (2004)

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1)
Date: 18-May-2005
From: Mikhail Kissine < mkissine at ulb.ac.be >
Subject: Semantics: A Reader 

	
-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Wed, 18 May 2005 21:37:33
From: Mikhail Kissine < mkissine at ulb.ac.be >
Subject: Semantics: A Reader 
 

EDITORS: Davis, Steven; Gillon, Brendan S. 
TITLE: Semantics 
SUBTITLE: A Reader 
PUBLISHER: Oxford University Press 
YEAR: 2004
Announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/16/16-329.html


Mikhail Kissine, Laboratoire de Linguistique Textuelle et de Pragmatique 
Cognitive, Aspirant FNRS, Free University of Brussels

SUMMARY

The book is a collection of papers in semantics, most of which are 
classical, previously published pieces of work. 

Part I: Introduction, consists of chapters written by the editors.
In the Preliminaries, the editors set the purposes of the volume: they 
provide an overview of theories that address meaning as a property of 
expressions, that have been applied to a given range of linguistic 
phenomena, and that are possible to evaluate. Such criteria of the choice 
of articles are thus not constrained by the ontological commitments of the 
theory, which, according to Davis and Gillon, should not take place prior 
to semantic theorising. 

The second chapter, Linguistics and Psychology, offers a summary of the 
main theoretical positions on the nature linguistic ability, such as the 
opposition between behaviourism and mentalism, and the dispute between 
Chomskian partisans of an independent Language Acquisition Device and 
defenders of non-modular approaches. The authors define the notion of I-
language (I-semantics), and discuss the way I-semantics (as the study of 
internalised semantic ability) can be applied to a whole community of 
speakers. 

The third chapter is entitled Linguistics and Logic. It provides a gradual 
introduction to the main notions of formal semantics: propositional logic, 
predicate logic and quantificational logic. Each notion is first 
introduced with the help of simple formal examples and then applied to 
selected phenomena of English. The introduction to quantificational logic 
leads to the discussion of quantified noun phrases and different 
approaches to it: Evans' conception of pronouns as going proxy for 
definite descriptions, Discourse Representation Theory, and Dynamic 
Predicate Logic. 

The fourth chapter, Theories of Reference and Theories of Meaning offers a 
classification of semantic theories. Davidson's satisfaction theory, which 
is given as an example of reference theories, is introduces and compared 
with model-theoretical approaches. Meaning theories are divided in two: 
atomic theories, that do not admit constituent internal to the lexemes, 
and molecular theories, that admit sub-lexical compositional structures. 
The molecular theories are sub-divided in analytic theories and 
encyclopaedic theories. The former are exemplified by Pustejovsky's 
approach, where analytical sentences are thought to give the meaning of 
lexical entries. Jackendoff view, which admits encyclopaedic information 
within concept constitution, illustrates the latter ones. Finally, the 
authors expose approaches that attempt to account for both the meaning and 
the reference: Frege's notions of sense and reference, and Kaplan's 
distinction between character and content.

The next chapter, Internalist and Externalist Semantic Theories, expands 
the former one. Internalist theories that assume that the lexical meaning 
pertains totally to the I-grammar of speakers are again sub-divided in 
atomic theories and molecular theories. The authors make a clear case 
against atomic theories, which amount to postulating unanalysable 
concepts, corresponding to lexical entries, within the language of 
thought. They discuss next the problem raised for molecular theories by 
entities that, form an ontological point of view, are not part of speakers 
grammars, and hence, cannot be part of the language of thought. They 
emphasise, however, that externalist theories are not incompatible with 
the existence of internal grammars, i.e. with a mentalist approach to 
semantics. Again, externalist theories are sub-divided into atomic, 
Davidson-like, theories, and molecular theories, à la Pustejovsky and 
Jackendoff. The authors discuss Frege's sense, Kaplan's character and 
model-theoretical semantics with relation to the question of externalism. 
This part is concluded by the suggestion, aimed at avoiding Putnam's 
(1975) claim that 'meanings are not in the head', to treat meaning as a 
set of rules defined with respect to an idealised speaker. 

