Books in the Palgrave Studies in Pragmatics, Language and Cognition series

The anthology 'Meaning and Analysis' addresses the key topics of H. Paul Grice's philosophy of language, such as rationality, non-natural meaning, communicative actions, conversational implicatures, the semantics-pragmatics distinction and recent debates concerning minimalist versus contextualist semantics.

This book presents a novel experimental approach to investigating the mental representation of linguistic alternatives. Combining theoretical and psycholinguistic questions concerning the nature of alternative sets, it sheds new light on the theory of focus and the cognitive mechanisms underlying the processing of alternatives.

This book breaks new ground towards an understanding of the mental processes involved in presupposition, the comprehension of information taken for granted.

This book is an advanced debate on the nature of scalar implicatures, one of the most popular topics in philosophical linguistics in the last 20 years. Leading theorists in the field offer an up-to-date presentation of the subject in a way that will help readers to orient themselves in the vast literature on the topic.

This book contains an original analysis of the existential there-sentence from a philosophical-linguistic perspective. At its core is the claim that there-sentences' form is distinct from that of ordinary subject-predicate sentences, and that this fundamental difference explains the construction's unusual grammatical and discourse properties.

The main argument of this book is that the notion of truth plays no role in speaker-hearers' interpretation of linguistic utterances and that it is not needed for theoretical accounts of linguistic meaning either.

Assertion is a term frequently used in linguistics and philosophy but rarely defined. This in-depth study surveys and synthesizes a range of philosophical, linguistic and psychological literature on the topic, and then presents a detailed account of the cognitive processes involved in the interpretation of assertions.

How should we analyse the meaning of proper names, indexicals, demonstratives and definite descriptions? What relation do such expressions stand to the objects they designate or to mental representations of those objects? George Powell casts new light on these and other questions by approaching them from within a cognitive framework.

Develops a highly original theory of accentuation in which accentuation serves the mere pragmatic function of making utterances well comprehensible. Semantic effects of accentuation are explained as epiphenomena of pragmatic accentuation. The theory is formally elaborated in a model-theoretic framework and experimentally justified.

The result is an advanced debate featuring broad empirical coverage of the issues, as well as an informed discussion of the connections between a Compositional Semantics and a Pragmatic Theory of Implicit Communication, in light of the empirical data coming from Experimental Semantics and Pragmatics.

Ten leading scholars provide exacting research results and a reliable and accessible introduction to the new field of optimality theoretic pragmatics.

The author questions the status quo in Romance linguistics. The Ergative/Unaccusative syntactic approach has been accepted as the orthodox analytical paradigm. He re-examines both the theoretical imperative and the empirical evidence for that approach, drawing on a large amount of new and surprising data from Italian, Spanish, French and Catalan.

In considering the ways in which current theories of language in use and communicative processes are applied to the analysis, interpretation and definition of literary texts, this book sets an agenda for the future of pragmatic literary stylistics and provides a foundation for future research and debate.

This collection brings about a current interdisciplinary debate on explicit communication. With Robyn Carston's pragmatics at the core of the discussion, special attention is drawn to linguistic under-determinacy, the explicit/implicit divide and also to the construction or recruitment of concepts in on-line utterance comprehension.

All humans can interpret sentences of their native language quickly and without effort. Working from the perspective of generative grammar, the contributors to this volume investigate three mental mechanisms, widely assumed to underlie this ability: compositional semantics, implicature computation and presupposition computation.

This volume brings together twelve papers by linguists and philosophers contributing novel empirical and formal considerations to theorizing about vagueness. Three main issues are addressed: gradable expressions and comparison, the semantics of degree adverbs and intensifiers (such as 'clearly'), and ways of evading the sorites paradox.

Francois Recanati has proposed a wide-ranging truth-conditional model of pragmatics. In this collection, his theories are addressed by distinguished contributors, with responses from Recanati himself, thus drawing the reader into the central debate within philosophy of language and cognitive science as to what kind of pragmatics system is needed.

Ten leading scholars provide exacting research results and a reliable and accessible introduction to the new field of optimality theoretic pragmatics.

In considering the ways in which current theories of language in use and communicative processes are applied to the analysis, interpretation and definition of literary texts, this book sets an agenda for the future of pragmatic literary stylistics and provides a foundation for future research and debate.

This volume offers a survey of the use of alternatives in semantics and pragmatics, and an overview of current approaches and applications of alternative-based semantics, from both theoretical and experimental perspectives.

This volume comprises thirteen original research papers and three overview papers presenting new work using a number of experimental techniques from psycho- and neurolinguistics in the three key areas of current semantics and pragmatics: implicature, negation and presupposition.

Rooted in Gricean tradition, this book concentrates on game - and decision - theoretic (GDT) approaches to the foundations of pragmatics. Offering a high-level survey of current GDT pragmatics and the field of its applications, this approach provides a basis for synchronic and diachronic explanations of language use.

This collection brings about a current interdisciplinary debate on explicit communication. With Robyn Carston's pragmatics at the core of the discussion, special attention is drawn to linguistic under-determinacy, the explicit/implicit divide and also to the construction or recruitment of concepts in on-line utterance comprehension.

How do we understand what we are told, resolve ambiguities, appreciate metaphor and irony, and grasp both explicit and implicit content in verbal communication? This book provides the first comprehensive introduction to an exciting new field in which models of language and meaning are tested and compared using techniques from psycholinguistics.

This volume brings together twelve papers by linguists and philosophers contributing novel empirical and formal considerations to theorizing about vagueness. Three main issues are addressed: gradable expressions and comparison, the semantics of degree adverbs and intensifiers (such as 'clearly'), and ways of evading the sorites paradox.

This book seeks to explain how discourse types influence the addressee's understanding of the communicator's intention. Examining global coherence-based accounts as well as proposals based on Gricean pragmatics, it argues that the key to a solution lies in the cognitive and communicative principles of relevance proposed by Sperber & Wilson.

The author questions the status quo in Romance linguistics. The Ergative/Unaccusative syntactic approach has been accepted as the orthodox analytical paradigm. He re-examines both the theoretical imperative and the empirical evidence for that approach, drawing on a large amount of new and surprising data from Italian, Spanish, French and Catalan.

All humans can interpret sentences of their native language quickly and without effort. Working from the perspective of generative grammar, the contributors to this volume investigate three mental mechanisms, widely assumed to underlie this ability: compositional semantics, implicature computation and presupposition computation.

How do we understand what we are told, resolve ambiguities, appreciate metaphor and irony, and grasp both explicit and implicit content in verbal communication? This book provides the first comprehensive introduction to an exciting new field in which models of language and meaning are tested and compared using techniques from psycholinguistics.