Description
Book SynopsisThis book investigates the relation between language and logic. Gennaro Chierchia looks at the way syntactic and inferential processes interact in determining polarity sensitive and free choice phenomena. He analyses these as a form of grammaticized scalar implicature and seeks to identify the common core of the polarity system by examining many of its manifestations as well as the choices that determine its diversity. To do so he reassesses the relations between syntax, semantics, and pragmatics and in the process makes startling insights into the relation of syntax to logic. Rudolf Carnap''s classic, The Logical Syntax of Language, defines syntax as a lexicon and a set of formation rules and logic as a set of inference rules. Modern generative linguistics maintains a similar modular approach: a combinatorial apparatus is said to generate structures over which semantic and pragmatic relations, such as presupposition and implicature, are defined. This book argues by contrast that many
Table of ContentsIntroduction ; 1. The Spontaneous Logicality of Language ; 2. Scalar Implicatures at the Interface Between Pragmatics and Syntax ; 3. Even Negative Polarity Items and Only Negative Polarity Items ; 4. Presuppositionality, Strength, and Concord in Polarity Systems ; 5. Existential Free Choice ; 6. Universal Free Choice ; 7. Intervention ; 8. Where We Stand ; References
