May 5, 2000 (Friday)

Margaret Jacks Hall (Bldg. 460)

Syntactic vs. Pragmatic Context in Semantic Change

Andrew Garrett (University of California, Berkeley)

I will consider two opposing views as to the nature of the "context" in context-based reinterpetations, and I will argue that syntactic context ("permutation") plays a greater role in semantic change than is nowadays usually held while pragmatic context (e.g. "invited inference") plays a smaller role. Case studies will include a new account of the origin of the English "go" future.

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Last modified: Sun Jun 25 23:19:20 2000