Formal Pragmatics - by Nirit Kadmon (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Formal Pragmatics addresses issues that are on the borderline of semantics and pragmatics of natural language, from the point of view of a model-theoretic semanticist. This up-to-date resource covers a substantial body of formal work on linguistic phenomena, and presents the way the semantics-pragmatics interface has come to be viewed today.

From the Back Cover

Formal Pragmatics addresses issues that are on the borderline of the semantics and pragmatics of natural language, from the point of view of a model-theoretic semanticist. This up-to-date resource covers a substantial body of formal work on linguistic phenomena, and presents the way the semantics-pragmatics interface has come to be viewed today.

• Introduces Discourse Representation Theory and File Change Semantics, with their formal representation of context and context change.
  
• Covers presupposition, including the nature and status of presuppositions as well as presupposition projection.
  
• Deals with focus, its prosodic manifestation, and the model-theoretic analysis of its meaning and function.

This volume, which serves as a textbook, as well as a reference or research book, offers a detailed discussion of key issues and clearly explains important, cutting-edge research.

Review Quotes

"This is a very special book in that it creates formal pragmatics as a field in its own right. There hasn't been anything like it so far. I used to tack on a little bit of pragmatics to my semantics classes, but this will now change." Angelika Kratzer, University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

About the Author

Nirit Kadmon is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Linguistics at Tel Aviv University. She graduated from Tel Aviv University in 1981, and went on to receive her Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 1987.