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James R. Shaw offers a new'bipartite'reading of Wittgenstein's treatment of rule-following and the foundations of semantics in his seminal Philosophical Investigations. On this reading, Wittgenstein's remarks are split between two logically distinct projects marked by different guiding questions, presuppositions, and methodologies. It shows how the attribution of this thoroughgoing bipartite structure resolves a number of internal tensions in the text and reveals Wittgenstein's controversial remarks on human agreement to exhibit a surprising attentiveness to, and plausible treatment of, a blurring of the semantics/metasemantics distinction arising in Wittgenstein's treatment of foundational semantic questions. Shaw then turns to an extended engagement with “Kripkensteinean” meaning skepticism. While on the reading offered, Wittgenstein never countenanced meaning skepticism, his work in the foundations of semantics gives us the resources to develop an unusual naive reply to the skeptic not yet explored in literature. Shaw argues that the Wittgensteinean reply is simple, effective, generalizable, and theoretically `light-weight', so that a theorist of almost any stripe could in principle take it up.

Thirteen essays in the book explore and investigate diverse contemporary philosophically current themes and issues. The title is derived from Wittgenstein's statement that'anguage is a labyrinth of paths,'and it studiously avoids any conclusive claim on its central motif. What people, both users and theorists, do with language, rather than what it is, is the running theme. The book critically presents the views of a wide range of philosophically and analytically oriented authors including, de Saussure, Levinas, Lévi-Strauss, Wittgenstein, Derrida, Bakhtin, Benjamin, Kafka, Heidegger, Blanchot, Jean-Luc Nancy, Barthes and Deleuze. Only two essays diverge from the main concern with language: the one on the discourse of death, and another on the philosophy of image. One essay involves an analysis of the cultural and political discourse in a contemporary Malayalam novel. The concluding essay attempts to develop a postcolonial field of language studies, with reference to the works of the 18th century British jurist and linguist Sir William Jones and the subsequent philological tradition, whose political consequences are only beginning to be understood.

This annotated commentary delineating Michel Pêcheux's materialist discourse theory anticipates the formation of a real social science to supersede the metaphysical meanings ‘always-already-there'instituted by empirical ideology. Structures of Language presents Pêcheux's consequential work in respect of Ferdinand de Saussure's epistemological breakthrough that founded the science of linguistics: the theoretical separation of sound from meaning. Noam Chomsky's generative grammar, John Searle's philosophy of language, B. F. Skinner's indwelling agents, J. L. Austin's speech situations, Jacques Lacan's symbolic order, and other influential linguistic researchers, are cited to explain imaginary semantic systems. The broader implications for structural metaphysics in language use are tacitly conveyed.

The proposal of a semantics for quotations using explanatory notions drawn from philosophical theories of pictures. In Quotations as Pictures, Josef Stern develops a semantics for quotations using explanatory notions drawn from philosophical theories of pictures. He offers the first sustained analysis of the practice of quotation proper, as opposed to mentioning. Unlike other accounts that treat quotation as mentioning, Quotations as Pictures argues that the two practices have independent histories, that they behave differently semantically, that the inverted commas employed in both mentioning and quotation are homonymous, that so-called mixed quotation is nothing but subsentential quotation, and that the major problem of quotation is to explain its dual reference or meaning—its ordinary meaning and its metalinguistic reference to the quoted phrase attributed to the quoted subject. Stern argues that the key to understanding quotation is the idea that quotations are pictures or have a pictorial character. As a phenomenon where linguistic competence meets a nonlinguistic symbolic ability, the pictorial, quotation is a combination of features drawn from the two different symbol systems of language and pictures, which explains the exceptional and sometimes idiosyncratic data about quotation. In light of this analysis of verbal quotation, in the last chapters Stern analyzes scare quotation as a nonliteral expressive use of the inverted commas and explores the possibility of quotation in pictures themselves.

