Beyond Semantics and Pragmatics

The study of meaning in language embraces a diverse range of problems and methods. Philosophers think through the relationship between language and the world; linguists document speakers' knowledge of meaning; psychologists investigate the mechanisms of understanding and production. Up through the early 2000s, these investigations were generally compartmentalized: indeed, researchers often regarded both the subject-matter and the methods of other disciplines with skepticism. Since then, however, there has been a sea change in the field, enabling researchers increasingly to synthesize the perspectives of philosophy, linguistics and psychology and to energize all the fields with rich new intellectual perspectives that facilitate meaningful interchange. The time is right for a broader exploration and reflection on the status and problems of semantics as an interdisciplinary enterprise, in light of a decade of challenging and successful research in this area. Taking as its starting-point Lepore and Stone's 2014 book Imagination and Convention, this volume aims to reconcile different methodological perspectives while refocusing semanticists on new problems where integrative work will find the broadest and most receptive audience.

1 - Two Questions about Interpretative Effects
2 - Exaggeration and Invention
3 - Calculability, Convention, and Conversational Implicature
4 - Presupposition Triggering and Disambiguation
5 - Discourse, Context and Coherence: The Grammar of Prominence
6 - Socializing Pragmatics
7 - Varieties of Intentionalism
8 - Showing, Expressing, and Figuratively Meaning
9 - Taking Perspective
10 - Perspectives and Slurs
11 - Composing Meaning and Thinking
12 - About Convention and Grammar
13 - On Convention and Coherence
14 - Convention, Intention, and the Conversational Record
15 - Issues for Meaning: Conventions, Intentions, and Coherence

Gerhard Preyer is Professor of Sociology at the Goethe-Universität, Frankfurt am Main. he is editor of the journal Protosociology, and of several books, including Contextualism in Philosophy (with Georg Peter, 2005), Logical Form and Language (2002, with Georg Peter), Context-Sensitivity and Semantic Minimalism (2007, with Georg Peter), and Donald Davidson on Truth, Meaning, and the Mental (2012), all published by Oxford University Press.