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A radical new theory of linguistic understanding
Offers a trenchant critique of leading theories of the relation between semantics and pragmatics
Informed by empirical study of a wide range of linguistic phenomena
Draws together philosophy, linguistics, and cognitive science



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.



Table of Contents

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