The title of this book is inspired by Jacques Derrida and by his seminal work, The Margins of Philosophy. The study of meaning in the past thirty years has focused on core meaning, and largely ignored the margins of meaning, where much of the power of language is to be found. The present work seeks to shift this focus by taking a postmodern approach that sees meaning as an accretion of verbal, social, cultural and personal sign systems, with fluid boundaries that shrink or expand with each meaner.Chapter 1 begins with a brief examination of present-day approaches to meaning, and goes on to a deconstruction of four twentieth century linguists. Chapter 2 takes as its starting point two aspects of the 20th century scientific paradigm, non-deterministic causation and relativity, and considers a number of thinkers who have worked within this paradigm. A major aim of this work is to convince students and teachers of literary theory, cultural studies and feminist theory of the validity of a linguistics of indeterminacy, so Chapter 3 focuses on an analytical approach that models indeterminacy in language, and Chapter 4 applies the model to a newspaper editorial, a Wallace Stevens'poem, and an extract from a Patrick White novel.

Can language directly access what is true, or is the truth judgment affected by the subjective, perhaps even solipsistic, constructs of reality built by the speakers of that language? The construction of such subjective representations is known as veridicality, and in this book Anastasia Giannakidou and Alda Mari deftly address the interaction between truth and veridicality in the grammatical phenomena of mood choice: the indicative and subjunctive choice in the complements of modal expressions and propositional attitude verbs. Combining several strands of analysis—formal linguistic semantics, syntactic theory, modal logic, and philosophy of language—Giannakidou and Mari's theory not only enriches the analysis of linguistic modality, but also offers a unified perspective of modals and propositional attitudes. Their synthesis covers mood, modality, and attitude verbs in Greek and Romance languages, while also offering broader applications for languages lacking systematic mood distinction, such as English. Truth and Veridicality in Grammar and Thought promises to shape longstanding conversations in formal semantics, pragmatics, and philosophy of language, among other areas of linguistics.

A classical viewpoint claims that reality consists of both things and stuff, and that we need a way to discuss these aspects of reality. This is achieved by using +count terms to talk about things while using +mass terms to talk about stuff. Bringing together contributions from internationally-renowned experts across interrelated disciplines, this book explores the relationship between mass and count nouns in a number of syntactic environments, and across a range of languages. It both explains how languages differ in their methods for describing these two fundamental categories of reality, and shows the many ways that modern linguistics looks to describe them. It also explores how the notions of count and mass apply to'abstract nouns', adding a new dimension to the countability discussion. With its pioneering approach to the fundamental questions surrounding mass-count distinction, this book will be essential reading for researchers in formal semantics and linguistic typology.

In On the Genesis of Thought and Language, linguist Alexey Koshelev explores fundamental questions of how human concepts arise in a child, why concepts appear in a child before words, the genesis of language, and why there are so many languages. Chapter One introduces the fundamental dichotomy “visual (exogenous) vs. functional (endogenous)” cognitive units; these units are used to give non-verbal definitions of mental representations of various objects, actions, and situations. In particular, definitions of such concepts as GLASS, CHAIR, BANANA, TREE, LAKE, RUN, and some others are given. Chapter Two discusses how children form concepts, hierarchical relationships, and propositions (conceptual ‘utterances'). It is shown that the initial units of the child's representation of the world are pre-conceptual cognitive units—mental representations of whole situations. In the course of two consecutive cycles in the child's cognitive development, these units transform into (a) primary notions—object and motor concepts, and (b) binary role relationships. Together, they constitute the elementary language of thought which, in the process of thinking, is used to build conceptual structures—propositions. It is further demonstrated that, immediately after the formation of thought, the child begins to develop his native language in which concrete and motor concepts become initial meanings of nouns and verbs, while propositions become the meanings of the child's expressions. The chapter concludes with a contrastive analysis of the proposed approach and Aristotle's and Chomsky's views on thought and language. Chapter Three analyzes how a community's culture affects its language. It is demonstrated that the progress of a community, the main constituent of the civilizational component of its culture, enhances the development of the content component of language by extending the range of its lexical and grammatical meanings. In the context of this analysis, Daniel Everett's (2008) hypothesis that culture affects language structure is discussed. In the subsequent sections, models of the development of human and social activity are offered. These models comprise three components: Activity (main component), Thought, and Language (auxiliary components that ensure the successful realization of activities). The models are illustrated with examples of some concrete societies.

