Starting on Thursday, we will discuss expressive meaning. This is a new topic for this course, so we will have to see what develops. The person who wrote the book on expressive meaning (a.k.a. conventional implicature), or rather is still writing it, is “Chris Potts”:http://www-unix.oit.umass.edu/~potts/. As our first reading, we will use a survey article that he wrote:
- Potts, Christopher. 2003. “Conventional implicatures, a distinguished class of meanings”:http://www-unix.oit.umass.edu/~potts/potts-cis-interfaces.pdf. To appear in Gillian Ramchand and Charles Reiss, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Interfaces. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
You could also look at his dissertation “The Logic of Conventional Implicatures” (available in a variety of formats from his web page) and a class handout on “Central Properties of Expressives”:http://people.umass.edu/potts/class5-expressives.pdf (from the current “Proseminar in Semantics”:http://www.people.umass.edu/potts/proseminar03.html at UMass).
Supplemental readings (not required) are David Kaplan’s paper on “Ouch and Oops” and Angelika Kratzer’s comments “Beyond Ouch and Oops“:
- Kaplan, David. The Meaning of Ouch and Oops. Explorations in the theory of Meaning as Use. Talk Length Version — Draft #3. [Available only for course participants]
- Kratzer, Angelika. 1999. Beyond ouch and oops: How descriptive and expressive meaning interact. A comment on David Kaplan’s paper. Cornell Conference on Theories of Context Dependency (March 26).
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This entry was posted by fintel on Tuesday, October 21st, 2003, at 9:08 am.
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