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James Raymond Hurford, FBA (born 16 July 1941) is a retired linguist and academic. [1]He was the General Editor of the book series Oxford Studies in the Evolution of Language, [2] as well as a member of the Centre for Language Evolution (formerly Language Evolution and Computation) research group at the University of Edinburgh where he is an emeritus professor.
In formal semantics, a Hurford disjunction is a disjunction in which one of the disjuncts entails the other. The concept was first identified by British linguist James Hurford. [1] The sentence "Mary is in the Netherlands or she is in Amsterdam" is an example of a Hurford disjunction since one cannot be in Amsterdam without being in the ...
In semantics, pragmatics, and philosophy of language, a question under discussion (QUD) is a question which the interlocutors in a discourse are attempting to answer. In many formal and computational theories of discourse, the QUD (or an ordered set of QUD's) is among the elements of a tuple called the conversational scoreboard which represents the current state of the conversation.
Semantics studies the rule systems that determine expressions' meanings. Within generative grammar, semantics is a species of formal semantics, providing compositional models of how the denotations of sentences are computed on the basis of the meanings of the individual morphemes and their syntactic structure. [33]
The principle of compositionality (also known as semantic compositionalism) is highly debated in linguistics. Among its most challenging problems there are the issues of contextuality , the non-compositionality of idiomatic expressions , and the non-compositionality of quotations .
Truth-conditional semantics is an approach to semantics of natural language that sees meaning (or at least the meaning of assertions) as being the same as, or reducible to, their truth conditions. This approach to semantics is principally associated with Donald Davidson , and attempts to carry out for the semantics of natural language what ...
In linguistics, semantic analysis is the process of relating syntactic structures, from the levels of words, phrases, clauses, sentences and paragraphs to the level of the writing as a whole, to their language-independent meanings. It also involves removing features specific to particular linguistic and cultural contexts, to the extent that ...
The semantic approach of philosophers like Stephen Neale [3] suggests that the sentence does in fact have the appropriate meaning as to make it true. Such meaning is added to the sentence by the particular context of the speaker—that, say, the context of standing next to a table "completes" the sentence.