Scalar Interpretation in Deontic Speech Acts

by Eugene Rohrbaugh

Overview

First Published in 1997. As the title suggests, this book is about the interpretation of scalar terms in commands and permission sentences. Why limit our study of the semantics of this class of lexical items to commands and permissions? In short, because there is more than enough to say about this mere subset of environments. Add to that the fact that reams have been written about scalar implicature in assertions, whereas relatively little has been said about the use of scalar terms in other types of illocutionary acts.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781000526790
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	11/18/2021
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	182
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Eugene Rohrbaugh

Table of Contents

1. Introduction 2. Deontic Modeling 2.1 Lewis’s model for deontic negotiation 2.2 Generalizing to ‘spurious concession’ 2.3 Coordination of commands and permissions 2.4 Merin’s Discourse Institution 2.5 Conclusions: problems for modeling deontic negotiation 3. Scalar Interpretation 3.1 Implicature: Grice (1975, 1978) 3.2 Linguistic Scales: Horn (1972) 3.3 Scale Reversal: Fauconnier (1975, 1978) 3.4 Conversational Maxims Revisited: Horn (1984) 3.5 Beyond Linear Scales: Hirschberg (1985) 3.6 Conclusions: problems for modeling scalar meaning 4. Possible Worlds 4.1 Dynamic Semantics 4.2 Branching Time 4.3 The problem with possible worlds 5. Situations 5.1 Lumps of Thought 5.2 Thin particulars, thick particulars, and situations 5.3 Situations for deontic modeling 5.4 Will situations solve our problems? 5.5 Rescue in sight? 6. States 6.1 SO As as Primitives 6.2 Defining PER and COM 6.3 Application: an example 6.4 Negation, retraction, and repeated events 6.5 The obligation set 6.6 Remaining problems 7. Events 7.1 Primitive notions defined 7.2 No negative events? 7.3 The model in action 7.4 Event Decomposition 8. Conclusions

Editorial Reviews

Examines the predictive success of various formal frameworks for modeling the meanings of scalar terms in commands and permissions. Takes spurious permission, free-choice permission, and full-choice conjunction as three problems for deontic modeling, and finds the root of the problems to be the choice of possible worlds as theoretic primitives. Describes and evaluates frameworks based on situations, states, events, and eventualities. Revised from a 1995 Ph.D. dissertation for the University of Texas at Austin. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

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