语义最小论和语境论的争论与发展

Debate and Development of Semantic Minimalism and Contextualism

随着语义学和语言哲学中语境论的兴起,语用学对句义的贡献及对命题真值条件的影响这一问题逐渐受到重视,随之而来的还有对语义学在其中所扮演角色的质疑。在前期,作为这一论战的防御方,语义最小论者试图最大程度地捍卫最小命题和命题论,限制语境敏感表达的范围以及语境对真值条件的影响。语境论者,则强势捍卫语境、意图等对语义的影响,否定最小命题和基本集的存在。在最近的发展中,语义最小论和语境论者则分别试图从一词多义和隐喻等语言现象以及意义与意图的关系来更深入地捍卫各自的形式语义学和语用学立场。

With the rise of contextualism in semantics and philosophy of language, the influence of pragmatics on the meaning of the sentence and truth-value conditions of the proposition has attracted more and more attention. At the same time, the role of semantics has been questioned. In the early stage, semantic minimalists defended the minimal proposition and propositionalism to the greatest extent and limited the scope of context-sensitive expressions as well as the influence of context on truth conditions. The contextualists strongly defended the influence of context and intention on semantics and denied the existence of the minimal proposition and the basic set. In recent developments, both sides shifted their discussions towards linguistic phenomena like polysemy and metaphor and the relationship between meaning and intention, which they used to defend their position of formal semantics and pragmatics respectively. Among them, the issue of polysemy is mainly reflected in the debate between convention and modulation, while the issue of intention concerns the redefinition of the relationship between intention and meaning by semantic minimalists. Overall, we need to think more about how to reconcile semantic minimalism and contextualism in the future.