Abstract

Abstract This paper elaborates upon the linguistic implications of results centred around prospect theory, a decision-theoretic framework that so far has been applied in psychology, economics, political science and sociology. One of the goals of prospect theory has been to account for cases where the reformation to decision-theoretic options (expressible as “gains” or “losses”) altered the preference order of individuals. Framing effects of this kind are entwined with a number of linguistic issues that are the topic of this paper relative to the domain under discussion: the granularity of meaning (including the status of thematic roles and the foreground/background distinction); the role of reference points; the relationship of semantic and conceptual structure; and information packaging. The paper also looks at the interface between the semantics of verbs related to “winning” and “losing” and the pragmatic principles of prospect theory.

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