The contextual contributions to meaning are at the core of the debate about the semantics/pragmatics distinction, one of the liveliest topics in current philosophy of language and linguistics. The controversy between semantic minimalists and contextualists regarding context and semantic content is a conspicuous example of the debate's relevance. This collection of essays, written by leading philosophers as well as talented young researchers, offers new approaches to the ongoing discussion about the status of lexical meaning and the role of context dependence in linguistic theorizing. It covers a broad range of issues in semantics and pragmatics such as presuppositions, reference, lexical meaning, discourse relations and information structure, negation, and metaphors. The book is an essential reading for philosophers, linguists, and graduate students of philosophy of language and linguistics.

Contents:

Luca Baptista/Erich Rast: Introduction - Manuel García-Carpintero: Norms of Presupposition - Emma Borg: Minimalism and the Content of the Lexicon - Anne Bezuidenhout: Contextualism and Information Structure: Towards a Science of Pragmatics - Augustín Vicente/Fernando Martínez-Manrique: Lexical Concepts: From Contextualism to Concept Decompositionalism - Isidora Stojanovic: Referring with Proper Names: Towards a Pragmatic Account - Kepa Korta/John Perry: Intentions to Refer - Brian Ball: What Is Semantic Content? - Sandy Berkovski: Some Remarks on Mthat - Teresa Marques: Truth and the Ambiguity of Negation - Ana Falcato: The Contextualist Fight Against Minimalism - Salvatore Pistoia-Reda: Some Notes on Game Theory and the Pragmatics of Alternatives - Andrei Moldovan: Can Uses of Language in Thought Provide Linguistic Evidence?

Luca Baptista and Erich Rast are research fellows at the Institute of Philosophy of Language at the New University of Lisbon.