Semantics Versus Pragmatics

Book Description
Leading scholars in the philosophy of language and theoretical linguistics present brand-new papers on a major topic at the intersection of the two fields, the distinction between semantics and pragmatics. Anyone engaged with this issue in either discipline will find much to reward their attention here. Contributors: Kent Bach, Herman Cappelen, Michael Glanzberg, Jeffrey C. King, Ernie Lepore, Stephen Neale, F. Recanati, Nathan Salmon, Mandy Simons, Scott Soames, Robert J. Stainton, Jason Stanley, Zoltan Gendler Szabo


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"Over the past thirty years, semantic theories for natural languages have become increasingly sophisticated, and have been invoked to deal with an ever increasing range of phenomena. This simultaneous expansion of depth and breadth has led to a renewed interest among philosophers, linguists, and cognitive scientists in the proper limits of this enterprise." Semantics versus Pragmatics offers a stimulating series of original essays on this issue by some of the world's leading specialists, and includes an introduction which outlines the orthodox conception of the distinction (going back to Paul Grice's seminal work) and some of the reasons it has recently come under severe criticism. The volume's ten chapters cut through the terminological confusion which inevitably accompanies debates about disciplinary boundaries and vividly illustrate where the real fault-lines lie. Together, they reveal the conceptual subtlety and empirical richness of this vital issue, considerably advancing our understanding of it.


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