200 research outputs found
To shift or not to shift:Indexical attraction in role shift in German Sign Language
Get PDFThere are two main competing views about the nature of sign language role shift within formal semantics today: Quer (2005) and Schlenker (2017a,b), following now standard analyses of indexical shift in spoken languages, analyze it as a socalled ‘monstrous operator’, while K. Davidson (2015) and Maier (2017), following more traditional and cognitive approaches, analyze it as form of quotation. Examples of role shift in which some indexicals are shifted and some unshifted pose a prima facie problem for both approaches. We show that the quotational approach can deal with these examples in terms of unquotation and a pragmatic principle of ‘attraction’. We present a systematic empirical investigation of the predictions of the quotation/attraction approach in DGS (German Sign Language). Results for the second person pronoun IX2, fully support the attraction hypothesis, while results for IX1 and HERE are inconclusive.<br/
Extracting fictional truth from unreliable sources
Get PDFA fictional text is commonly viewed as constituting an invitation to play a certain game of make-believe, with the individual sentences written by the author providing the propositions we are to imagine and/or accept as true within the
fiction. However, we can’t always take the text at face value. What narratologists call ‘unreliable narrators’ may present a confused or misleading picture of the fictional world. Meanwhile there has been a debate in philosophy about so-called ‘imaginative resistance’ in which we are inclined to resist imagining (or even accepting as true in the fiction) what’s explicitly stated in the text. But if we can’t take the text’s word for it, how do we determine what’s true in a fiction? We propose an account of fiction interpretation in a dynamic setting (a version of DRT with a mechanism for opening, updating, and closing temporary ‘workspaces’) and combine this framework with belief revision logic. With these tools in hand we turn to modelling imaginative resistance and unreliable narrators
Perspective shift across modalities
Get PDFLanguages offer various ways to present what someone said, thought, imagined, felt, and so on from their perspective. The prototypical example of a perspective-shifting device is direct quotation. In this review we define perspective shift in terms of indexical shift: A direct quotation like “Selena said, ‘Oh, I don't know.’” involves perspective shift because the first-person indexical ‘I’ refers to Selena, not to the actual speaker. We then discuss a variety of noncanonical modality-specific perspective-shifting devices: role shift in signed language, quotatives in spoken language, free indirect discourse in written language, and point-of-view shift in visual language. We show that these devices permit complex mixed forms of perspective shift which may involve nonlinguistic gestural as well as visual components
De se reductionism takes on monsters
Get PDFContains fulltext :
40182.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Open Access
Mixed Quotation: The Grammar of Apparently Transparent Opacity
Get PDFThe phenomenon of mixed quotation exhibits clear signs of both the apparent transparency of compositional language use and the opacity of pure quotation. I argue that the interpretation of a mixed quotation in- volves the resolution of a metalinguistic presupposition. The leading idea behind my proposal is that a mixed-quoted expression, say, “has an anomalous feature”, means what x referred to with the words ‘has an anomalous feature’. To understand how this solves the paradox, I set up a precise grammatical framework, explicitly connecting various levels of linguistic analysis: phonological forms, categorial syntax, and a dynamic picture of the semantics–pragmatics interface. In this framework I formalize and evaluate a presuppositional account of mixed quotation. Finally, I address the phenomenon of unquotation and argue that it is an essential ingredient for an elegant and empirically adequate analysis of mixed quotation in natural language
Pure Quotation
Get PDFPure quotation, as in ‘cat’ has three letters, is a linguistic device designed for referring to linguistic expressions. I present a uniform reconstruction of the four classic philosophical accounts of the phenomenon: the proper name theory, the description theory, the demonstrative theory, and the disquotational theory. I evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of each proposal with respect to fundamental semantic properties like compositionality, productivity, and recursivity
Language shifts in free indirect discourse
Get PDFFree indirect discourse is a way of reporting what a protagonist thinks or says that is distinct from both direct and indirect discourse. In particular, while pronouns and tenses are presented from the narrator's perspective, as in indirect discourse, other indexical and expressive elements reflect the protagonist's point of view, as in direct discourse. In this paper I discuss a number of literary examples of free indirect discourse in which the narrator slips into the language, dialect or idiolect of the protagonist. I argue that the leading formal semantic analyses of free indirect discourse, which rely on semantic context shifting, fail to account for such language shifts. I then present an alternative account that treats free indirect discourse as a form of mixed quotation
The Pragmatics of Person and Imperatives in Sign Language of the Netherlands
Get PDFWe present new evidence against a grammatical distinction between second and third person in Sign Language of The Netherlands (NGT). More precisely, we show how pushing this distinction into the domain of pragmatics helps account for an otherwise puzzling fact about the NGT imperative: not only is it used to command your addressee, it can also express ‘non-addressee-oriented commands’
Mixed quotation: between use and mention
No full textAbstract. Quotation exhibits characteristics of both use and mention. I argue against the recently popular pragmatic reductions of quotation to mere language use (Recanati, 2001), and in favor of a truly hybrid account synthesizing and extending Potts (2007) and Geurts and Maier (2005), using a mention logic and a dynamic semantics with presup-position to establish a context-driven meaning shift. The main selling point of this presuppositional analysis is its account of error neutral-ization and shifted indexicality under quotation. The current paper ex-plores a “quote-breaking ” extension to solve the problems posed by non-constituent quotation, anaphora and ellipsis accross quotation marks, and quantifier raising out of quoted matter. 1 Varieties of quotation Between mentioning someone’s words and indirect speech reporting lies a variety of more or less opaque ways of reporting a speech act. Let me illustrate this by categorizing some quotative reports of a real-life Bushism1 found in various blog
- …