The final chapter, Semantics and Context, is devoted to the by-now 
classical problem of contextual contribution to the content of utterances. 
The authors argue against underlying place-holders, both syntactical (cf. 
for instance Stanley 2000) or semantical, as follows from Kaplan's notion 
of context. The end of the chapter contains an introduction to Relevance-
theoretical notion of the explicature of an utterance (e.g. Sperber and 
Wilson 1995; Carston 1988, 2002). However, the authors point out that 
Relevance apparatus may explain how the context determine the semantic 
value in an epistemological sense of 'determine' only: since interpreters 
are sometimes mistaken, the semantic value provided by mechanisms of 
interpretation may not correspond to the actual semantic value of the 
utterance. 

Finally, an appendix contains a very clear and condensed introduction to 
the notions of set theory necessary to the apparatus of formal semantics.

Part II: Background
The first paper is Pelletier's "The Principle of Semantic 
Compositionality". The author provides a discussion of arguments against 
compositionality, and offers a method to get to a definition of semantic 
evaluation in a way that is non-compositional and compatible with facts 
about learnability and understandability of natural languages: such an 
evaluation should be recursive but non-inductive, i.e. it must be grounded 
by some basic operations. The paper is followed by originally 
published "Afterthoughts 2000" and "Afterthoughts 2004". The author claims 
that semantic atomism does not entail compositionality, and, consequently, 
that the possibility of non-compositional but atomistic semantic 
theorising constitutes a powerful argument against holism. He expresses 
also some doubts regarding holism in other fields. Finally, Pelletier 
makes a case for compositionality to be understood as a function of all 
syntactic components, and for empirical importance of compositionality. 

The second paper is Gillon's original "Ambiguity, Indeterminacy, Deixis, 
and Vagueness", which draws clear-cut boundaries between these four 
concepts. The main part of the article shows that the most liable way to 
define ambiguity is the plurality of possible label bracketing, and the 
most reliable test to detect it is the existence of conflicting truth 
judgement, each of which is coupled with a different circumstance of 
evaluation. Ambiguity is then contrasted with indeterminacy (that admits, 
unlike ambiguity, endophoric expressions with a different sense than their 
antecedent), with deixis (that sets the context of evaluation), and with 
vagueness (that consists in conflicting truth-value judgement with respect 
to the same circumstance of evaluation).

Part III: Approaches contains a series of foundational papers that 
exemplify different streams in semantic theorising. 
This part begins with Lewis' "General Semantics", where is developed a 
semantics for natural languages based on categorial context-free grammars. 
While for primitive categories (e.g. NP) intension is a function from 
indices to extensions, for derived categories (adjectives, VPs, adverbs) 
intensions are complex, that is, corresponding to functions from 
intensions to intensions. Lewis defines meaning as "semantically 
interpreted phrase markers minus their terminal nodes" (p. 119). 

Lewis's paper is followed by Davidson's very influential "Truth and 
Meaning". It contains a famous version of the 'Slingshot argument', 
according to which a proposition may correspond to whichever fact, and the 
formulation of a Tarskian holistic semantics for natural languages.

Kamp's paper "A Theory of Truth and Semantic Representation" is an early 
formulation of Discourse Representation Theory, further developed in Kamp 
and Reyle (1993). The principles of this non-compositional theory that 
attributes truth-conditions to intermediate representations (Discourse 
Representation Structures, which capture, in addition to truth-conditional 
information, availability for anaphoric relations) are discussed with the 
relation to quantificational noun phrases.

Groenendijk and Stokhof's "Dynamic Predicate Logic" represents an opposite 
solution to the same problem: truth is defined with respect to the 
assignment functions in a way to keep track of the context change, which 
allows quantifiers to get scope over conjunctions and sentence boundaries, 
and provides the right interpretations for "donkey sentences".

