Sally McConnell-Ginet

Gennaro Chierchia

This self-contained introduction to natural language semanticsaddresses the major theoretical questions in the field. This self-contained introduction to natural language semantics addresses the major theoretical questions in the field. The authors introduce the systematic study of linguistic meaning through a sequence of formal tools and their linguistic applications. Starting with propositional connectives and truth conditions, the book moves to quantification and binding, intensionality and tense, and so on. To set their approach in a broader perspective, the authors also explore the interaction of meaning with context and use (the semantics-pragmatics interface) and address some of the foundational questions, especially in connection with cognition in general. They also introduce a few of the most accessible and interesting ideas from recent research to give the reader a bit of the flavor of current work in semantics. The organization of this new edition is modular; after the introductory chapters, the remaining material can be covered in flexible order. The book presupposes no background in formal logic (an appendix introduces the basic notions of set theory) and only a minimal acquaintance with linguistics. This edition includes a substantial amount of completely new material and has been not only updated but redesigned throughout to enhance its user-friendliness.

An Introduction to Semantics

Meaning and Grammar

This book investigates the relation between language and logic. Gennaro Chierchia looks at the way syntactic and inferential processes interact in determining polarity sensitive and free choice phenomena. He analyses these as a form of grammaticized scalar implicature and seeks to identify the common core of the polarity system by examining many of its manifestations as well as the choices that determine its diversity. To do so he reassesses the relations between syntax, semantics, and pragmatics and in the process makes startling insights into the relation of syntax to logic. Rudolf Carnap's classic, The Logical Syntax of Language, defines syntax as a lexicon and a set of formation rules and logic as a set of inference rules. Modern generative linguistics maintains a similar modular approach: a combinatorial apparatus is said to generate structures over which semantic and pragmatic relations, such as presupposition and implicature, are defined. This book argues by contrast that many structures typically perceived as syntactically deviant owe their status to their logical properties, in other words to whether they are contradictory or analytically true in specific ways. This alters the Carnapian view. The characterization of grammatical structure requires a more direct role of logical inferences: the functional lexicon of grammar comes, Professor Chierchia shows, with a set of inference rules that crucially and directly determine grammaticality patterns. Logic in Grammar presents the results of the author's decade-long work on pragmatics and scalar implicatures and extends his long-term project on how humans reason and categorize the world. It is a book that will interest linguists, philosophers, and cognitive scientists alike.

Polarity, Free Choice, and Intervention

Logic in Grammar

Speed

In limbo

In a fundamental investigation of language and human reasoning, Gennaro Chierchia looks at how syntactic and inferential processes interact through the study of polarity sensitive and free choice items. He reformulates the semantics of focus and scope and the pragmatics of implicature as part of the recursive semantic system.

In The Dynamics of Meaning, Gennaro Chierchia tackles central issues in dynamic semantics and extends the general framework. Chapter 1 introduces the notion of dynamic semantics and discusses in detail the phenomena that have been used to motivate it, such as "donkey" sentences and adverbs of quantification. The second chapter explores in greater depth the interpretation of indefinites and issues related to presuppositions of uniqueness and the "E-type strategy." In Chapter 3, Chierchia extends the dynamic approach to the domain of syntactic theory, considering a range of empirical problems that includes backwards anaphora, reconstruction effects, and weak crossover. The final chapter develops the formal system of dynamic semantics to deal with central issues of definites and presupposition. Chierchia shows that an approach based on a principled enrichment of the mechanisms dealing with meaning is to be preferred on empirical grounds over approaches that depend on an enrichment of the syntactic apparatus. Dynamics of Meaning illustrates how seemingly abstract stances on the nature of meaning can have significant and far-reaching linguistic consequences, leading to the detection of new facts and influencing our understanding of the syntax/semantics/pragmatics interface.

Gennaro Chierchia

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