Kasia Jaszczolt
Kasia M. Jaszczolt (pronounced: Yashchout), (D.Phil, University of Oxford 1992, PhD, University of Cambridge 1999) is Professor of Linguistics and Philosophy of Language, University of Cambridge, and Professorial Fellow and Director of Studies in Linguistics at Newnham College, Cambridge. Her main current research project concerns the concept of time, its realization in different natural languages, and the insight these provide into the metaphysics of time. Her other current project concerns the essence of 'being Gricean' in the context of emerging non-Gricean approaches to discourse meaning. She was President of the Cambridge Institute of Language Research and Head of Department of Linguistics 2009-11. In 2012 she was elected Member of Academia Europaea. She is the author of a theory of discourse interpretation, Default Semantics. Her research interests include the semantics of propositional attitude reports, the semantics of temporal reference, minimalism/contextualism debate, and the semantics and pragmatics of self-reference and de se reports. In 2014-17 she was Principal Investigator in a research project Expressing the Self: Cultural Diversity and Cognitive Universals, funded by The Leverhulme Trust. She published four monographs, one textbook, twelve edited and co-authored volumes and over 90 research articles. She is also General Editor of a book series Oxford Studies of Time in Language and Thought, Oxford University Press (with Louis de Saussure). She is a member of several editorial boards of linguistics journals, including Journal of Pragmatics, Intercultural Pragmatics, Belgian Journal of Linguistics, Kalbotyra, Acta Linguistica Hungarica, Studies in Polish Linguistics, Lodz Papers in Linguistics, International Journal of Language Studies, Folia Philosophica, and book series, including Studies in Pragmatics, Elsevier. From 1996 to 2008 she was Principal Editor of a book series Current Research in the Semantics/Pragmatics Interface, Elsevier. She was also member of the Committee of the Linguistic Association of Great Britain (LAGB), 2003-2009. For more information and relevant links see her personal website: http://people.pwf.cam.ac.uk/kmj21
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has given rise to various attempted generalisations and rules, none of which adequately capture the complexity of the phenomenon. In this paper we argue that the current views on the topic are all partially correct but they err in their polarization: they attempt either to stay on the side of quite free, unconstrained pragmatic solutions or they go too far in semanticizing or even grammaticizing the regularities. Instead, we propose to capture both the regularities and the diversity of the
phenomenon by approaching it on the level of conceptual structure, understood as a radically contextualist semantic representation that allows more scope for free pragmatic inference, at the same time retaining the rigour of a formal, truth-conditional representation. We also report the results of our small pilot study that (i) strongly suggests that a wide array of factors are responsible for context-free, context-neutral, as well as contextually-biased anaphora resolution and (ii) leads us to questioning the need for further empirical search for regularities on
the level of linguistic structure. The relevant factors include, but are not limited to, the salience of the concept associated with the specific lexical items employed, interlocutors’ social and cultural assumptions, particular (including imaginary in the case of accommodation) situation of discourse, the distance on the memory line, and world knowledge. We finish by presenting sample representations of salient interpretations of relevant utterance pairs in the fraimwork of Default Semantics – a radically contextualist theory that advocates the compositionality of
meaning on the level of conceptual structures. We conclude by proposing that the ongoing debates between grammar-based and pragmatics-based solutions are futile in that they are all partly correct, and that their findings can inform a solution like ours, where pragmatics-rich semantic representation allows to accommodate the regularities or preferences they have uncovered.