Default Meanings

In this paper I present some aspects of the controversy surrounding the semantics/pragmatics boundary and offer a possible solution in the form of Default Semantics. First, I present a brief introduction to Paul Grice’s approach to meaning as intentional communication. Next, I address the problem of the unit og which truth conditions should be predicated, assuming after Grice that the most successful approach to meaning has to make use of truth conditions. Further, I extend the discussion to some aspects of neo-Gricean pragmatics, most notably the issue of pragmatic processing that contributes to the truth-conditional representation and the proposed shortcuts through this processing in the form of default meanings. In the main part, I present the theory of Default Semantics (Jaszczolt 2005a), assess some arguments in favour of such an interactive theory of meaning that combines information from various sources, and address the issue of compositionality of meaning so conceived. In the final part, I apply the theory of Default Semantics to expressions with future-time reference in English in order to demonstrate the advantages of a framework that combines various types of information about utterance meaning in one, merged semantic representation. The main advantage turns out to be, in this domain, the unified treatment of all expressions with future-time reference.

Is Compositionality a Trivial Principle？

Primarily a response to Paul Horwich＇s ＂Composition of Meanings,＂ this paper attempts to refute his claim that compositionality--roughly, the idea that the meaning of a sentence is determined by the meanings of its parts and how they are there combined--imposes no substantial constraints on semantic theory or on our conception of the meanings of words or sentences.

Logic and Sense

In the paper, original formal-logical conception of syntactic and semantic： intensional and extensional senses of expressions of any language L is outlined. Syntax and bi-level intensional and extensional semantics of language L are characterized categorically： in the spirit of some Husserl＇s ideas of pure grammar, Le^niewski-Ajukiewicz＇s theory syntactic/semantic categories and in accordance with Frege＇s ontological canons, Bochefiski＇s famous motto--syntax mirrors ontology and some ideas of Suszko： language should be a linguistic scheme of ontological reality and simultaneously a tool of its cognition. In the logical conception of language L, its expressions should satisfy some general conditions of language adequacy. The adequacy ensures their unambiguous syntactic and semantic senses and mutual, syntactic, and semantic compatibility, correspondence guaranteed by the acceptance of a postulate of categorial compatibility syntactic and semantic （extensional and intensional） categories of expressions of L. From this postulate, three principles of compositionality follow： one syntactic and two semantic already known to Frege. They are treated as conditions of homomorphism partial algebra of L into algebraic models of L： syntactic, intensional, and extensional. In the paper, they are applied to some expressions with quantifiers. Language adequacy connected with the logical senses described in the logical conception of language L is, of course, an idealization, but only expressions with high degrees of precision of their senses, after due justification, may become theorems of science.

组合原则探赜

意义组合原则,又称组合性原则或组合原则,是蒙太格语法等逻辑语法理论的指导性原则。学界对组合原则的理解有两层含义:一是复合表达式的整体意义是其部分意义的函项;二是在相应语法系统中句法和语义的对应。本文针对这两个特征,介绍蒙太格语法中意义组合原则的应用,对意义组合原则第一层含义的使用实例进行分析,同时对组合原则第二层含义的情况也给予分析,最后讨论DRT对组合原则的挑战,说明意义组合原则的重要的理论价值。