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The metasemantics of contextual sensitivity| old_uid | 15652 |
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| title | The metasemantics of contextual sensitivity |
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| start_date | 2015/05/21 |
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| schedule | 14h-16h |
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| online | no |
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| location_info | salle Langevin |
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| details | “Context and Semantic Value” |
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| summary | There appears to be a lot of contextual sensitivity in natural language. Aside from obviously contextually sensitive expressions like ‘I’, ‘now’, ‘here’, ‘she’ and so on, quantifiers, conditionals, modals, possessives like ‘Annie’s book’, relational expressions that take implicit arguments like ‘ready’, gradable adjectives and so on are all good candidates for being contextually sensitive. It appears that expressions like ‘I’, whose meaning alone suffices for it to have a semantic value in context, are the exception when it comes to contextual sensitivity. Much more common seem to be expressions or constructions whose meanings must be supplemented in some way in context to have semantic values. I call such expressions supplementives to highlight their need for the supplementation in question. It is plausible that in addition to demonstrative expressions, including demonstrative pronouns, all the less obviously contextually sensitive expressions mentioned above—modals, conditionals, gradable adjectives and so on--are supplementives in my sense.
The question arises as to what is the nature of the supplementation required by supplementives in order that they have semantic values in context; and whether all supplementives require the same mechanism—supplementation of the same nature—to have semantic values in context. I argue that there is a single mechanism by means of which supplementives secure semantic values in context and describe two accounts of what that mechanism is. |
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| responsibles | Pacherie, Dokic |
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