1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910784540103321

Autore

Bultinck Bert

Titolo

Numerous Meanings / / Bert Bultinck

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Leiden; ; Boston : , : BRILL, , 2004

ISBN

1-280-63017-5

9786610630172

0-08-045679-0

Edizione

[1st ed.]

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (343 p.)

Collana

Current Research in the Semantics / Pragmatics Interface ; ; 15

Disciplina

420/.143

Soggetti

Cardinal numbers

English language - Numerals

English language - Semantics

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Description based upon print version of record.

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

Introduction -- The Gricean Theory of Implications -- Three Decades of Gricean Numerals -- General Corpus Analysis of the Forms and Functions of English Cardinals -- 'At Least N', 'Exactly N', 'at Most N' and 'Absolute Value' Readings -- Conclusion.

Sommario/riassunto

Outlandish as it may seem to the uninitiated, the meaning of English cardinal numbers has been the object of many heated and fascinating debates. Notwithstanding the numerous important objections that have been formulated in the last three decades, the (neo-)Gricean, scalar account is still the standard semantic description of numerals. In this book, Bultinck writes the history of this implicature-driven approach and demonstrates that it suffers from methodological insecurity and postulates highly non-conventional meanings of numerals as their "literal meaning", while it confuses the level of lexical semantics with that of utterances and cannot deal with a large number of counter-examples. Relying on the results of an extensive corpus-based analysis, an alternative account of the meaning of English cardinals and the ways in which their interpretation is influenced by other linguistic elements is presented. As such, this analysis constitutes a prism that offers todays linguist an iridescent history of one of the most fascinating, if often misconstrued, topics in contemporary meaning



research: the conversational implicatures.