Danilo Marcondes argues that, contrary to a traditional view maintaining that language is not given any central role in early modern philosophy, an “early linguistic turn” in the seventeenth century opened a place for the philosophy of language as part of the philosophical system then under construction. Skepticism and Language in Early Modern Philosophy: The Early Linguistic Turn also claims that the revival of ancient skepticism at the modern age contributed decisively towards this “linguistic turn” insofar as it attacked the “powers of the intellect” in representing reality and making knowledge possible. Marcondes also argues that the concept of language itself becomes crucial to this investigation since the various understandings that developed during this period led to the central role that would be given to the philosophy of language in contemporary philosophy.

This book collects twenty-five of the author's essays, each of which addresses a descriptive or a foundational issue that arises at the interface between linguistic semantics and pragmatics, on the one hand, and the philosophy of language, on the other. Arranged into three interconnected parts (I. Matters of Meaning and Truth; II. Matters of Meaning and Force; III. Knowledge Matters), the essays suggest that some key topics in the above-mentioned fields have often been approached in ways that considerably underestimate their empirical or conceptual complexity, and attempt to delineate perspectives from which, and conditions under which, an improved understanding of those topics could be sought. The book will be of interest to linguists working in semantics and pragmatics, and to philosophers working in the philosophy of language and in epistemology.

Auch heute noch (oder vielmehr: heute wieder) geistert durch die Sprachphilosophie und die Philosophie des Geistes die These, dass es sich bei mentalen Einstellungen wie Glauben und Wissen um Relationen zwischen kognitiven Subjekten und Propositionen bzw. Sachverhalten handle. Mit anderen Worten haben diese These bereits zahlreiche Philosophen von Bolzano bis Frege vertreten, doch deren Lehren wurden vor 100 Jahren von Neopositivsten als metaphysischer Unsinn abgekanzelt. Und als vor 50 Jahren Karl Popper seine Lehre von der Welt 3 mit ausdrücklicher Berufung auf Bolzano und Frege entwickelte, warf man ihm vor, damit die methodologischen Standards seines Kritischen Rationalismus zu missachten. All dies scheint in Vergessenheit geraten zu sein. Dabei könnte man auch heute noch viel aus dieser Vorgeschichte lernen. Dieser Band bemüht sich darum, diese frühen Quellen zum Thema in Erinnerung zu rufen und für eine heutige Diskussion kritisch-systematisch aufzubereiten.

This book is an exploration of the dimensions of meaning in language from several important perspectives that are of major interest to scholars today, bringing together studies from the realms of linguistic pragmatics, semantics, ontological knowledge engineering, and computational linguistics. Situated within modern functional-cognitive constructional-ontological and computational paradigms, the analyses here are supported by authentic language data, including corpus data, from a rich set of languages. Context and situation play an important but complex role in meaning elaboration. The role of context and situation is elusive and has proved difficult to elucidate with respect to meaning and knowledge representation. This volume provides evidence of the nature of the, often rapid, emergence of meaning in the digital world of the internet, social media, and Internet memes. The use of computational avatars and the rise of human language technologies, including big data and digital corpora, have made the construction of meaning and human language understanding essential to the work of linguists, cognitive scientists and computer scientists who are increasingly working together in collaborative teams to share insights.

This book implements a multidisciplinary approach in describing language both in its ontogenetic development and in its close interrelationship with other human subsystems such as thought, memory, and activity, with a focus on the semantic component of the evolutionary-synthetic theory.The volume analyzes, among others, the mechanisms for grammatical polysemy, and brings to light the structural unity of artefact and natural concepts (such as CHAIR, ROAD, LAKE, RIVER, TREE). Additionally, object and motor concepts are defined in terms of the language of thought, and their representation in neurobiological memory codes is discussed; finally, the hierarchic structure of basic meanings of concrete nouns is shown to arise as a result of their step-by-step development in ontogeny.

