School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Theses

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A speech-act theoretic approach to meaning : conditionals, noun phrases and generality

Barker, Stephen John ( 1996)

This thesis develops an alternative approach to linguistic meaning, which I dub the speech-act theoretical approach, or STA, which neither employs the syntactic and semantic forms of modern logic nor defines meaning in terms of semantic objects. Rather STA envisages the central task of meaning theory as the characterisation of speech-act structures embedded in conversational contexts. The framework is not a supplement to a semantic core-theory, which is the role usually assigned to speech-act theory and pragmatics. Rather the core-theory itself is to be couched in terms of speech-act structures and their modes and deployment. In this thesis, STA is developed in detail to provide an account of if-sentences, noun phrases, pronouns and generality and their interactions. In Part I, chiefly singular if-sentences are examined. A unified treatment of indicatives, counterfactuals, non-declaratives and if-sentences in combination with logical and pragmatic particles is provided. It is argued that semantic treatments of generality, noun phrases and anaphora cannot account for complex anaphoric chains in sentences featuring generality and conditionality. In part 2, STA's treatment of noun phrases, pronouns and generality is described. The complex problems arising in connection with anaphora and generality in if-sentences are treated in detail.