Theories of meaning, reference, and pragmatics including speech acts and conversational implicature.
35 cards · basic cards · AI-written, checked twice. Edit anything.
- What is semantics?
- The study of meaning in language, including how words and sentences relate to the world.
- What is pragmatics?
- The study of how context affects the interpretation and use of language.
- What does it mean for a word to have reference?
- The word picks out or denotes a particular thing or set of things in the world.
- What is the sense of a word or expression?
- Its meaning or the way it is understood, distinct from what it refers to.
- What are truth conditions?
- The circumstances under which a sentence is true or false.
- What does it mean to say meaning is extensional?
- The meaning depends only on what the expression refers to, not on how it is described.
- What does it mean to say meaning is intensional?
- The meaning depends on the sense or description, so co-referential terms can differ in meaning.
- What is a speech act?
- An utterance that performs an action, such as promising, commanding, or declaring.
- What is the locutionary act?
- The act of producing sounds and words that form a grammatical utterance with semantic meaning.
- What is the illocutionary act?
- The act performed in saying something, such as asserting, requesting, or promising.
- What is the perlocutionary act?
- The effect or consequence produced in the hearer by uttering something.
- What is a performative utterance?
- An utterance that performs an action rather than simply stating a fact.
- What is a constative utterance?
- An utterance that makes a claim about the world and is true or false.
- Why did Austin's performative/constative distinction eventually break down?
- Performatives can be true or false too, and constatives perform actions such as asserting.
- What are Searle's five main types of speech acts?
- Representatives (asserting), directives (commanding), commissives (promising), expressives (thanking), and declarations (firing).