Pragmatic aspects of a semantic_conception

Cognitio-Estudos, 2021

We want to explore in this article the characteristics of prescriptive semantics and its usefulness to solve pragmatic problems, both analytical and synthetic, on meaning. We will proceed in the following way: 1. arguing about the limitations of a non-prescriptive and purely extensional semantics, based on the prediction of formulas of an object-language system; and 2. projecting the advantages of a theory that can pragmatically regulate meaning schemes, to enrich our instruments of meaning and consensus production with the results of scientific innovation and the interaction between different languages. The two authors we used to show this path were Alfred Tarski and Rudolph Carnap on the classical extensionalist side, and Robert Brandom and C.I Lewis on the pragmatist side. The first two were mentioned for an exhibition of formal semantics and its limits; the second two were mentioned for an exposition of a prescriptive and intensional theory and its pragmatic advantages for regulating the prediction of new truths and adaptation to the old ones.

In: L. Cummings, ed., 2010, The Pragmatics Encyclopedia, London: Routledge, 458-462

Semantics and pragmatics have both developed sophisticated methods of analysis of meaning. The question to address is whether their objects of study can be teased apart or whether each sub-discipline accounts for different contributions (in the sense of qualitatively different outputs or different types of processes) that produce one unique object called 'meaning'. Traditionally, semantics was responsible for compositionally construed sentence meaning, in which the meanings of lexical items and the structure in which they occur were combined. The best developed approach to sentence meaning is undoubtedly truth-conditional semantics. Its formal methods permit the translation of vague and ambiguous sentences of natural language into a precise metalanguage of predicate logic and provide a model-theoretic interpretation to so construed logical forms. Pragmatics was regarded as a study of utterance meaning, and hence meaning in context, and was therefore an enterprise with a different object of study. However, the boundary between them began to be blurred, giving rise to the so-called semantic underdetermination view. Semantic underdetermination was a revolutionary idea for the theory of linguistic meaning. It was a reaction to generative semantics of the 1960s and 1970s which attempted to give syntactic explanations to inherently pragmatic phenomena. We have to note the importance of the Oxford ordinary language philosophers (others, in opening up the way for the study of pragmatic inference and its contribution to truth-

Synthese, 1997

A certain orthodoxy has it that understanding is essentially computational: that information about what a sentence means is something that may be generated by means of a derivational process from information about the significance of the sentence’s constituent parts and of the ways in which they are put together. And that it is therefore fruitful to study formal theories acceptable as compositional theories of meaning for natural languages: theories that deliver for each sentence of their object-language a theorem acceptable as statement of its meaning and derivable from axioms characterizing subsentential expressions and operations forming that sentence. This paper is to show that there is something deeply wrong with these ideas, namely that they are based on a certain confusion about ascriptions of semantic knowledge. The paper is to make this point by considering a semantic theorist who has explicit knowledge of a theory of truth for L. And by showing that all the theorist needs ...

As its title, Semantics: Meaning in Language, indicates the focus of this book is on context-less meaning ("narrow semantics"), for all that the intention is to throw light on issues of language use. Two main approaches are discussed in detail. The first has its origin in the philosophy of language, and is concerned with the extra-linguistic relations between units of language and items in the world; key concepts are reference, denotation and truth. The second originates in linguistics and concentrates on intra-linguistic relations such as antonymy and synonymy. However, at many points the question arises whether these approaches to narrow semantics need to be supplemented by pragmatics.

Academia Letters, 2021

We will argue that semantic models are not enough to distinguish between what is meaningful and what is pseudo-meaningful. It can only do so when combined to some further knowledge of the interpretative options, and those are arrived at by the Scientific models of reality. The discussion of the difference between what is meaningful and what is nonsense is, on this account, always subjected to a discussion about the demarcation between science and pseudo-science. This discussion can be made employing metaphysical reasoning, by positivist criteria or naturalistic parameters. In any case, what enters in question is not merely semantic, and semantics is not able to offer a universal and timeless account of the distinction of meaning and pseudo-meaning. This is a short article to highlight some forgotten relations between formal semantics and philosophical issues. This relations were once the common trait of a category theory, but as the speculations pertaining to this field became more linked to mathematical models on syntactic regularities and recursive semantic projections, the less the semantic problem seems linked to philosophical questions or questions related to scientific demarcation. The article is an appeal to remember this aspect of the discussion. Along with it we invite the reader to a reflection inside that field of debate. The tradition of semantic philosophy initiated by Frege (1982) had its broad repercussion because it gave all the tools to identify the mapping functions of language capable of basing its projection of identity content. An expression that is synonym of another have the same projection feature, i.e., it can map equal semantic values, or produce the same generative

