How to Implicate -- Subsententially

Subsentences, Ellipsis, and the Philosophy of Language
Stainton, Robert, University of Western Ontario
Print publication date: 2006
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: January 2007
Print ISBN-13: 978-0-19-925038-7
doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199250387.001.0001

"It is a near truism of philosophy of language that sentences are prior to words."

"Sentences, it is said, are what we believe, assert, and argue for."

"Uses of sentences constitute our evidence in semantics."

"Only sentences stand in inferential relations, and are true or false."

"Sentences are, indeed, the only things that fundamentally have meaning."

"Does this near truism really hold of human languages?"

"Stainton, our subsentential Grice, drawing on a wide body of evidence, argues forcefully that utterers (English, even) can and do use mere words, not sentences, to communicate complete thoughts."

Or "almost complete" (vide Paris Hilton).

"It considers the implications of this empirical result for language-thought relations, various doctrines of sentence primacy, and the semantics-pragmatics boundary."

"Stainton's work -- (cfr. Judith Baker, Glendon College) "is important both for its philosophical and empirical claims, and for the methodology employed."

"Stainton illustrates how the methods and detailed results of the various cognitive sciences can bear on central issues in philosophy of language."

"At the same time, he applies philosophical distinctions to show that arguments which seemingly support the primacy of sentences do not really do so."

Keywords: sentence, semantics, pragmatics, cognitive sciences

Table of Contents
Part I. The Appearances and Some Background

1. Introduction: The Appearances, and What They Might Mean

2. Further Background Issues

Part II. The Genuineness Issue

3. Not A Full-fledged Speech Act?

4. Extra-Grammatical Maneuvers

5. Semantic Ellipsis

6. Syntactic Ellipsis

7. A Divide-and-Conquer Strategy

8. A Positive Representational–Pragmatic View

Part III. Implications

9. Language–Thought Relations

10. Sentence Primacy

11. Sentences, Assertion, and the Semantics–Pragmatics Boundary

Bibliography

Index