Publications
Publication details [#55830]
Publication type
Article in journal
Publication language
English
Keywords
Place, Publisher
John Benjamins
Journal DOI
10.1075/pc
Annotation
“Imported“ is a member of a large family of adjectives, including “enemy“, “domestic“, “local“, “exported“, “foreign“. Call these terms contextuals. Contextuals are prima facie context-sensitive expressions in that the same contextual sentence can have different truth-values, and hence different truth-conditions, from utterance to utterance. This paper uses Perry's multipropositionalist framework to get a new angle on contextuals. It explores the idea that the lexical linguistic meaning of contextual adjectives introduces two conditions to the cognitive significance of an utterance. These conditions contain a variable, y, that does not correspond to any lexical component in the sentence. This is the available tool for letting the speakers' intentions, or what the speakers have in mind, play a semantic role. The paper's view focuses on the complex condition that linguistic meaning (as type) sometimes semantically determines.