At the Semantics / Pragmatics Interface in Child Language

The Semantics/Pragmatics Interface

We survey three domains – scalar implicatures, presupposition, and conventional implicatures – in which the division of labor between semantics and pragmatics has given rise to new empirical and formal insights in the last decade. In each case, there is a vibrant contemporary debate concerning the modular decomposition of rich arrays of data.

Evidentiality and Epistemic Modality at the Semantics/Pragmatics Interface

It is fairly standard to assume that a speech act consists of an illocutionary level of meaning, F , and a separate level of propositional content, p, such that F takes p as its argument, F (p). This paper is concerned (i) with establishing for one language, Cusco Quechua (CQ), to which of these two levels of meaning its evidential and its epistemic modal markers belong, and (ii) with developin...

Scalar implicatures: experiments at the semantics-pragmatics interface.

In this article we present two sets of experiments designed to investigate the acquisition of scalar implicatures. Scalar implicatures arise in examples like Some professors are famous where the speaker's use of some typically indicates that s/he had reasons not to use a more informative term, e.g. all. Some professors are famous therefore gives rise to the implicature that not all professors a...

Procedural Meaning and the Semantics/ Pragmatics Interface

Underspecification and the Semantics / Pragmatics Interface

The notion of UNDERSPECIFICATION [17, 2, 21, 25] has been proposed as a possible solution to the problem of specifying a theory of the semantics / pragmatics interface—more specifically, of the process of identifying an interpretation in context—that is consistent with psychological, as well as linguistic evidence. The assumptions about the respective roles of semantics and pragmatics adopted i...