The semantics and metasemantics of context-sensitive language

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Emanuel Viebahn, since 9/2019
• Subject Area: Theoretical Philosophy
• Term: from 2016 to 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 321474420

The aim of the network is to investigate the semantics and metasemantics of linguistic contextsensitivity. There is a sense in which almost every sentence is contextsensitive: what a speaker communicates by uttering a sentence depends on the context in which the sentence is uttered. For example, one and the same sentence can be used to communicate different things depending on whether or not the speaker is being ironic. The network will focus on contextsensitivity in a narrower sense, according to which an expression counts as contextsensitive only if some aspect of its meaning - what it literally says or what it refers to - depends on the context of utterance. For instance, what is said by a use of the sentence 'I am hungry' depends on the context because 'I' refers to whoever uses the expression. The network will address the following four questions concerning such semantic contextsensitivity: How widespread is semantic contextsensitivity? How should the semantics of contextsensitive expressions be construed? Which methods are suitable to determine whether or not an expression is contextsensitive? Which aspects of the context have an influence on the semantics of contextsensitive expressions? The first two questions belong to semantics, while the last two belong to metasemantics. The network will address them in six focussed work packages, and aims to make progress by adopting an approach that is interdisciplinary (tackling questions in the philosophy of language in a linguisticallyinformed way) as well as intersubdisciplinary (combining semantics and metasemantics).

• DFG Programme: Scientific Networks
• Ehemaliger Antragsteller: Dr. Erik Stei, from 9/2018 until 9/2019