The Role of Data at the Semantics-Pragmatics Interface

✍ Scribed by Eniko Németh T. (editor); Karoly Bibok (editor)

• Publisher: De Gruyter Mouton
• Year: 2010
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 436
• Series: Mouton Series in Pragmatics [MSP]; 9
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

To join the recent debate on data problem in linguistics, this collection of papers provides complex dual purpose analyses at the interface of semantics and pragmatics (including historical, lexical, formal and experimental pragmatics). Based on several current theories and various types of data taken from a number of languages, it discusses object theoretical issues of referentiality, scalar implicatures, implicit arguments, grammaticalization, co-construction and syntactic alternation in their mutual connections to metatheoretical questions concerning the relationship between data and theory.

✦ Table of Contents

Contents
Contributors
Introduction: The semantics-pragmatics interface from linguistic and metalinguistic perspectives
Part One Issues of referentiality
On the definiteness effect in existential sentences: Data and theories
On the semantics and pragmatics of shifted indexicals
Demonstratives and reference to individuated objects vs. reference to properties of objects: A contrastive analysis
Part Two Scalar implicatures and beyond
Two experiments and some suggestions on the meaning of scalars and numerals
Some experimental aspects of optimality theoretic pragmatics
Part Three Pragmatic ways from words to constructions and utterances
The cognitive background of grammaticalization
From syntactic alternations to lexical pragmatics
How lexical-semantic factors influence the verbs' occurrence with implicit direct object arguments in Hungarian
Co-constructing what is said in interaction
Data-gathering methods in research on hyperbole production and interpretation
Index