Pragmatic Halos

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

It is a truism that people speak 'loosely' - that is, that they often say things that we can recognize not to be true, but which come close enough to the truth for practical purposes. Certain expressions, such as those including exactly, all and perfectly, appear to serve as signals of the intended degree of approximation to the truth. This article presents a novel formalism for representing the notion of approximation to the truth, and analyzes the meanings of these expressions in terms of this formalism. Pragmatic looseness of this kind should be distinguished from authentic truth-conditional vagueness.*.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)522-551
Number of pages30
JournalLanguage
Volume75
Issue number3
DOIs
StatePublished - Sep 1999

Keywords

  • predicates
  • mathematical functions
  • pragmatics
  • adjectives
  • quantification
  • scalars
  • noun phrases
  • semantics
  • maxims

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Language and Linguistics
  • Linguistics and Language

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