This dissertation consists of three independent but related papers on the boundary between semantics and pragmatics. The overarching theme is that it is most fruitful to study how semantics interacts with pragmatics by identifying linguistic phenomena that call out for explanation, and by comparing the theoretical virtues of the semantics-pragmatics packages that explain or predict those phenomena. Contrary to what is often said about their role in semantic theorizing, ordinary intuitions are not the targets of semantic explanations, because they only play the role of bringing to light or justifying linguistic phenomena. Chapter 1 argues that the imprecise interpretations of maximal standard absolute adjectives, such as `clean' and `certain', are the adjectives' semantic contents. My argument is based on the phenomenon that the result of embedding Rotstein and Winter's `Both towels are clean, but the red one is cleaner than the blue one' inside the belief context `Mary believes that' has three readings. I argue that my semantic account is preferable to the extant accounts because only it can deliver all three readings. Chapter 2 argues that Jason Stanley's binding assumption is faced with two well-founded overgeneration worries, and that a feasible response to those worries is to draw from some parallels between quantifier domain restriction and adjectival domain restriction, and to adopt the variable-free approach to binding, which is compatible with Stanley's grammatical approach to quantifier domain restriction. This chapter as a whole illustrates that what makes Stanley's grammatical approach better than the pragmatic approach isn't its ability to respect ordinary intuitions, but its better explanatory and predictive power. Chapter 3 objects to Rothschild and Segal's arguments for their account of color adjectives, on which color adjectives are fully-fledged indexicals with minimal semantic constraints on their possible extensions. I argue that, instead of choosing between Rothschild and Segal's account and the rival accounts they argue against, we can defuse Travis cases by clarifying the relation between ordinary intuitions, linguistic phenomena, and explanation and prediction.
Siu, Charlie Ho Kin,
"Intuition and Semantic Explanation"
(2017).
Philosophy Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://doi.org/10.26300/ztf6-pq92
