LINGUIST List 9.1731

Sun Dec 6 1998

Books: Avail for review: Semantics

Editor for this issue: Andrew Carnie <carnielinguistlist.org>

Directory

1. Andrew Carnie, Available for Review: Semantics

The books listed below are in the LINGUIST office and now
available for review. If you are interested in reviewing
a book (or leading a discussion of the book); please contact 
our book review editor, Andrew Carnie, Ph.D., at:

	carnielinguistlist.org
	
Please include in your request message a brief statement about your
research interests, background, affiliation and other information that might
be valuable to help us select a suitable reviewer. Do not include an
electronic CV or a URL linking to a personal homepage. These will be
ignored. 

Please also send a surface mail address for us to send the book to.

**********************************************

SEMANTICS:

Ishikawa, Kiyoshi (1998) A network thoery of Reference. IULC Publications.
	Bloomington.

 Noting specific inadequacies with truth-conditional approaches,
Ishikawa develops a dynamic theory of reference incorporating features of
Discourse Representation Theory, File Change Semantics and Situation
Semantics, and also deals with non-monotonic belief revision. He argues
that the task of natural language semantics is to describe meaning in
terms of the psychological relation of language to our cognition of 
external reality. In his approach, a linguistic expression's meaning is
its potential to change the information state of a cognitive agent.
Reference is not understood as a link to a real individual external to an
agent, but as the agent's act to link a character in a linguistic frame of
individuation to characters in other (linguistic or nonlinguistic) frames.
 As the target of inquiry, the distinction between referential and
attributive uses of definite descriptions is analyzed through the
construction of conversation scenarios. In addition, Ishikawa extends his
theory to an analysis of belief and attitude reports. Application of the
theory to cleft and pseudocleft constructions is also outlined.

SEMANTICS

Klein, Henny (1997) Adverbs of Degree in Dutch and Related Languages.
 John Benjamins

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1998 Contributors