Book Description

How direct is the mapping between linguistic constructions and their interpretations? Much less direct than we generally assume, according to this book. Extending current ideas from frameworks like Relevance Theory, pragmatic inference is shown to have a far greater role than it is normally afforded, making crucial contributions to semantic representations. This necessitates a radical new perspective in formal linguistics: we must isolate what is attributable to inference before we can even identify what the grammar should account for. Addressing fundamental assumptions of linguistic theory and tapping into significant new ideas in frameworks like Dynamic Syntax, this book outlines and illustrates an approach to grammar that addresses actual mechanisms of interpretation in context, instead of assuming a direct 'interface' between static syntactic representations and semantics. Theoretical arguments are supported by detailed formal and informal linguistic analysis at a key meeting point of syntax, semantics and pragmatics: information structure. An in-depth case study of 'syntactic focus' in Hungarian demonstrates how an unusually wide range of complex phenomena including quantificational and aspectual constructions and the syntax of negation can be accounted for by the linguistic encoding of radically underspecified semantic procedures plus rich pragmatic reasoning. Both in its clear argumentation for a radical new theoretical perspective and in its no