The book deals with questions that complement the philosophical aspects of Parmenides, mainly with an analysis of the proem in light of the Greek literary and religious tradition to determine which are traditional and which are novel. Further, a proposed analysis of the proem indicating how the questions dealt with in it could be translated into terms of modern linguistics ('to be'as a hyperonym, the semantics of negation, or the semantics of'being'versus the semantics of verb tenses). And finally, the Parmenidean use of adjectives with ά- privative, which seem contradictory with the Parmenian idea that what is not cannot be known. Customary to the Eleatic Lessons, prestigious authors make valuable contributions to the issues addressed.

This handbook presents an overview of the phenomenon of reference - the ability to refer to and pick out entities - which is an essential part of human language and cognition. In the volume's 21 chapters, international experts in the field offer a critical account of all aspects of reference from a range of theoretical perspectives. Chapters in the first part of the book are concerned with basic questions related to different types of referring expression and their interpretation. They address questions about the role of the speaker - including speaker intentions - and of the addressee, as well as the role played by the semantics of the linguistic forms themselves in establishing reference. This part also explores the nature of such concepts as definite and indefinite reference and specificity, and the conditions under which reference may fail. The second part of the volume looks at implications and applications, with chapters covering such topics as the acquisition of reference by children, the processing of reference both in the human brain and by machines. The volume will be of interest to linguists in a wide range of subfields, including semantics, pragmatics, computational linguistics, and psycho- and neurolinguistics, as well as scholars in related fields such as philosophy and computer science.

The philosophy of language of Robert Brandom is based on a theoretical structure composed of three main elements: the normative analysis of linguistic practices, the inferential characterization of conceptual contents and the expressive articulation of the relations between the former two. Normative pragmatics aims to explain how linguistic practices are sufficient to confer contentful states in those who engage in them. Inferential semantics provides a theory of such pragmatic significances in terms of the inferential relations that articulate conceptual contents. Rational expressivism is the thesis that concept application is essentially a process of turning something that can only be done into something that can also be said. Such a threefold structure is the core of normative inferentialism. This book is a concise, self-contained and comprehensive presentation of this philosophical enterprise. It guides the reader through the analysis of Brandom's imposing theoretical apparatus, the discovery of the roots of his approach in American pragmatism and German idealism, till the exploration of some of its most interesting and recent outcomes in pragmatics and semantics. It is a valuable resource for both those who approach Brandom's work for the first time and those who are interested in the potential of normative inferentialism.

This volume offers novel views on the precise relation between reference to an object by means of a linguistic expression and our mental representation of that object, long a source of debate in the philosophy of language, linguistics, and cognitive science. Chapters in this volume deal with our devices for singular reference and singular representation, with most focusing on linguistic expressions that are used to refer to particular objects, persons, or places. These expressions include proper names such as Mary and John; indexicals such as I and tomorrow; demonstrative pronouns such as this and that; and some definite and indefinite descriptions such as The Queen of England or a medical doctor. Other chapters examine the ways we represent objects in thought, particularly the first-person perspective and the self, and one explores a notion common to reference and representation: salience. The volume includes the latest views on these complex topics from some of the most prominent authors in the field and will be of interest to anyone working on issues of reference and representation in thought and language.

First published in 1990, this book argues that any theory of language constructs its ‘object'by separating ‘relevant'from ‘irrelevant'phenomena — excluding the latter. This leaves a ‘remainder'which consists of the untidy, creative part of how language is used — the essence of poetry and metaphor. Although this remainder can never be completely formalised, it must be fully recognised by any true account of language and thus this book attempts the first ‘theory of the remainder'. As such, whether it is language or the speaker who speaks is dealt with, leading to an analysis of how all speakers are ‘violently'constrained in their use of language by social and psychological realties.