A major characteristic of the linguistic theories of the twentieth century, which stemmed from logical empiricism, is that the notion of reference was placed at the core of semantics. As a result, the meaning of a noun was associated with the object or the entity to which it referred, and the meaning of a statement was correlated with the state of affairs or the possible world it was meant to designate. This representational conception, which corresponds to the definition of semantics proposed by Charles Morris in 1938 (semantics studies " the relations of signs to the objects to which the signs are applicable "), became, however, the target of a number of criticisms at the end of the last century. Linguists objected that it only reduces language to a world that does not correspond to the semantic interpretation performed by the speakers. In his book Making It Explicit (1994), Robert Brandom argued that this representational conception had to be replaced by one that restores the value of the notion of inference. But, for the semantic explanation, by proposing such a reversal of perspective in prioritizing the concepts of " reference " and " inference " , the respective role and scope of investigation of semantics and pragmatics were deeply modified. The aim of this paper is thence to retrace the evolution of the connections between semantics and pragmatics by comparing some representational and inferential approaches. First, we will analyse the referential conception of meaning and we will show how a semantics based on a theory of models can be open to what Wilfrid Sellars (1956) and Willard Quine (1969) have respectively called the " myths of the Given and of the Museum ". Then we will examine the inferential approach to meaning by underlining the various theoretical changes in orientation it induces (primacy of the proposition over subsentential expressions, holistic conception, ...). Finally, this analysis will lead to highlighting some consequences of the modification of the role of semantics and pragmatics. More specifically, we will stress the fact that certain parameters, which in a referential conception belonged to pragmatics, now belong to semantics, while from an inferential perspective, the taking into account of the referential dimension of languages is understood as a social practice which is part of pragmatics.

Academia Letters, 2021

This short article is a historical reading of some of the persistent traits of philosophical semantics. We observe its development through the paths outlined by the contribution of Frege, Carnap, Tarski and Davidson (occasionally inviting Quine and Etchemendy to the discussion). We're trying to identify a symptom. The form that a semantic theorization tends to take in the course of analytical philosophy by following these authors obeys the following pattern: the theory of language that formal semantics intend to simplify is a general form of the compulsion of this language itself to its interpretative stability. The semantic theories that were elaborated to account for the patterns of interpretation and communication have a recurring limitation: whenever we relativize the notion of meaning and truth (to a model, to a possible world, to a linguistic definition, to a empirical science) some complexity is added. This addition robs our theory from its ability to offer a unitary understanding of the linguistic phenomenon that the very language helps to accomplish. We will keep for the conclusion a general commentary on the circular forms that the definition of meaning in a language has taken, whenever semantic theories have tried to account for intensional and modal phenomena; and, finally, we will draw some philosophical interpretations of this phenomenon.

The Handbook of Pragmatics, 2006

Language, 1977

Una tradizione plurisecolare ha quasi sempre perduto di vista che, in realtà, le forme linguistiche non hanno alcuna intrinseca capacità semantica: esse sono strumenti, espedienti, più o meno ingegnosi, senza vita e valore fuori delle mani dell'uomo, delle comunità storiche che ne facciano uso (De Mauro 1965). Abstract In this paper I offer my reflections on the relationship between semantics and pragmatics. I argue that semantics – the relatively stable and context-invariant meanings of the language – is necessarily amplified by pragmatics, which is a way of transcending the possibilities of semantics. Pragmatic layers, especially if they meet the cognitive needs of language users and represent culturally salient concepts, tend to become semanticized. The situation is complicated by the postulation of explicatures, which I argue are not cancellable and mimic the semantic resources of the language (very often I have claimed that explicatures are mainly cases in which a pragmatic inference does some work in rescuing a statement from otherwise insuperable logical problems). Like entailments they are not cancellable, but they share the features of all pragmatic inferences in that they are calculable. I propose that explicatures are loci of the tension between semantics and pragmatics, and given lack of cancellability they are strong candidates for inferences that become semanticized. In this paper, I see the tension between pragmatics and semantics exemplified by situations where an excessive weight is placed on the semantics (legal documents, such as laws) and situations where an excessive burden is placed on the pragmatics (pidgins like Tok Pisin). In this paper, I also argue that I would like to give thanks to Tullio De Mauro, who made me think of this topic by his stimulating considerations. I would also like to thank principles of language use tend to become semanticised in the form of discourse rules and I consider the praxis of language games and argue that discourse rules, unlike principles, have the advantage of being teachable and also of favoring the involvement of speakers in the communicative praxis (Lo Piparo F, Gramsci and Wittgenstein. An intriguing connection. In: Capone A (ed) Perspectives on language use and pragmatics. Lincom, Muenchen, pp 285–320, 2010).