Literatura

PRAGMATICS
I. BASIC NOTIONS IN SEMANTICS AND PRAGMATICS
Semantics and pragmatics are both concerned with the study of meaning; we have to distinguish between speaker meaning and sentence meaning.
Speaker meaning: is what a speaker means (intends to convey) when he uses a piece of language.
Sentence meaning: (or word meaning) is what a sentence (or word) means.
There is often a divergencebetween the meaning of the linguistic expression a speaker uses and the meaning he intends to communicate by using it. What hearers are interested in is what the speaker means, and that leads him to ignore the fact that the speaker's words mean something else.
* Slip-of-the-tongue-cases: when a speaker accidentally and unconciously uses a different word from the one he wanted to use.* Malapropism: a speaker uses a certain word thinking it has a certain meaning when the word in fact means something else.
Hearers are usually able to discount the `wrong' meaning for ambiguous utterances and recover the meaning the speaker intend without making any concious choice.
The hearer's knowledge of what the speaker's words mean only provides a clue as to what the speaker means, and he must build thespeaker's meaning from this clue together with his knowledge of the context. In some cases this clue is very skeletal, as not complete sentences.
Ex: Not in here.
But, even when the speaker utters a complete sentence, there can be a variety of ways in which the meaning of his words falls short of what the hearer takes him to mean.
Ex: There are too many marks in this book
Utterance: any stretchof talk or writing, by one single person, before and after which there is a silence on the part of that person. An utterance is the use by a particular speaker , on a particular occasion, of a piece of language, such as a sequence of sentences, a phrase, or even a single word. Utterances are physical events and they are ephemeral.
Sentence: It is, conceived abstractly, a string of words puttogether by the grammatical rules of a language. It is an abstract linguistic entity. A given sentence always consists of the same words, and in the same order. Any change in the words, or in their order, makes a different sentence.
Not all utterances are actually tokens (realizations) of sentences, but sometimes only of parts of sentences (phrases or single words).
Proposition: it's part of themeaning of the utterance of a declarative sentence that describes some state of affairs. Propositions may also be defined as mental representations which have meaning, that is, as semantic representations.
Propositions cannot be said to belong to any particular language. Sentences in different languages can correspond to the same proposition, if the two sentences are perfect translations of eachother.
Propositions are public in the sense that the same proposition is accessible to different persons: different individuals can grasp the same proposition.
References
Blakemore, D. (1992), Understanding Utterances, Oxford: Blackwell.
Hurford, J.R. & B. Heasley (1983), Semantics: A Coursebook, Cambridge: CUP.
Recommended reading and practice
Units 1 - 3 in Hurfoord & HeasleyInference: an inference is any conclusion that one is reasonably entitled to draw from a sentence or utterance.
Deductive inference: deductive inferences cannot be defeated or cancelled by the addition of extra information. Deductive inferences can therefore be called `demonstrative'.
Ex: All human beings are rational (PREMISE)
Peter is a human being (PREMISE)
Peter is rational (CONCLUSION)Inductive inference: they involve an informational jump. The conclusion includes information not warranted by the premises. For that reason they can be cancelled by the addition of extra premises. Inductive inferences can therefore be called `non demonstrative'.
Entailment: they are deductive inferences.
A proposition X entails a proposition Y if the truth of Y follows necessarily from the truth of...