This book offers a semantic and metasemantic inquiry into the representation of meaning in linguistic interaction. Kasia Jaszczolt's view represents the most radical stance on meaning to be found in the contextualist tradition and thereby the most radical take on the semantics/pragmatics boundary. It allows for the selection of the cognitively plausible object of enquiry without being constrained by such distinctions as what is said/what is implicated or what is linguistic and what is extralinguistic. She argues that this is the only promising stance on meaning. The analysis transcends the traditional distinctions drawn, and traditional questions posed, in post-Gricean pragmatics and philosophy of language. It heavily relies on the dynamic construction of meaning in discourse, using truth conditions as a tool but at the same time conforming to pragmatic compositionality? whereby aspects of meaning that enter this composition have very different provenance. Meaning in Linguistic Interaction builds on the author's earlier work on Default Semantics and adds new arguments in favour of radical contextualism as well as novel applications, focusing on the role of salience, the flexibility of word meaning, the literal/nonliteral distinction, and the dynamic nature of a character, as well as offering an entirely new perspective on the indexical/nonindexical distinction. It contains a state-of-the-art discussion of the semantics/pragmatics boundary disputes, focusing on varieties of semantic minimalism and contextualism and on the limitations of an indexicalism. Jaszczolt's work is illustrated with examples from a variety of languages and offers some formal representations of meaning in the metalanguage of Default Semantics.

The book explores the way in which apophatic discourse of negative theology has illuminated contemporary critical theory. It demonstrates the significance of apophasis both in Jacques Derrida's search for a «new language», responsive to singularity and alterity, and in the analyses of the experience of transgression, developed by Maurice Blanchot, George Bataille and Michel Foucault. Following Derrida's understanding of negative theology as a transgressive concept that transcends the linguistic, historical and religious contexts from which it arises, the book proves that apophasis is not merely a discourse on language restricted to one theological tradition, but should be viewed as a mode of dialogue and openness, essential to all responsible thinking.

In Potential Questions at the Semantics-Pragmatics Interface Edgar Onea proposes a novel component for question under discussion based discourse pragmatic theories thereby combining such theories with new ideas from inquisitive semantics. He shows how potential questions account for an entire range of grammatical phenomena. These phenomena include the semantics of indefinite determiners, the meaning contribution of nominal appositives, specificational constructions and non restrictive relative clauses. This book delivers a comprehensive and empirically rich investigation into the role of questions in natural language interpretation. Drawing on data from German, English, Hungarian and Russian, Edgar Onea's study significantly broadens our understanding of conventional sensitivity to questions through formally rigorous analyses of specificational particles, parentheticals and indefinites. The Potential Questions framework offers a new and exciting perspective on utterance meanings as not just addressing, but also raising questions, with important consequences for integrated analyses of discourse structure and discourse relations. This book is essential reading for anybody interested in the semantics-pragmatics interface.Judith Tonhauser, The Ohio State University

Bienvenue dans la collection Les Fiches de lecture d'UniversalisCinq ans après son introduction-traduction de L'Origine de la géométrie de Husserl, Jacques Derrida publie, en 1967, trois livres étrangement différents, paradoxalement proches.Une fiche de lecture spécialement conçue pour le numérique, pour tout savoir sur De la grammatologie de Jacques DerridaChaque fiche de lecture présente une œuvre clé de la littérature ou de la pensée. Cette présentation est couplée avec un article de synthèse sur l'auteur de l'œuvre.A propos de l'Encyclopaedia Universalis : Reconnue mondialement pour la qualité et la fiabilité incomparable de ses publications, Encyclopaedia Universalis met la connaissance à la portée de tous. Écrite par plus de 7 200 auteurs spécialistes et riche de près de 30 000 médias (vidéos, photos, cartes, dessins…), l'Encyclopaedia Universalis est la plus fiable collection de référence disponible en français. Elle aborde tous les domaines du savoir.