Barwise and Perry's "Situations and Attitudes" is an outline of Situation 
Semantics (see Barwise and Perry 1983) based on a discussion of attitude 
reports: meanings are taken to be relations between utterances and 
situations, i.e. between states of affairs consisting of entities, events, 
states, and relations between them (which implies a realistic stance 
towards relations).

Jackendoff's paper "What Is a Concept, That a Person May Grasp It" is a 
very clear and representative example of internalist generative theories 
that position themselves as incompatible with model-theoretic semantics. 
The organisation of concepts is thought of in terms of fundamental 
categories, realised in function-argument structure. This internal 
structure is used to account for the sameness of patterns across different 
semantic fields. The model also integrates outputs from other cognitive 
systems, such as vision.

The last paper of the second part is Fauconnier's "Mental Spaces, Language 
Modalities, Conceptual Integration". The paper offers a clear and 
summarised introduction to the theory of mental spaces (cf. for instance 
Fauconnier 1994), where grammatical information is seen as providing a 
skeleton for the construction of conceptual spaces, and the paths of 
access between them. It outlines a treatment of coreference, tenses and 
conceptual blending, and offers examples from American Sign Language.

Part IV: Topics
The first two papers pertain to lexical semantics. 
Pustejovksy's "Generative Lexicon" as an analytical theory of lexical 
meanings that offers rules for the generation of new lexical meanings. 
Each lexical entry is composed by its quale structure, its argument 
structure and its inheritance (relatively to other concept) structure. 
Meaning is viewed as being flexible, and arising generatively by 
composition of lexemes.

Gillon's "Towards a common semantics for English count and mass noun" 
offers, as its title indicates, a unified account for count and mass 
nouns. Counts nouns are associated with the feature +CT, that allows a 
free selection of grammatical number + or -PL, while mass noun have the 
feature -CT, and are associated either +PL or -PL. The feature -CT 
associates with the name the greatest aggregate of which the name or the 
NP is true, while +CT associates a set of all minimal aggregations of 
which the name or the NP is true. 

Burge's "Reference and proper names" defends a view according to which 
proper names are not abbreviations of predicates of the kind of "X is the 
name of _" or individual constants. Instead, proper names are analysed as 
playing the role of demonstratives and of such predicates at the same time.

The next two articles are devoted to the problem of the semantic status of 
pronouns. Evan's paper "Pronouns" argues against the view that the 
referents of bound pronouns are determined by extra-linguistic factors. 
Instead, using a Fregean notion of satisfaction (according to which object 
x satisfies a predicate A, iff A(b) is true, such that b is an expression 
referring to x,), Evans argues that pronouns are co-referential with their 
antecedents. The pronouns that have a quantifier phrase as antecedent (E-
type pronouns, in Evan's terminology) and are not bound by the quantifier 
of that phrase are analysed as referring to those objects only that verify 
the antecedent. 

The same topic is addressed within the Government and Binding framework by 
Higginbotham's "Pronouns and bound variables". The core idea of the 
article is that pronouns are variables coindexed with its antecedents: 
this is achieved thanks to a reindexing rule that deletes the bound 
pronoun referential index and thus leaves only the anaphoric index 
available. 

The next paper is the foundational Barwise and Cooper's "Generalized 
quantifiers and Natural Language". The main insight of generalised 
quantification, as applied to natural languages, is to treat quantifiers 
as constituted by the combination of a determiner and a set expression, 
and to take them as denoting families of sets. Beyond the surface level, 
every natural language contains an NP constituent that express generalised 
quantification over the domain of discourse. Among the most important 
achievements of Barwise and Cooper are probably the distinctions between 
strong and weak quantifiers, and monotone decreasing and monotone 
decreasing quantifiers. More generally, the paper illustrates the 
possibility to study of linguistic competence with the help of logical 
tools (like the notions of validity and inference).

The next topic is the semantics of tense. An excerpt from Reichenbach's 
Elements of Symbolic Logic, "The Tense of Verbs", contains the seminal 
formalisation of English tense system with the help of the threefold 
distinction between the time of the event, the time of reference, and the 
time of speech. 

