Imagination and Convention

How do hearers manage to understand speakers? And how do speakers manage to shape hearers' understanding? Lepore and Stone show that standard views about the workings of semantics and pragmatics are unsatisfactory. They offer a new account of language as a specifically social competence for making our ideas public. They argue that this approach is a good way to target the distinctive mechanisms and problems at play in explaining the human faculty of language. At the same time, this view embraces the diverse dimensions of meaning that linguists have discovered. This is the right way to delimit semantics.

Ernie Lepore is Acting Director of the Rutgers Center for Cognitive Science.
Matthew Stone is Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science, Rutgers University.

- Preface - 1: Overview - I: The Landscape of Pragmatic Inference - Introduction to Part I - 2: The Gricean Framework - 3: The Linguistic Turn - 4: The Psychological Turn - II: The Interpretive Effects of Linguistic Rules - Introduction to Part II - 5: The Scope of Linguistic Conventions - 6: Speech Act Conventions: Indirection and Relevance - 7: Presupposition and Anaphora: The Case of Tense and Aspect - 8: Information Structure: Intonation and Scalars - Summary of Part II and Projection - III: Varieties of Interpretive Reasoning - Introduction to Part III - 9: The Scope of Interpretive Reasoning - 10: Perspective Taking: Metaphor - 11: Presenting Utterances: Sarcasm, Irony, and Humor - 12: Leaving Things Open: Hinting - Summary of Part III and Projection - IV: Theorizing Semantics and Pragmatics - Introduction to Part IV - 13: Interpretation and Intention Recognition - 14: Inquiry and the Formal Underpinnings of Communication - Conclusion