Imogen Dickie develops an account of aboutness-fixing for thoughts about ordinary objects, and of reference-fixing for the singular terms we use to express them. Extant discussions of this topic tread a weary path through descriptivist proposals, causalist alternatives, and attempts to combine the most attractive elements of each. The account developed here is a new beginning. It starts with two basic principles. The first connects aboutness and truth: a belief is about the object upon whose properties its truth or falsity depends. The second connects truth and justification: justification is truth conducive; in general and allowing exceptions, a subject whose beliefs are justified will be unlucky if they are not true, and not merely lucky if they are. These principles--one connecting aboutness and truth; the other truth and justification--combine to yield a third principle connecting aboutness and justification: a body of beliefs is about the object upon which its associated means of justification converges; the object whose properties a subject justifying beliefs in this way will be unlucky to get wrong and not merely luck to get right. The first part of the book proves a precise version of this principle. Its remaining chapters use the principle to explain how the relations to objects that enable us to think about them--perceptual attention; understanding of proper names; grasp of descriptions--do their aboutness-fixing and thought-enabling work. The book includes discussions of the nature of singular thought and the relation between thought and consciousness.

Elastic language carries non-specific and stretchable meaning, as in'He loves her, kind of'. It is used like a slingshot, targeting various strategic goals. Consolidating current research and charting new directions, this book develops a refreshing theory of elasticity, empirically attested by natural language data from tension-prone encounters between Australian Customs officers and passengers. The theory proposes three principles (fluidity, stretchability and strategy) and offers a systematic look at how elastic language, as a sliding scale, works to balance strengthening and weakening speech tones, to firm and soften a speaker's stance, and to reveal and evade the truth. The comparative analysis of forms, functions, and context confirms that elastic language is fluid, stretchable, and strategic. It serves both cooperative and competitive functions, and social and speech factors impact on its use. This book will appeal to students and researchers working in pragmatics, applied linguistics, sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, and communication.

Researchers in critical discourse analysis (CDA) have often pointed to grammar as a locus of ideology in discourse. This book illustrates the role that grammars as models of language (and image) can play in revealing ideological properties of texts and discourse in social and political contexts. The book takes the reader through three distinct grammatical frameworks – functional grammar, multimodal grammar and cognitive grammar. Using examples taken from a range of discourses relating to globalisation, including discourses of immigration, war, corporate practice and political protests, the book demonstrates the individual utility and the interconnectedness of these models inside CDA. A key argument advanced is that the cognitive processes necessarily involved in making sense of language are based in visual experience. This position offers new ways of understanding the ideological effects of grammatical choices in texts and suggests a reassessment of the relationship between linguistic and multimodal grammars in CDA. The book will appeal to students and researchers interested in CDA and the relationship between discourse, cognition and social action.

Questo volume esamina la realtà linguistica della Valle del Mercure, area geografica di confine tra Basilicata e Calabria. Elemento portante della ricerca, che introduce nuove impostazioni e nuovi parametri sociolinguistici, è l'interpretazione della linguistica di contatto come chiave del cambiamento di variazione. Avviando una dialettologia politopica e comparativa attenta ad analizzare località già appartenenti all'Area Lausberg, lo studio permette di giungere anche a una proposta complessiva riguardante il quadro dialettologico dell'intera Basilicata, da considerare come una regione «costituita da microaree alternate ad isole linguistiche e/o colonie linguistiche che si estendono a ‹macchia di leopardo›».

In pragmatics, it is widely accepted that the overall meaning of an utterance performed as part of a verbal interchange is basically underdetermined by the meaning of the sentence uttered. What counts as having been said for most contemporary authors goes far beyond sentence meaning. Rather, it has to be considered as a complex utterance level combining semantic knowledge and context-driven, pragmatic information as an integrated whole. The focus of the present book lies on central questions about the nature, the function and the acquisition of pragmatic inferencing strategies. The question of the relation between the explicit and the implicit side of verbal communication and its mutual delimitation is addressed. What is the character of pragmatic inferences, wherever they may be situated in a descriptive model? Are they nonce inferences arising anew in each act of communication, or do we have to conceive of them as based on regularities and conventions? What is an adequate model of the acquisition of the skills which are relevant for mastering the inferential processes leading to an adequate interpretation of utterances? And what is the relation between a theory of pragmatic enrichment and optimality theory with an OT pragmatics as a possible result?

