Use-Conditional Meaning by Daniel Gutzmann, Hardcover | Indigo Chapters

This book seeks to bring together the pragmatic theory of "meaning as use" with the traditional semantic approach that considers meaning in terms of truth conditions. Daniel Gutzmann adopts core ideas by the philosopher David Kaplan in assuming that the meaning of expressions such as oops ordamn can be captured by giving the conditions under which they can be felicitously used. He develops a multidimensional approach to meaning, called hybrid semantics, that incorporates use conditions alongside truth conditions in a unified framework. This new system overcomes the empirical gaps andconceptual problems associated with previous multidimensional systems; it also lessens the burden on the compositional system by shifting restrictions on the combination of use-conditional expressions to the lexicon-semantics interface instead of building them directly into the combinatoric rules. The approach outlined in this book can capture the entire meaning of complex expressions, and also has natural applications in the analysis of sentence mood and modal particles in German, as Gutzmann's two detailed case studies demonstrate. The book will be a valuable resource for linguists workingin the fields of semantics, pragmatics, and philosophy of language, as well as to philosophers and cognitive scientists with an interest in meaning in language. | Use-Conditional Meaning by Daniel Gutzmann, Hardcover | Indigo Chapters