Hola a todos, la próxima sesión del seminario general del Grupo de Excelencia será el 9 de marzo a las 13 horas en el seminario 238. Stavros Assimakopoulos nos hablará acerca de la noción de procedural meaning y de sus relaciones con el expresivismo. Aquí va un pequeño adelanto:
Procedural Meaning: State of the art and potential future directions.
Stavros Assimakopoulos (stavros@ugr.es)
It is common practice in the tradition of formal semantics to equate the meaning of a sentence with the specification of the conditions under which it is true. In this setting, a lexical item’s meaning is equated with its stable contribution to the truth conditions of all the sentences in which it appears. From the cognitive perspective that Relevance Theory adopts, truth-conditional lexical meaning is best viewed as conceptual, in the sense that it comprises representational information about the lexical item at hand. However, not all expressions carry conceptual content. There are certain classes of lexical items whose function is cognitively procedural rather than conceptual, i.e. they encode computational specifications of how to manipulate the linguistic structure they are part of. From Blakemore’s first systematic treatment of procedural meaning within Relevance Theory up to this point, there has been an impressive amount of research conducted in the area, which deals not only with certain classes of lexical expressions but also with linguistic aspects pertaining to the grammatical system and even phonological properties. In this talk, I will present the theoretical construct of procedural meaning as it is currently perceived within Relevance Theory, present its advantages over other alternatives as well as certain problems that arise from its current treatment and discuss certain research directions that seem to be worth pursuing in the future.
