Linguistic Relativity

In what ways are language, cognition and perception interrelated? Do they influence each other? This book casts a fresh light on these questions.

Crosslinguistic influence is an established area of second language research, and as such, it has been subject to extensive scrutiny.

This book criticizes the methodology of the recent semantics-pragmatics debate in the theory of language and proposes an alternative. It applies this methodology to argue for a traditional view against a group of “contextualists” and “pragmatists”, including Sperber and Wilson, Bach, Carston, Recanati, Neale, and many others. The author disagrees with these theorists who hold that the meaning of the sentence in an utterance never, or hardly ever, yields its literal truth-conditional content, even after disambiguation and reference fixing; it needs to be pragmatically supplemented in context.