In this pioneering book Polish author Katarzyna Jaszczolt lays down the foundations of an original theory of meaning in discourse, reveals the cognitive foundations of discourse interpretation, and puts forward a new basis for the analysis of discourse processing. She provides a step-by-step introduction to the theory and its application, and explains new terms and formalisms as required. Dr. Jaszczolt unites the precision of truth-conditional, dynamic approaches with insights from neo-Gricean pragmatics into the role of speaker's intentions in communication. She shows that the compositionality of meaning may be understood as merger representations combining information from various sources including word meaning and sentence structure, various kinds of default interpretations, and conscious pragmatic inference.
What is it for marks or sounds to have meaning, and what is it for someone to mean something in producing them? Answering these and related questions, Schiffer explores communication, speech acts, convention, and the meaning of linguistic items in this reissue of a seminal work on the foundations of meaning. A new introduction takes account of recent developments and places his theory in a broader context.
Cognitive Foundations of Grammar
The main function of language is to convey meaning. The question of why
language is structured the way it is, Heine here argues, has therefore
to be answered first of all with reference to this function. Linguistic
explanations in terms of other exponents of language structure, e.g. of
syntax, are likely to highlight peripheral or epi-phenomenal rather
than central characteristics of language structure. This book uses
basic findings on grammaticalization processes to describe the role of
cognitive forces in shaping grammar. It provides students with an
introductory treatment of a field of linguistics that has developed
recently and is rapidly expanding.
