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Imagination and Convention: Distinguishing Grammar and Inference in Language


Imagination and Convention: Distinguishing Grammar and Inference in Language

Hardback by Lepore, Ernie (Rutgers University); Stone, Matthew (Rutgers University)

Imagination and Convention: Distinguishing Grammar and Inference in Language

£67.00

ISBN:
9780198717188
Publication Date:
11 Dec 2014
Language:
English
Publisher:
Oxford University Press
Pages:
302 pages
Format:
Hardback
For delivery:
Estimated despatch 27 May - 1 Jun 2024
Imagination and Convention: Distinguishing Grammar and Inference in Language

Description

What do speakers mean? What do they convey? What do they reveal? How do they invite us to think? Communication exploits conventional rules, deliberate choices, and many other faculties. How? A common answer invokes simple meanings and general ways to reinterpret them, as in H. P. Grice's theory of conversational implicature. Lepore and Stone show such answers are unsatisfactory. Instead, they argue that language provides diverse tools for making ideas public, and that communication recruits distinct kinds of imagination. The work synthesizes results from across cognitive science into a profoundly new account of meaning in language.

Contents

I: THE LANDSCAPE OF PRAGMATIC INFERENCE; II: THE INTERPRETIVE EFFECTS OF LINGUISTIC RULES; III: VARIETIES OF INTERPRETIVE REASONING; IV: THEORIZING SEMANTICS AND PRAGMATICS

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