the science of meaning
essays on the metatheory of
natural language semantics
edited by D. Ball and B. Rabern
2018, Oxford University Press
By creating certain marks on paper, or by making certain sounds—breathing past a moving tongue—or by articulation of hands and bodies, language users can give expression to their mental lives. With language we command, assert, query, emote, insult, and inspire. Language has meaning. This fact can be quite mystifying, yet a science of linguistic meaning—semantics—has emerged at the intersection of a variety of disciplines: philosophy, linguistics, computer science, and psychology. The past fifty years have seen an explosion of research into the semantics of natural languages. There are now sophisticated theories of phenomena that were not even known to exist mere decades ago. Much of the early work in natural language semantics was accompanied by extensive reflection on the aims of semantic theory, and the form a theory must take to meet those aims. But this meta-theoretical reflection has not kept pace with recent theoretical innovations. The purpose of this volume is to re-address these questions concerning the foundations of natural language semantics in light of the current state-of-the-art in semantic theorising.
0. Introduction to the science of meaning
Derek Ball and Brian Rabern
1. What is — or, for that matter, isn’t — ‘experimental' semantics?
Pauline Jacobson
2. Axiomatization in the meaning sciences
Wesley H. Holliday and Thomas F. Icard, III
3. David Lewis on context
Robert Stalnaker
4. From meaning to content
François Recanati
5. Reviving the parameter revolution in semantics
Bryan Pickel, Brian Rabern, and Josh Dever
6. Changing notions of linguistic competence in the history of formal semantics
Barbara Partee
7. Lexical meaning, concepts, and the metasemantics of predicates
Michael Glanzberg
8. Interpretation and the interpreter
Kathrin Glüer
9. Expressing expectations
Inés Crespo, Hadil Karawani, and Frank Veltman
10. Fregean compositionality
Thomas Ede Zimmermann
11. Semantic typology and composition
Paul Pietroski
12. Semantics as model-based science
Seth Yalcin
13. Semantic possibility
Wolfgang Schwarz
14. Semantics as measurement
Derek Ball
more information on the OUP website