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Discourse Contextualism

Author: Alex Silk

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2016-08-11

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13: 0191086525

This book investigates context-sensitivity in natural language by examining the meaning and use of a target class of theoretically recalcitrant expressions. These expressions-including epistemic vocabulary, normative and evaluative vocabulary, and vague language ("CR-expressions")-exhibit systematic differences from paradigm context-sensitive expressions in their discourse dynamics and embedding properties. Many researchers have responded by rethinking the nature of linguistic meaning and communication. Drawing on general insights about the role of context in interpretation and collaborative action, Silk develops an improved contextualist theory of CR-expressions within the classical truth-conditional paradigm: Discourse Contextualism. The aim of Discourse Contextualism is to derive the distinctive linguistic behavior of a CR-expression from a particular contextualist interpretation of an independently motivated formal semantics, along with general principles of interpretation and conversation. It is shown how in using CR-expressions, speakers can exploit their mutual grammatical and world knowledge, and general pragmatic reasoning skills, to coordinate their attitudes and negotiate about how the context should evolve. The book focuses primarily on developing a Discourse Contextualist semantics and pragmatics for epistemic modals. The Discourse Contextualist framework is also applied to other categories of epistemic vocabulary, normative and evaluative vocabulary, and vague adjectives. The similarities/differences among these expressions, and among context-sensitive expressions more generally, have been underexplored. The development of Discourse Contextualism in this book sheds light on general features of meaning and communication, and the variety of ways in which context affects and is affected by uses of language. Discourse Contextualism provides a fruitful framework for theorizing about various broader issues in philosophy, linguistics, and cognitive science.

Discourse Contextualism

Author: Alex Silk

Publisher:

Published: 2016

Total Pages: 255

ISBN-13: 9780191826573

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Alex Silk investigates the role of context in the meaning and use of natural language. His text provides a systematic account of the distinctive ways in which speakers use context-sensitive expressions to coordinate their attitudes and negotiate about how the context should evolve.

Epistemic Contextualism

Author: Peter Baumann

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2016

Total Pages: 276

ISBN-13: 0198754310

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Peter Baumann develops and defends a distinctive version of epistemic contextualism, the view that the truth conditions or the meaning of knowledge attributions can vary with the context of the attributor. Baumann discusses problems and objections, and provides an extension of contextualism beyond epistemology.

Oxford Studies in Metaethics 12

Author: Russ Shafer-Landau

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2017-07-06

Total Pages: 334

ISBN-13: 0198805071

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Oxford Studies in Metaethics is the only publication devoted exclusively to original philosophical work in the foundations of ethics. It provides an annual selection of much of the best new scholarship being done in the field. Its broad purview includes work being done at the intersections of ethical theory with metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of language, and philosophy of mind. The essays included in the series provide an excellent basis for understanding recent developments in the field; those who would like to acquaint themselves with the current state of play in metaethics would do well to start here.

Context

Author: Robert Stalnaker

Publisher: OUP Oxford

Published: 2014-07-24

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 0191027200

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Robert Stalnaker explores the notion of the context in which speech takes place, its role in the interpretation of what is said, and in the explanation of the dynamics of discourse. He distinguishes different notions of context, but the main focus is on the notion of context as common ground, where the common ground is an evolving body of background information that is presumed to be shared by the participants in a conversation. The common ground is the information that is presupposed by speakers and addressees, and a central concern of this book is with the notion of presupposition, and with the interaction of compositional structure with discourse dynamics in the explanation of presuppositional phenomena. Presupposed information includes background information both about the subject matter of a discourse and about the evolving discourse itself, and about the attitudes of the participants in the discourse, including who and where they are, and what they agree and disagree about. Stalnaker provides a way of representing self-locating information that helps to explain how it can be shared and communicated, and how it evolves over time. He discusses the semantic and pragmatics of conditionals and epistemic modals, and their role in representing agreement, disagreement, and the negotiation about how a context should evolve. The book concludes with a discussion of the relations between contextualism and semantic relativism. The Context and Content series is a forum for outstanding original research at the intersection of philosophy, linguistics, and cognitive science. The general editor is François Recanati (Institut Jean-Nicod, Paris).

