Making Sense of Mention, Quotation, and Autonymy. A Semantic and Pragmatic Survey of Metalinguistic Discourse
Résumé
This thesis sets out to do mainly two things. On the one hand, I wish to provide an overview of scholarship on natural metalanguage. On the other, I want to tackle some of the most interesting problems that emerge from the recent literature on the subject. As far as my first goal is concerned, I discuss the origin of the term and the notion of 'metalanguage' in logic (Ch 1); I review and criticise the various theories of mention or quotation (Ch 2, 4, 5) because these are the main theoretical upshot, in the area of the study of natural languages, of the logicians' discussions of metalanguage. As for the second goal, I discuss the problems linked to the reference of quotational sequences (Ch 4); I devise a typology of metalinguistic utterances (Ch 6), based on a conception of semantics and pragmatics that is set out in Ch 3; I examine where a natural metalanguage "fits" with respect to the rest of the language and review a number of concerns regarding, notably, the infiniteness of the lexicon (Ch 7); I explore some of the issues raised by complex cases of alleged simultaneous use and mention (Ch 8).
Domaines
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