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Philosophy

Robert J. Stainton

Pragmatics

Articles 1 - 8 of 8

Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities

Two Questions About Interpretive Effects, Robert J. Stainton, Christopher Viger Dec 2017

Two Questions About Interpretive Effects, Robert J. Stainton, Christopher Viger

Robert J. Stainton

We discuss central themes in Lepore and Stone's Imagination and Convention. We begin by laying out their view, and then pose both empirical and methodological criticisms.

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Cuasi Factivos, Axel Barcelo Aspeitia, Robert J. Stainton Dec 2015

Cuasi Factivos, Axel Barcelo Aspeitia, Robert J. Stainton

Robert J. Stainton

We introduce a construction which we label 'quasi-factive'. They are heard like factives, in that we immediately take the complement to be true. Yet they aren't really factive at all. Examples include: 'It's not widely known that Marta was born in Canada' (because she was born in Uruguay); 'Don't tell anyone that Carlos will run as a candidate' (because he won't); 'Did it bother Jane that Miguel came?' (no, because Miguel didn't come). We identify sub-categories of our quasi-factives, and then tentatively explore a pragmatic explanation of how they work their magic.

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Brevity, By Laurence Goldstein, Monica Mcmillan, Robert J. Stainton Nov 2014

Brevity, By Laurence Goldstein, Monica Mcmillan, Robert J. Stainton

Robert J. Stainton

No abstract provided.

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Revisiting Pragmatics Abilities In Autism Spectrum Disorders, Jessica De Villiers, Brooke Myers, Robert J. Stainton Dec 2013

Revisiting Pragmatics Abilities In Autism Spectrum Disorders, Jessica De Villiers, Brooke Myers, Robert J. Stainton

Robert J. Stainton

In a 2007 paper, we argued that speakers with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASDs) exhibit pragmatic abilities which are surprising given the usual understanding of communication in that group. That is, it is commonly reported that people diagnosed with an ASD have trouble with metaphor, irony, conversational implicature and other non-literal language. This is not a matter of trouble with knowledge and application of rules of grammar. The difficulties lie, rather, in successful communicative interaction. Though we did find pragmatic errors within literal talk, the transcribed conversations we studied showed many, many successes. A second paper reinforced our finding of a …

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Herder And Pragmatics, Robert J. Stainton Dec 2012

Herder And Pragmatics, Robert J. Stainton

Robert J. Stainton

No abstract provided.

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Shorthand, Syntactic Ellipsis, And The Pragmatic Determinants Of What Is Said, Reinaldo Elugardo, Robert J. Stainton Aug 2004

Shorthand, Syntactic Ellipsis, And The Pragmatic Determinants Of What Is Said, Reinaldo Elugardo, Robert J. Stainton

Robert J. Stainton

Our first aim in this paper is to respond to four novel objections in Jason Stanley's 'Context and Logical Form'. Taken together, those objections attempt to debunk our prior claims that one can perform a genuine speech act by using a sub‐sentential expression—where by 'sub‐sentential expression' we mean an ordinary word or phrase, not embedded in any larger syntactic structure. Our second aim is to make it plausible that, pace Stanley, there really are pragmatic determinants of the literal truth‐conditional content of speech acts. We hope to achieve this second aim precisely by defending the genuineness of sub‐sentential speech acts. …

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The Pragmatics Of Non-Sentences, Robert J. Stainton Dec 2003

The Pragmatics Of Non-Sentences, Robert J. Stainton

Robert J. Stainton

No abstract provided.

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Unembedded Definite Descriptions And Relevance, Robert J. Stainton Oct 1998

Unembedded Definite Descriptions And Relevance, Robert J. Stainton

Robert J. Stainton

Definite descriptions (e.g. 'The king of France in 1997', 'The teacher of Aristotle') do not stand for particulars. Or so I will assume. The semantic alternative has seemed to be that descriptions only have meaning within sentences: i.e., that their semantic contribution is given syncategorimatically. This doesn't seem right, however, because descriptions can be used and understood outside the context of any sentence. Nor is this use simply a matter of "ellipsis." Since descriptions do not denote particulars, but seem to have a meaning in isolation, I propose that they be assigned generalized quantifiers as denotations — i.e. a kind …

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