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Subjectivity and Perspective in Truth-Theoretic Semantics

Peter Lasersohn

December 2016

ISBN: 9780199573684

304 pages
Paperback
246x171mm

In Stock

Oxford Studies in Semantics and Pragmatics

Price: £35.49

This book explores linguistic and philosophical issues presented by sentences expressing personal taste, such as Roller coasters are fun, and examines how truth-theoretic semantics can account for expressions of this type. It provides a detailed and explicit formal grammar paired with semantic analysis and pragmatic theory.

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Description

This book explores linguistic and philosophical issues presented by sentences expressing personal taste, such as Roller coasters are fun, and examines how truth-theoretic semantics can account for expressions of this type. It provides a detailed and explicit formal grammar paired with semantic analysis and pragmatic theory.

  • Bridges the gap between linguistic and philosophical analyses of the topic
  • Provides a clear, detailed semantic analysis paired with pragmatic theory
  • Presents and defends an unusual philosophical position

About the Author(s)

Peter Lasersohn, Professor of Linguistics and Philosophy, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Peter Lasersohn is Professor of Linguistics and Philosophy at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He completed his Ph.D. in Linguistics at Ohio State University in 1988, and taught at the University of Texas at Austin, the University of California at Santa Cruz, and the University of Rochester before his appointment at Illinois in 1996. He is the author of two previous books, A Semantics for Groups and Events (Garland, 1990), and Plurality, Conjunction and Events (Kluwer, 1995); and of shorter articles in journals including Language, Linguistics and Philosophy, Linguistic Inquiry, Journal of Semantics, Natural Language Semantics, Synthese, and Inquiry.

Table of Contents

    Preface
    List of abbreviations
    1:Subjectivity, disagreement, and content
    2:Dismissing the easy alternatives
    3:Setting the syntactic and semantic stage
    4:Notes on the grammar of time and space
    5:Basic relativist semantics
    6:"Hidden" and "disguised" elements
    7:Pragmatics of truth assessment
    8:Attitude predicates in relativist semantics
    9:Assertion and other speech acts
    10:Between fact and opinion
    11:Reliability, imagination, and the functional motivation for relativism
    References
    Index

Reviews

"this monograph represents a welcome contribution to the study of sentences concerning matters of opinion within the framework of logical semantics. As a result, it will be particularly appealing to specialists in formal linguistics and, more generally, scholars who are interested in the study of linguistic expressions of subjectivity." - Enrico Torre, Linguist List

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