Barbara Partee, in "Some Structural Analogies between Tenses and Pronouns 
in English", makes a case for introducing time variables in the logical 
form of sentences, and not treating tenses as time operators. She notices 
that present tense may be used only deictically, like "I", while the past 
tense has also a referential reading, like "they", and may be used as 
anaphorically. 

Kamp's paper "Two theories about adjectives" starts by exposing the 
analysis of adjectives as being functions from meanings of NP's to 
meanings of NP's, and rejecting the view according to which some 
adjectives are functions from properties to properties. In order to solve 
the problem posed by comparatives to the former theory, an alternative 
theory of vagueness is defended, where some sentences do not pertain to 
the union of the set of all true sentences and all false sentences. This 
account, which maintains that adjectives are one-place predicates, 
predicts that in absence of contextual criteria of comparison two 
sentences containing a given adjective cannot be judged false or true.

In "Prepositions and points of view", Cresswell provides a lambda-
categorial formalisation aimed at capturing the perspectival information 
contained in prepositions, such as "across", without treating the point of 
view as a contextual index. The basic machinery for doing so is 
associating a time interval with each possible world and introducing a 
path function p over moments m, such that (p,a,w)(m) is the space occupied 
by a at m in w.

Three papers address the semantics of adverbs. Bellart's "On semantics and 
distributional properties of sentential adverbs" questions the two-partite 
division of adverbs into predicative adverbs (e.g. "slowly") and 
sentential adverbs (e.g. "fortunately", "possibly"). In addition to 
semantic criteria, distributional properties, which take into account the 
position of the adverb and the semantic category of its admissible 
arguments, provide a more fine-grained classification among sentential 
adverbs. 

The distinction between predicative adverbs, formalised as functions from 
singulary proposition functions to singulary proposition functions, and 
sentential adverbs, formalised as functions from propositions to 
propositions, originates from Thomason and Stalnaker's paper, "A semantic 
theory of adverbs", which is reprinted in this volume after Bellart's 
paper. Four sufficient conditions to be a sentential adverb are put 
forward: (a) inducing opaque contexts, (b) giving rise to scope 
ambiguities, (c) including a sentence modifier within its scope (d) being 
replaceable by "It is ADVERB true that". 

Lewis' paper, "Adverbs of quantification", deals with adverbs 
like "always, sometimes, never, usually, frequently, rarely etc". Instead 
of taking them as quantifying over times or events, Lewis analyses these 
adverbs as quantifiers over cases (a case being an acceptable assignment 
of values to the free variables of the modified sentence): such adverbs 
bind unselectively all the free variables of the sentence in which they 
occur. The paper also contains a discussion of devices used to restrict 
the admissible assignments (e.g. "if"-clauses).

Approaches to connectives are illustrated by papers by Posner, Gazdar and 
Jennings. Posner's "Semantics and pragmatics of sentence connectives in 
natural language" defends a Gricean approach, which preserves a truth-
conditional semantics for connectives and provides additional meanings by 
contextual enrichments driven by pragmatic considerations. 

Gazdar's "A cross-categorial semantics for coordination" analyses non-
sentential coordination as the union of properties denoted by NPs or VPs.

An original paper by Jennings, "The meaning of connectives" is a plea 
against truth-conditional semantic theory. The first part of the paper 
attempts to show that standard truth-conditional analysis of the 
connective "or", even augmented with Gricean mechanisms, cannot account 
for all the uses of it in English. More particularly, it is pointed out 
that "or" may have disjunctive as well as conjunctive uses. Then it is 
claimed that no satisfactory truth-conditional account may be provided 
for "but", since it can also have both disjunctive and conjunctive uses. 
Jennings outlines next a biological theory of meaning, whose purpose is to 
apply methods from population biology to the syntax of sentences. The 
origin of connectors is traced back to spatial or temporal meanings in 
order to individuate contemporary meanings. The meaning of an n-tuple 
predicate is taken to apply to a set of n-tuples of which it has been 
claimed that this predicate is true. Since, across time this set is 
uniformly increased, the meaning of the predicate becomes less and less 
specified. The next step is allotropy, where a sentence may yield two 
different syntactic representations with the same satisfaction-conditions. 
When syntactic differences do yield a difference in satisfaction-
conditions, lexical items may receive a new meaning, in order to preserve 
the sameness of satisfaction conditions. These processes are exemplified 
with different connectors, the process of shortening of scope being 
discussed in more detail.

