Dear All, Next Tuesday (19th Feb), Emma Borg, from the University of Reading, will give a talk entitled `Linguistic context-sensitivity and the semantics/pragmatics debate'. An abstract is attached below.
The meeting will start at 5.15pm and will be held in the Fisher Building of St. John's College in either the Boys Smith Room, the Dirac Room, or the Castlereagh Room. As usual, the speaker will present for no longer than 45 minutes, followed by a discussion until 7.00pm. If you would like to join Emma for dinner after the talk, then please let me know by noon on the day of the talk. The termcard is available online: http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/news_events/moral_sci.html Regards, Daniel Brigham Secretary of the Moral Sciences Club Faculty of Philosophy University of Cambridge *** This paper explores a range of mechanisms which have been posited in philosophy of language in order to explain how linguistic content becomes sensitive to features drawn from a context of utterance (namely indexicality, unarticulated constituents, and modulation). I consider in what respects these mechanisms differ from one another and what evidence can be provided that any one of them is required within an adequate semantic theory. I suggest that positing both unarticulated constituents and a process like modulation, as some theorists do, is unmotivated, with modulation apparently providing a better solution to various problems. Thus I suggest that the focus of debate should be on indexicality together with the possibility of semantically relevant modulation of meaning. I then ask about the nature of modulation and explore the implications of these findings for semantic theorising in general. _____________________________________________________ Sent by the CamPhilEvents mailing list. To unsubscribe or change your membership options, please visit the list information page: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEvents Posts are archived here: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEventsArchive
