The study of meaning in language embraces a diverse range of problems and methods. Philosophers think through the relationship between language and the world; linguists document speakers’ knowledge of meaning; psychologists investigate the mechanisms of understanding and production. Up through the early 2000s, these investigations were generally compartmentalized: indeed, researchers often regarded both the subject-matter and the methods of other disciplines with skepticism. Since then, however, there has been a sea change in the field, enabling researchers increasingly to synthesize the perspectives of philosophy, linguistics and psychology and to energize all the fields with rich new intellectual perspectives that facilitate meaningful interchange. The time is right for a broader exploration and reflection on the status and problems of semantics as an interdisciplinary enterprise, in light of a decade of challenging and successful research in this area. Taking as its starting-point Lepore and Stone’s 2014 book Imagination and Convention, this volume aims to reconcile different methodological perspectives while refocusing semanticists on new problems where integrative work will find the broadest and most receptive audience.
Introduction: Linguistic Structure and Meaning
Gerhard Preyer
1. Two Questions about Interpretive Effects
Robert J. Stainton and Christopher Viger
2. Exaggeration and Invention
Kent Bach
3. Calculability, Convention, and Conversational Implicature
Wayne A. Davis
4. Presupposition Triggering and Disambiguation
Adam Sennet
5. Discourse, Context, and Coherence: The Grammar of Prominence
Una Stojnić
6. Socializing Pragmatics
William B. Starr
7. Varieties of Intentionalism
Jessica Keiser
8. Showing, Expressing, and Figuratively Meaning
Mitchell Green
9. Taking Perspective
Madeleine Arseneault
10. Perspectives and Slurs
Claudia Bianchi
11. Composing Meaning and Thinking
Roberto G. de Almeida
12. About Convention and Grammar
Michael Glanzberg
13. On Convention and Coherence
Andrew Kehler and Jonathan Cohen
14. Convention, Intention, and the Conversational Record
Mandy Simons
15. Issues for Meaning: Conventions, Intentions, and Coherence
Ernie Lepore and Matthew Stone
Index
Oxford University Press, Oxford 2018