Non-declarative sentences are discussed in the next two papers. The core 
idea of Higginbotham's "Interrogatives" is that interrogative sentences 
express abstract questions, i.e. mutually exclusive and non-empty 
partitions of the possible states of the worlds. It is to abstract 
questions that reference is made in indirect questions. 

Vanderveken's original article, "Success, satisfaction, and truth in the 
logic of speech acts and formal semantics" offers an up-to-date summary of 
the illocutionary logic (Searle and Vanderveken 1985; Vanderveken 1990, 
1991). In this approach, primary units of meanings are illocutionary acts, 
whose force is determined by the conditions of success, and whose 
satisfaction is determined by the correspondence between the propositional 
content and the world (i.e. the truth of the propositional content) and 
the direction of this correspondence. The set of all possible 
illocutionary forces is defined recursively with the help of the six 
components of the illocutionary force: the illocutionary point, the mode 
of achievement, the conditions on the propositional content, the 
preparatory conditions, the sincerity condition and the degree of 
strength. The truth-conditions of the propositional content are formulated 
in way that allows the understanding senses of propositions without 
knowing their denotation: the truth-conditions of a proposition in a given 
circumstance are all those truth-conditions associated with its atomic 
propositions that make the proposition true with respect to that 
circumstance. New semantic relations are defined: illocutionary entailment 
(the speakers cannot perform an illocutionary act P without eo ipso 
performing an illocutionary act Q), truth-conditional entailment (P cannot 
be satisfied unless Q is satisfied), illocutionary entailment of 
satisfaction (the success of P entails the satisfaction of Q), and truth-
conditional entailment of success (the satisfaction of P entails the 
success of Q). 

The last paper of this part is Davidson seminal "The logical form of 
action sentences", which introduces events in the ontology of semantic 
theory, in order to allow entailments like the one from "John butters a 
toast in the bathroom at midnight" to "John butters a toast". Action names 
are thus taken to be alternative descriptions of events, i.e. predicates 
that take events as one of their arguments. 

Part IV: Context Dependency
The first paper of this part, devoted to contextual influences on 
semantics, is Kaplan's "Demonstratives". It contains an explicit and 
detailed statement of Kaplan's distinction between "the character of an 
expression", i.e. a function from contexts to contents, and "the content 
of an expression", i.e. a function from circumstances of evaluation to 
individuals. Demonstratives and indexical are taken to be directly 
referential, since they have a character that determine always the same 
function from context to content, and hence is not part of the content of 
the proposition expressed by sentences in which they occur. A further 
crucial point is that contingency and necessity are notions that are 
applicable to content only, while logical truth applies exclusively to the 
character. 

In "Truth and Demonstratives", Weinstein attempts to formulate Tarskian 
truth-conditions for non-eternal sentences, i.e. sentences that contain 
demonstratives and indexicals. The new T-sentence contains, on the left-
hand the truth-predicate that has for argument a meta-language variable 
corresponding to the utterance of s (s being the structural description of 
the sentence uttered), such that all the referents of demonstrative 
pronouns of s correspond to variables of the meta-language, and, on the 
right-hand, the translation in the meta-language, obtained by replacing 
the nth occurrence of demonstrative pronouns by the nth variable of the 
object-language.

