Meaning without Truth

Predelli, Stefano

doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199695638.001.0001

Cited by 52 publications

(39 citation statements)

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“…In this respect our view differs from MP but also from a view like Schoubye's (), according to which the Being Called Condition is a semantic presupposition (see footnote 20). In what follows we argue, in line with Predelli (, ), that a use of a complex like [ n P n + √ALFRED] in referential position imparts the information that Alfred is called Alfred . We thereby provide a non‐semantic account of the metalinguistic information conveyed by referential uses of proper names.…”

Section: The Pragmatics Roots Of the Being Called Conditionsupporting

confidence: 61%

“…Concerning the former we follow the referentialist tradition: the only contribution of a name in referential position to the content of the sentence in which it occurs is its reference. Additionally, we rely on work by Predelli (, ) to argue that (in addition to its truth conditional contribution) referential uses of proper names impart information by virtue of extra‐semantic regularities encoded in its use , concretely, the information that Alfred is called Alfred . We thereby provide a non‐semantic account of the Being Called Condition.…”

Section: The Pragmatics Roots Of the Being Called Conditionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…On the other hand, and most importantly, it imparts information by virtue of extra‐semantic regularities encoded in the specific type of use. Put differently, the specific constraints imposed on contexts by a certain theory of use “provide the background for the explanation of how [a use] u manages to impart information straightforwardly not encoded within the semantic content” (Predelli : 37).…”

Section: The Pragmatics Roots Of the Being Called Conditionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In section 4, we address the semantics and pragmatics of proper names. In 4.1 we tackle referential uses and present a non‐semantic account for the Being Called Condition (along the lines of Predelli , ), that is, we maintain that the metalinguistic information that ‘N is called N ’ is part of the extra‐semantic information imparted by referential uses of names, and not part of their truth‐conditional content. In 4.2 we deal with predicative uses.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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No Name: The Allosemy View

Saab

Guercio²

2019

Studia Linguistica

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According to certain versions of predicativism, names denote metalinguistic predicates of a certain type, e.g. the name Perón as it occurs in the sentence Perón died in 1974 denotes a predicate more or less paraphrasable as “being called Perón” (Burge 1973, Matushansky 2008 and Fara 2011, among others). The metalinguistic theory of names is claimed to be superior in nontrivial ways to direct reference theories, according to which names contribute an individual without the mediation of descriptions (Kripke 1980). The alleged triumph of predicativism is that by assuming the “being called N” property as basic, both referential and non‐referential uses of proper names can be given a uniform semantic analysis. By contrast, the referentialist needs to resort to homonymy or semantic ambiguity. In addition, there are some systematic connections between referential and predicative uses of names that at first glance also seem to favor predicativism. The goal of this paper is to present an alternative syntax, semantics and pragmatics of proper names. We assume that grammatical categories and the associated meanings that they are supposed to encode are not grammatical primitives, but epiphenomena that result from the particular way in which syntax combines functional material and lexical Roots. Before syntax, lexical Roots have no detectable meanings. On this account, there are no names before syntax, as there are no nouns, verbs or adjectives. Names are thus seen as the result of a particular syntactic configuration whose semantic realization is that of contributing an individual. Metalinguistic uses of names, and other derived uses, are involved in a different syntactic scheme, one that makes a name Root a predicate of a certain type. Besides their different syntactic basis, we argue that metalinguistic inferences in both referential and predicative uses of names have a pragmatic source. According to the theory we propose, then, the so‐called Being Called Condition is neither a syntactic nor a semantic primitive. Under this conception of proper names the uniformity argument does not hold and the adduced linguistic evidence cannot lead to any (meta‐)semantic consideration.

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Section: The Pragmatics Roots Of the Being Called Conditionsupporting

confidence: 61%

Section: The Pragmatics Roots Of the Being Called Conditionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: The Pragmatics Roots Of the Being Called Conditionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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No Name: The Allosemy View

Saab

Guercio²

2019

Studia Linguistica

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“…Others take the meaning to be non-propositional and non-truth-conditional, differing on the fundamental ingredient: e.g. contempt expression (Barker 2000;Copp 2001;Richard 2008;Jeshion 2013b), derogatory perspectives (Camp 2013), register (Predelli 2013), expressive meaning (Potts 2007), identity-affiliation (Nunberg forthcoming), contrastive-choice (Bolinger 2015).…”

Section: The Truth-conditional Semantic Approachmentioning

confidence: 99%

Slurs, roles and power

Popa-Wyatt

Wyatt

2017

Philos Stud

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Slurring is a kind of hate speech that has various effects. Notable among these is variable offence. Slurs vary in offence across words, uses, and the reactions of audience members. Patterns of offence aren't adequately explained by current theories. We propose an explanation based on the unjust power imbalance that a slur seeks to achieve. Our starting observation is that in discourse participants take on discourse roles. These are typically inherited from social roles, but only exist during a discourse. A slurring act is a speech-act that alters the discourse roles of the target and speaker. By assigning discourse roles the speaker unjustly changes the power balance in the dialogue. This has a variety of effects on the target and audience. We show how these notions explain all three types of offence variation. We also briefly sketch how a role and power theory can help explain silencing and appropriation. Explanatory power lies in the fact that offence is correlated with the perceived unjustness of the power imbalance created.

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Expressives

McCready¹

2020

The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Semantics

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This chapter considers the semantics and pragmatics of expressive content. It begins by exemplifying the class of expressives, in the process introducing the tests that have been proposed for expressivity, focusing on the expressive adjectives fucking and damn , and on pejorative terms. The chapter then turns to specific analyses of these and other expressive items, also discussing facts related to how the particular content of some expressives can be derived from context. The chapter concludes with a discussion and overview of various approaches to semantic composition with expressives.

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Meaning without Truth

Cited by 52 publications

References 1 publication

No Name: The Allosemy View

No Name: The Allosemy View

Slurs, roles and power

Expressives

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