2026-09-21T07:42:49Z https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/oai-pmh

oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/19314 2023-07-10 col_2142_5131 col_2142_13736 com_2142_5130 com_2142_8975 com_2142_8903

Green, Georgia M. Helmreich, Stephen Christian 2011-05-07T12:03:40Z 2011-05-07T12:03:40Z 10000-01-01 1996 In this dissertation, the thesis is defended that lexical semantics is not a subdomain of semantics, but rather a subdomain of pragmatics. That is, knowledge about the meaning of words is not part of one's knowledge of the language, but rather part of one's knowledge of the world. This distinction marks the traditional difference between dictionary and encyclopedia. One consults a dictionary to find out what the word lemon means (on the assumption that one knows what lemons are), while one goes to the encyclopedia to find out about lemons (on the assumption that you know how English speakers name them). The view suggested here is that this is a distinction that is not possible to maintain in a formal description of a language. Such a formal description, it is claimed, should contain only minimal semantic information about any lexical item. Almost all semantic information would be regarded as encyclopedic world-knowledge. Part of establishing this thesis is to show that the interpretation of lexical items in utterances can be contextually determined, given a suitably broad definition of context, and is thus pragmatic in nature, understanding the domain of pragmatics to be language in context. It is shown that is is possible both for interpretation of an utterance to depend on the interpretation of its parts (to accept some form of the Principle of Compositionality) and for the interpretation of the smallest parts to be determined pragmatically from context. Thus much of this dissertation is devoted to the task of providing a truth-conditional model-theoretic account of utterance meaning that allows for the interpretation of lexical items in context without recourse to any object that might be called its meaning. This account uses a Montague-type semantics and incorporates a modification of the methods suggested in Nunberg (1978). Made available in DSpace on 2011-05-07T12:03:40Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 2 license.txt: 4922 bytes, checksum: 910b249b4beec47e7ab768910c8f966f (MD5) 9712304.pdf: 10225389 bytes, checksum: d7ba6336f4815d72a1138f080a4a497f (MD5) Previous issue date: 1996 Item marked as restricted to the 'UIUC Users [automated]' Group (id=2) by Howard Ding (hding2@illinois.edu) on 2011-05-07T14:36:07Z Item is restricted indefinitely. Restriction data tranferred 2014-07-01T11:14:28-05:00 Original Data Group with Access UIUC Users [automated] Release Date: none Reason: ETDs are only available to UIUC Users without author permission ETDs are only available to UIUC Users without author permission U of I Only 9780591198942 AAI9712304 (UMI)AAI9712304 http://hdl.handle.net/2142/19314 eng Copyright 1996 Helmreich, Stephen Christian Language, Linguistics Pragmatic referring functions as Montague semantic operators text Linguistics Linguistics University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Dissertation Ph.D.