Lewis' "Score-keeping in a language game", exposes the by-now famous idea 
of accommodation -- the psychological mechanism that corrects the 
interpretation of the conversational events in a way to fit the rules on 
which the kinematics of the conversation depends. The illustrations used 
are presupposition (the audience tends to assume the truth of the 
presupposed proposition), permission utterances (that shift the boundaries 
of what is permissible), definite descriptions (the audience tends to 
assume that there is a salient referent in the domain of discourse 
corresponding to it), the shift of the spatial point of reference by the 
verbs 'going' and 'coming', the vagueness in the applicability of some 
predicates (here the accommodation increases the standards of the 
applicability), the domain of application of modals, the truth of 
performative utterances and planning.

Carston's original paper "Explicature and semantics" is a Relevance-
theoretical survey of the solutions provided to the problem of the 
existence of phonologically unrealised components of meaning. More 
particularly, she argues against the 'Indexicalist' view that postulates 
hidden variables within the logical form, sometimes bound and sometimes 
free: among the counter-arguments Carston puts forward are the unnecessary 
proliferation of hidden variables, the difficulty to set the boundary 
between cases where the variables are free and those where they are bound, 
and the difficulty to find hidden variables for some examples. She 
provides a Relevance-theoretical solution, in which the logical form of 
the sentence, -- output of the linguistic decoding module--, provides a 
mere blueprint to the interpretation module (which is part of a more 
general mind-reading module). Since each utterance comes with the 
presumption of optimal Relevance, the audience fills in indexicals 
(saturation), expands the logical form (free enrichment), and, adapts some 
concepts, all that done in way to derive the maximal cognitive benefit and 
minimise the processing effort.

Stainton's paper, "Quantifier phrases, meaningfulness 'in isolation', and 
ellipsis" is a good illustration of the problem of sub-sentential 
utterances. He argues that quantifiers phrase do not contribute to the 
sentence meaning without being part of it: they correspond to generalised 
quantifiers, i.e. to functions from sets to propositions. When they occur 
in isolation (e.g. 'Six apples' uttered in a grocery) the second set is 
provided pragmatically, through a Relevance-driven process. Such 
quantifier phrases in isolation are not to be assimilated to non-natural 
meaning, since their interpretation depends on their constituents, 
combined in a compositional way. Neither do they exhibit the behaviour 
peculiar to ellipsis, that is, of to phonologically shortened sequences 
that correspond to the same underlying syntactic structure as non-
shortened counterparts. 

EVALUATION

The volume brings together very much of foundational literature of 
contemporary semantic theory, and manages to provide a broad sample of 
existing approaches and problems. The organisation is very neat and handy. 
In this respect, the book may be of great use to academics and advanced 
students in semantics. To be sure, an unfamiliar reader must be prevented 
that many articles do not reflect anymore the present state of the art. 
For instance, Discourse Representation Theory (DRT) has evolved in many 
aspects since Kamp's paper, originally published in 1981 (for instance, in 
the treatment of generalised quantification with the help of duplex 
conditions). Likewise, event semantics has known great changes since 
Davidson's original article. 

Related to this point is the question whether it is possible to use the 
book as a textbook for students in semantics. It seems that this is one of 
the points of the extensive introduction: the topics addressed are 
systematically related to some of the articles. However, some parts seem 
too terse for a beginner, and too tedious for the scholar. More 
particularly, even if the second chapter "Linguistics and Logic" provides 
a very clear introduction to propositional and predicate calculus, the 
discussion on DRT is very dense and short, which makes me doubt that it 
could be of a great use to the unfamiliar reader, or bring new insights 
for a familiar one. Perhaps, the same remarks could apply to some parts of 
the chapter "Semantic and Context". It is regretful that the authors 
devote much of space to Relevance theory, already exposed in great detail 
Carston's paper, without mentioning alternative approaches like Recanati's 
(e.g. Recanati 1989, 2004) or default-interpretations ones (e.g. Levinson 
2000).

Gillon's, Vanderveken's and Carston's original articles provide clear and 
good overviews in their respective domains. More controversial to my mind 
is Jennings paper. More particularly, I would like to point out a 
potential counter-argument to the first part of the paper, which contains 
a case against truth-conditional accounts of English connective 'or'. 
Jennings argues that, since in sentences like (1) 'or' has a conjunctive 
meaning, it cannot be analysed along the truth tables of the logical 
disjunction.
(1) You may do this or you may do that.

This latter fact still does not show that a truth-theoretical account of 
disjunction is impossible. For instance, some authors (Zimmermann 2000; 
Geurts forthcoming) analyse disjunction as a conjunction of modalities, 
which gives a unified account for (1) and (2):
(2) He will come or he will not come.

Hence, even if the origin of 'or' is traceable back to several distinct 
sources, it is still not shown that a unified formal account for the 
contemporary uses of 'or' is impossible.

As for the truth-conditional analysis of 'but', which Jennings claims to 
be impossible, it is a widely accepted fact in neo-Gricean theories that 
such elements do not pertain to the logico-conceptual structure of the 
utterance, but rather play a procedural role by restricting the possible 
contexts of interpretation (cf. Blakemore 1987). This is quite in line 
with Jennings claim that 'but'-clauses discriminate some operations on 
inferential effect produced by utterances. 

To conclude, I believe that the volume will be of great use for anyone 
working in semantics. I recommend also its use for teaching purposes, for 
it contains the most important illustrations of virtually all the topics 
one may want to address in a course in semantics. 

REFERENCES

Barwise, J. and J. Perry (1983) Situations and attitudes. Cambridge, 
Mass.: MIT Press.

Blakemore, D. (1987) Semantic constraints on Relevance. Oxford: Blackwell.

Carston, R. (1988) "Implicature, explicature and truth-theoretic 
semantics." In R. M. Kempson (ed.) Mental Representations: the interface 
between language and reality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 
155-81.

Carston, R. (2002) Thoughts and Utterances. The pragmatics of explicit 
communication. Oxford: Blackwell.

Fauconnier, G. (1994) Mental spaces: aspects of meaning construction in 
natural language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Geurts, B. (forthcoming) "Entertaining alternatives: disjunctions as 
modals."

Kamp, H. and U. Reyle (1993) From discourse to logic : introduction to 
modeltheoretic semantics of natural language, formal logic and discourse 
representation theory. Dordrecht: Kluwer.

Levinson, S. C. (2000) Presumptive meanings : the theory of generalized 
conversational implicature. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Putnam, H. (1975) "The meaning of 'meaning'." In K. Gunderson (ed.) 
Language, Mind and Knowledge. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 
pp. 131-93.

Recanati, F. (1989) "The pragmatics of what is said." Mind and Language, 
4, pp. 295-329.

Recanati, F. (2004) Literal meaning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Searle, J. R. and D. Vanderveken (1985) Foundations of Illocutionary 
Logic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Sperber, D. and D. Wilson (1995) Relevance: Communication and Cognition. 
Oxford: Blackwell.

Stanley, J. (2000) "Context and logical form." Linguistics and Philosophy, 
23(4), pp. 391-434.

Vanderveken, D. (1990) Meaning and Speech Acts: Volume I: Principles of 
language use. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Vanderveken, D. (1991) Meaning and Speech Acts: Volume II: Formal 
semantics of success and satisfaction. Cambridge: Cambridge University 
Press.

Zimmermann, E. (2000) "Free choice disjunction and epistemic possibility." 
Natural Language Semantics, 8, pp. 255 - 90. 

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Mikhail Kissine is a PhD student at the Laboratoire de Linguistique 
Textuelle et de Pragmatique Cognitive, Université Libre de Bruxelles with 
the financial support of the Fond National de la Recherche Scientifique. 
His thesis investigates the cognitive factors that make possible the 
interpretation of speech acts. It is an attempt to combine recent findings 
in cognitive linguistics with more traditional approaches to pragmatics 
and semantics, and to contribute to current debates on the 
semantics/pragmatics interface.





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