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From Utterances to Speech Acts

By Mikhail Kissine

"Kissine offers a new theory of speech acts which is philosophically sophisticated and builds on work in cognitive science, formal semantics, and linguistic typology. This highly readable, brilliant essay is a major contribution to the field."

--François Recanati, Institut Jean-Nicod


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Book Information

   

Title: Events, Phrases, and Questions
Written By: Robert Truswell
URL: http://ukcatalogue.oup.com/product/9780199577781.do
Series Title: Oxford Studies in Theoretical Linguistics
Description:

This book examines some knotty problems in natural language. These typically involve questions where the sense or the grammaticality of an utterance teeters on or over the edge of acceptability among native speakers. The phenomena in question have been examined within syntactic theory for over two decades with no wholly satisfactory outcome. Dr Truswell broadens the scope of the enquiry to the interface between syntactic structure and other, indirectly related, cognitive, and semantic structures such as aspect, agentivity, and presupposition. Uniting work from philosophical, cognitive and linguistic perspectives, he develops a model of the internal structure of events as perceptual and cognitive units. He deploys the model to explain and predict the acceptability of particular formulations. He considers the individuation of events in the light of the model and provides a novel account of patterns of question formation. He shows that these patterns throw new light on central claims of Chomsky's biolinguistic minimalist program and Jackendoff's parallel architecture theory of mind and language. This is work at the cutting edge of linguistic theory, catholic in its theoretical scope, open to insights from cognate fields, and illustrated with examples from a wide range of languages. It will interest philosophers, semanticists and cognitive scientists concerned with topics like events, agentivity, and planning, as well as linguists studying syntax or the syntax-semantics interface.

Publication Year: 2011
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Review: Become a Reviewer
BibTex: View BibTex record
Linguistic Field(s): Psycholinguistics
Semantics
Syntax
Cognitive Science

Versions:
Format: Hardback
ISBN: 0199577773
ISBN-13: 9780199577774
Pages: 280
Prices: U.K. £ 60.00

 
 
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 0199577781
ISBN-13: 9780199577781
Pages: 280
Prices: U.K. £ 27.99