Publications

Publication details [#45182]

Jaszczolt, Katarina M. 2007. The syntax-pragmatics merger: Belief reports in the theory of Default Semantics. Pragmatics & Cognition 15 (1) : 41–64.
Publication type
Article in journal
Publication language
English
Place, Publisher
John Benjamins
Journal DOI
10.1075/pc

Annotation

This paper is a voice in the ongoing discussion on the source and properties of pragmatic inference that contributes to the representation of discourse meaning. It starts off from the contextualist standpoint of truth-conditional pragmatics (TCP, Recanati 2002, 2003, 2004) and develops a proposal of representations of utterance meaning, the so-called merger representations, that incorporate the output of pragmatic inference. The move from TCP to pragmatics-rich semantics of acts of communication is facilitated by rethinking the compositionality of meaning and predicating compositionality of such pragmatics-rich structures. It is argued that the advantage of ‘semanticizing’ the output of pragmatic sources of meaning is that we can relax the view on compositionality of meaning and offer an algorithm of the interaction of such sources where the requirement of compositionality is imposed on the output of the interaction rather than on the output of the syntactic processing of the sentence. This proposal is applied to belief reports for which it offers representations of their various readings.