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The Semantics of the Bengali Verb fεla

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 June 2016

Jila Ghomeshi
Jila Ghomeshi*
Affiliation:
University of Toronto
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Extract

Any theory of semantics must account for the role of inference in the interpretation of a sentence, however, it is not clear at which level of the grammar this inferencing capability must be represented. In Sperber and Wilson (1986) for example, inference plays an important role in the interpretation of an utterance in discourse, yet their theory does not integrate lexical representations with discourse and inferencing. Jackendoff (1987, 1990) on the other hand, while giving explicit representations for sentences and lexical items, does not address the question of discourse and inference. In this paper I will argue that it is essential to take account of discourse-level factors when analyzing sentence meaning, and indeed word meaning. In particular I will show that the meaning of the auxiliary verb fεla. in Bengali can be properly represented only if such discourse-level factors are included.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Linguistics/Revue canadienne de linguistique , Volume 36 , Issue 4 , December 1991 , pp. 337 - 361
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Linguistic Association 1991

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