Context and Contexts

Author: Anita Fetzer

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing

Published: 2011-06-09

Total Pages: 250

ISBN-13: 9027286639

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This book departs from the premise that context represents a complex relational configuration which can no longer be conceived as an analytic prime but rather requires a parts-whole perspective to capture its inherent dynamism. The edited volume presents a collection of papers which examine the connectedness between context, contextualization and entextualization. They address the questions how meaning and speech acts are situated in context, how both are influenced by context, how context influences speech acts and meaning, how context is imported into the discourse, and how context is entextualized in discourse. The papers cover institutional and non-institutional contexts, the language of Greek laws, political discourse, confrontational media discourse and task-oriented face-to-face and back-to-back interactions. They reflect current moves in pragmatics and discourse analysis to cross disciplinary and methodological boundaries by integrating relevant premises and insights, in particular cognition, adaptive action, negotiation of meaning, sequentiality, recipient design and genre.

Contextualism in Philosophy

Author: Gerhard Preyer

Publisher: Clarendon Press

Published: 2005-08-11

Total Pages: 412

ISBN-13: 0191556181

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In epistemology and in philosophy of language there is fierce debate about the role of context in knowledge, understanding, and meaning. Many contemporary epistemologists take seriously the thesis that epistemic vocabulary is context-sensitive. This thesis is of course a semantic claim, so it has brought epistemologists into contact with work on context in semantics by philosophers of language. This volume brings together the debates, in a set of twelve specially written essays representing the latest work by leading figures in the two fields. All future work on contextualism will start here.

Contextual Computing

Author: Robert Porzel

Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media

Published: 2010-11-25

Total Pages: 189

ISBN-13: 3642173969

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Recent advances in the fields of knowledge representation, reasoning and human-computer interaction have paved the way for a novel approach to treating and handling context. The field of research presented in this book addresses the problem of contextual computing in artificial intelligence based on the state of the art in knowledge representation and human-computer interaction. The author puts forward a knowledge-based approach for employing high-level context in order to solve some persistent and challenging problems in the chosen showcase domain of natural language understanding. Specifically, the problems addressed concern the handling of noise due to speech recognition errors, semantic ambiguities, and the notorious problem of underspecification. Consequently the book examines the individual contributions of contextual composing for different types of context. Therefore, contextual information stemming from the domain at hand, prior discourse, and the specific user and real world situation are considered and integrated in a formal model that is applied and evaluated employing different multimodal mobile dialog systems. This book is intended to meet the needs of readers from at least three fields – AI and computer science; computational linguistics; and natural language processing – as well as some computationally oriented linguists, making it a valuable resource for scientists, researchers, lecturers, language processing practitioners and professionals as well as postgraduates and some undergraduates in the aforementioned fields. “The book addresses a problem of great and increasing technical and practical importance – the role of context in natural language processing (NLP). It considers the role of context in three important tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, Semantic Interpretation, and Pragmatic Interpretation. Overall, the book represents a novel and insightful investigation into the potential of contextual information processing in NLP.” Jerome A Feldman, Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, UC Berkeley, USA http://dm.tzi.de/research/contextual-computing/

Exploring Contextualism and Performativity

Author: Alessandro Capone

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2022-12-15

Total Pages: 246

ISBN-13: 3031125436

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This edited volume on contextualism and pragmatics is interdisciplinary in character and contains contributions from linguistics, cognitive science and socio-pragmatics. Going beyond conventional contextual matters of truth-conditions and pragmatic intrusion, this text deals with a variety of issues including hyperbole, synonymy, reference, argumentation, schizophrenia, rationality, morality, silence and clinical pragmatics. Contributions also address the semantics/pragmatics debate and show to what extent the theory of contextualism can be applied. This volume is based on a unitary research project financed by the University of Messina and appeals to students and researchers working in linguistics and the philosophy of language.

Text, Context, Pretext

Author: H. G. Widdowson

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2008-04-15

Total Pages: 200

ISBN-13: 0470758279

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Written by a leading researcher in the field, this fascinating examination of the relations between grammar, text, and discourse is designed to provoke critical discussion on key issues in discourse analysis which are not always clearly identified and examined. Written by a leading researcher in the field Continues the enquiry into discourse analysis that Zellig Harris initiated 50 years ago, which raised a number of problematic issues that have remained unresolved ever since Introduces the notion of pretext as an additional factor in the general interpretative process Focuses attention specifically on the work of critical discourse analysis (CDA) in light of the issues discussed