 | |
| Author | Paul Portner |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Subject | linguistic modality |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press |
Publication date | 2009 |
Modality is a non-fiction book by the semanticist Paul Portner. The book, first published by the Oxford University Press in 2009, lays out the basic problems in linguistic modality and some of the standard approaches to solving them.
The book was reviewed by Valentine Hacquard and Ferenc Kiefer. [1] [2] [3]
In linguistics and related fields, pragmatics is the study of how context contributes to meaning. The field of study evaluates how human language is utilized in social interactions, as well as the relationship between the interpreter and the interpreted. Linguists who specialize in pragmatics are called pragmaticians. The field has been represented since 1986 by the International Pragmatics Association (IPrA).
In grammar, the term particle has a traditional meaning, as a part of speech that cannot be inflected, and a modern meaning, as a function word associated with another word or phrase, generally in order to impart meaning. Although a particle may have an intrinsic meaning, and indeed may fit into other grammatical categories, the fundamental idea of the particle is to add context to the sentence, expressing a mood or indicating a specific action. In English, for instance, the phrase "oh well" has no purpose in speech other than to convey a mood. The word 'up' would be a particle in the phrase to 'look up', implying that one researches something, rather than literally gazing skywards. Many languages use particles, in varying amounts and for varying reasons. In Hindi, for instance, they may be used as honorifics, or to indicate emphasis or negation. In some languages they are more clearly defined, such as Chinese, which has three types of zhùcí : Structural, Aspectual, and Modal. Structural particles are used for grammatical relations. Aspectual particles signal grammatical aspects. Modal particles express linguistic modality. Polynesian languages, which are almost devoid of inflection, use particles extensively to indicate mood, tense, and case.
A possible world is a complete and consistent way the world is or could have been. Possible worlds are widely used as a formal device in logic, philosophy, and linguistics in order to provide a semantics for intensional and modal logic. Their metaphysical status has been a subject of controversy in philosophy, with modal realists such as David Lewis arguing that they are literally existing alternate realities, and others such as Robert Stalnaker arguing that they are not.
In linguistics, evidentiality is, broadly, the indication of the nature of evidence for a given statement; that is, whether evidence exists for the statement and if so, what kind. An evidential is the particular grammatical element that indicates evidentiality. Languages with only a single evidential have had terms such as mediative, médiatif, médiaphorique, and indirective used instead of evidential.
In the linguistic sub-fields of applied linguistics and pragmatics, a hedge is a word or phrase used in a sentence to express ambiguity, probability, caution, or indecisiveness about the remainder of the sentence, rather than full accuracy, certainty, confidence, or decisiveness. Hedges can also allow speakers and writers to introduce ambiguity in meaning and typicality as a category member. Hedging in category membership is used in reference to the prototype theory, to signify the extent to which items are typical or atypical members of different categories. Hedges might be used in writing, to downplay a harsh critique or a generalization, or in speaking, to lessen the impact of an utterance due to politeness constraints between a speaker and addressee.
In linguistics, mirativity, initially proposed by Scott DeLancey, is a grammatical category in a language, independent of evidentiality, that encodes the speaker's surprise or the unpreparedness of their mind. Grammatical elements that encode the semantic category of mirativity are called miratives.
Epistemic modality is a sub-type of linguistic modality that encompasses knowledge, belief, or credence in a proposition. Epistemic modality is exemplified by the English modals may, might, must. However, it occurs cross-linguistically, encoded in a wide variety of lexical items and grammatical structures. Epistemic modality has been studied from many perspectives within linguistics and philosophy. It is one of the most studied phenomena in formal semantics.
Robert Culp Stalnaker is an American philosopher who is Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy.
While the English language lacks distinct inflections for mood, an English subjunctive is recognized in most grammars. Definition and scope of the concept vary widely across the literature, but it is generally associated with the description of something other than apparent reality. Traditionally, the term is applied loosely to cases in which one might expect a subjunctive form in related languages, especially Old English and Latin. This includes conditional clauses, wishes and reported speech. Modern descriptive grammars limit the term to cases in which some grammatical marking can be observed, nevertheless coming to varying definitions.
Donkey sentences are sentences that contain a pronoun with clear meaning but whose syntactical role in the sentence poses challenges to grammarians. Such sentences defy straightforward attempts to generate their formal language equivalents. The difficulty is with understanding how English speakers parse such sentences.
Katarzyna Malgorzata "Kasia" Jaszczolt is a Polish and British linguist and philosopher. She is currently Professor of Linguistics and Philosophy of Language at the University of Cambridge, and Professorial Fellow at Newnham College, Cambridge.
Formal semantics is the study of grammatical meaning in natural languages using formal tools from logic and theoretical computer science. It is an interdisciplinary field, sometimes regarded as a subfield of both linguistics and philosophy of language. It provides accounts of what linguistic expressions mean and how their meanings are composed from the meanings of their parts. The enterprise of formal semantics can be thought of as that of reverse-engineering the semantic components of natural languages' grammars.
Paul Portner is an American linguist and Professor of Linguistics at Georgetown University. He is known for his works on linguistic modality.
Meaning and Necessity: A Study in Semantics and Modal Logic is a book about semantics and modal logic by the philosopher Rudolf Carnap. The book, in which Carnap discusses the nature of linguistic expressions, was a continuation of his previous work in semantics in Introduction to Semantics (1942) and Formalization of Logic (1943). Considered an important discussion of semantics, it was influential and provided a basis for further developments in modal logic.
Barbara Kenyon Abbott is an American linguist. She earned her PhD in linguistics in 1976 at the University of California at Berkeley under the supervision of George Lakoff. From 1976 to 2006, she was a professor in the department of linguistics and Germanic, Slavic, Asian, and African languages at Michigan State University, with a joint appointment in philosophy. She is now a Professor Emerita.
Georgia M. Green is an American linguist and academic. She is an emeritus professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her research has focused on pragmatics, speaker intention, word order and meaning. She has been an advisory editor for several linguistics journals or publishers and she serves on the usage committee for the American Heritage Dictionary.
Lisa Christine Matthewson is Professor of Linguistics in the Department of Linguistics at University of British Columbia with specialties in pragmatics and semantics. She has also done significant work with semantic fieldwork and in the preservation and oral history of First Nations languages, especially St'át'imcets and Gitksan. Matthewson's appointment at UBC was notable because she was the first female full professor in the department's history.
Laura Ruetsche is an American philosopher focusing on the foundations of quantum physics, feminist philosophy and philosophy of science. Ruetsche is a Professor and Chair of the department of philosophy at the University of Michigan. Her book, Interpreting Quantum Theories: The Art of the Possible was published in 2011 and received the 2013 Lakatos Award. She has also published on a diverse array of topics, exploring, among other things, philosophically salient differences between non-relativistic quantum mechanics and quantum field theory, modal semantics for quantum physics and virtue-epistemological theories of warrant. She is the partner of Gordon Belot also at the philosophy department of the University of Michigan.
Raffaella Zanuttini is an Italian linguist whose research focuses primarily on syntax and linguistic variation. She is a Professor of Linguistics at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut.
In linguistics exhaustivity refers to an implicature in which a proposition is strengthened by denying its stronger alternatives. It is a major topic in the linguistic subfields of semantics and pragmatics.
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