Article Title：Semantic contextuality
Abstract：
This paper investigates the relationships between aspects of the context in which an utterance u takes place, and u's semantic profile, that is, its literal truth-conditions. It is widely recognized that contextual features play two important but different roles in this respect: they determine what I call a representation of u, for instance as a sentence-index pair, and they contribute to the interpretation of the indexical elements occurring in the uttered sentence. In either case, context is determinant for the assignment of an intension to u, that is, for an assignment of truth-values across points of evaluation. The main thesis of this paper consists in the claim that further contextual aspects must be taken into consideration at what I call a post-compositional level: utterances mapped to identical intensions may nevertheless be assigned distinct truth-conditional profiles. The importance of post-compositional contextual factors is brought to light by focusing on instances of contextual dependence occasionally addressed in the literature on pragmatics and natural language semantics, such as utterances saying of a certain object that it is red vis a vis situations in which the object in question is a book with a white cover, wrapped in red paper. (C) 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Keywords: contextuality; indexicality; intensions; truth-conditions; compositionality; compositional module
DOI: 10.1016/j.pragma.2004.01.002
Source：JOURNAL OF PRAGMATICS
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