Current Research in the Semantics/Pragmatics Interface

ISSN: 1472-7870

Editor: Ken Turner and Klaus Von Heusinger
Subject: Linguistics (view other series in this subject area)
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The aim of this series is to focus upon the relationship between semantic and pragmatic theories for a variety of natural language constructions.

The boundary between semantics and pragmatics can be drawn in many various ways; the relative benefits of each have given rise to a vivid theoretical dispute in the literature in the last three decades.

As a side effect, this variety has produced a certain degree of confusion and absence of purpose in the extant publications on the topic. This series provides a forum where the confusion within the existing literature can be removed and the issues raised by different positions can be discussed with a renewed sense of purpose. The editors intend the contributions to this series to take further steps towards clarity and cautious consensus.

Details of the latest volume in the series are as follows:

Volume 26 - Multidimensional semantics of adverbs
Mingya Liu

Multidimensional Semantics of Evaluative Adverbs provides a multidimensional analysis for the lexical semantics of evaluative adverbs: nonfactive evaluative adverbs trigger a conventional implicature, whereas factive evaluative adverbs not only trigger a conventional implicature but also a conventional presupposition. This analysis proves to be more advantageous than existing analyses in terms of empirical coverage and explanatory power. With the case of evaluative adverbs, the book demonstrates how secondary meanings (e.g. conventional presuppositions, conventional implicatures) interact with primary meanings (i.e. main assertion or at-issue content). For the first time, a three-dimensional formal language of conventional implicatures and conventional presuppositions is implemented and applied to derive the right truth conditions of sentences with evaluative adverbs and predict their projection behaviors. With a cross-linguistic perspective (focusing on German, English and Mandarin Chinese) and using corpus- and psycholinguistic methods, the book also offers new perspectives on the syntax, semantics and pragmatics of adverbials. The treatment of the positive polarity of evaluative adverbs as a projection problem is more plausible than previous analyses. The formal treatment of their semantic vagueness (e.g. degree semantics and judge dependency) will shed light on the still ongoing discussion of the semantics-pragmatics interface or even the syntax-pragmatics interface. As projective meaning and semantic underspecification stay in the center stage of research on semantics and pragmatics and adverbial syntax-semantics has been an important field of inquiry in generative linguistics, this book will certainly be of great interest to linguists from fields including syntax, semantics, pragmatics, comparative linguistics, and also philosophers of language

Contact the Series Editors

Series Editor
Klaus von Heusinger
University of Cologne, Germany
klaus.vonheusinger@uni-koeln.de

Series Editor
Ken Turner
University of Brighton, UK
k.p.turner@bton.ac.uk

Commissioning Editor
Chris Hart
chart@emeraldinsight.com

Editorial Board

Nicholas Asher, Université Paul Sabatier, France
Johan Van der Auwera, University of Antwerp, Belgium
Betty Birner, Northern Illinois University, USA
Claudia Casadio, Universitá degli studi G. d’Annunzio Chieti Pescara, Italy
Ariel Cohen, Ben Gurion University, Israel
Marcelo Dascal, Tel Aviv University, Israel
Paul Dekker, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Regine Eckardt, University of Göttingen, Germany
Markus Egg, Humbolt University Berlin, Germany
Donka Farkas, University of California, Santa Cruz, USA
Bruce Fraser, Boston University, USA
Thorstein Fretheim, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Norway
Brendan Gillon, McGill University, Canada
Jeroen Groenendijk, University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands
Yueguo Gu, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, PRC
Larry Horn, Yale University, USA
Yan Huang, University of Auckland, New Zealand
Asa Kasher, Tel Aviv University, Israel
Manfred Krifka, Humboldt University, Germany
Susumu Kubo, Matsuyama University, Japan
Chungmin Lee, Seoul National University, South Korea
Stephen Levinson, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, the Netherlands
Claudia Maienborn, University of Tübingen, Germany
Tony McEnery, Lancaster University, UK
Alice ter Meulen, University of Geneva, Switzerland.
François Nemo, University of Orléans, France
Peter Pelyvas, University of Debrecen, Hungary
Jaroslav Peregrin, Czech Academy of Sciences and University of Hradec Králové, Czech Republic
Allan Ramsay, University of Manchester, UK
Rob Van der Sandt, Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands
Kjell Johan Sæbo, University of Oslo, Norway
Robert Stalnaker, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA
Martin Stokhof, University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands
Gregory Ward, Northwestern University, USA
Henk Zeevat, University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands
Thomas Ede Zimmermann, University of Frankfurt, Germany

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