This book presents a study of the connections between vagueness and gradability, and their different manifestations in adjectives (morphological gradability effects) and nouns (typicality effects). It addresses two opposing theoretical approaches from within formal semantics and cognitive psychology. These approaches rest on different, apparently contradictory pieces of data. For example, for psychologists nouns are linked with vague and gradable concepts, while for linguists they rarely are. This difference in approach has created an unfortunate gap between the semantic and psychological studies of the concepts denoted by nouns, as well as adjectives. The volume describes a wide range of relevant facts and theories. Psychological notions such as prototypes and dimensions are addressed with formal rigor and explicitness. Existing formal semantic accounts are examined against empirically established cognitive data. The result is a comprehensive unified approach. The book will be of interest to students and researchers working on the semantics and pragmatics of natural languages and their cognitive basis, the psychology of concepts, and the philosophy of language.

Mit seiner Philosophie der Sprache hat der Frankfurter Philosoph Bruno Liebrucks (1911–1986) eine an Hegel orientierte, dennoch deutlich nonkonformistische Logik und Metaphysik geschaffen. Den Grund jeglicher Philosophie erkennt Liebrucks in „der Sprache“ als logischer Struktur des In-der-Welt-Seins. Dieses Sprachverständnis speist sich aus der neutestamentlichen Logos-Theologie und eröffnet eine originelle, ebenso erfahrungsbezogene wie spekulative Auseinandersetzung mit christlicher Tradition. Konsequenz ist eine im Kontext des Freiheitsthemas vollzogene Neubetrachtung des Gottesbegriffs in dessen Relevanz für das Selbstverständnis des Menschen. Die Metapher vom Menschen als – freie – Marionette Gottes ist der rote Faden, an dem sich die Argumentation orientiert und hierbei zentrale Begriffe aus Theologie, Philosophie und Sprachwissenschaft in Liebrucks‘ gleichermaßen traditionsbewusstem wie innovativem, manchmal poetischem, stets detailreichem und konsequentem Denken sowie anhand von dessen unverwechselbarem Idiolekt zur Geltung bringt. Die Untersuchung eröffnet erstmalig einen Zugang zum Gesamtwerk Liebrucks‘ als eines Denkers, dessen Erbe sowohl Theologen, als auch Philosophen und Sprachwissenschaftlern neue Impulse vermittelt.

The nature of propositions and the cognitive value of names have been the focal point of philosophy of language for the last few decades. The advocates of the causal reference theory have favored the view that the semantic contents of proper names are their referents. However, Frege's puzzle about the different cognitive value of coreferential names has made this identification seem impossible. Geirsson provides a detailed overview of the debate to date, and then develops a novel account that explains our reluctance, even when we know about the relevant identity, to substitute coreferential names in both simple sentences and belief contexts while nevertheless accepting the view that the semantic content of names is their referents. The account focuses on subjects organizing information in webs; a name can then access and elicit information from a given web. Geirsson proceeds to extend the account of information to non-referring names, but they have long provided a serious challenge to the causal reference theorist.

Since translation cannot be approached in isolation from meaning, anything that is said about translation must necessarily be placed in the context of meaning. Accordingly, the first volume of the book concerns this necessary context, while the second volume will view translation in terms of the semantic framework presented in the first volume. Both volumes are to a large extent consistent with major tenets of cognitive linguistics. The work is addressed primarily to students pursuing translation studies but also to all those persons who are interested in semantics and translation for whatever other reasons. The main aim of the book is to provide the prospective reader with a quantum of knowledge in the two areas. A subsidiary aim is to tidy up the metalinguistic terminology, replete with such deficiencies as polysemy, whereby one term is laden with a number of senses, as well as synonymy, due to which one sense is connected with more than one term.

This book deals with speech representation in Greek adolescents'storytelling and investigates how members of different communities of practice present themselves and other characters as interactional protagonists through the stories they tell. The work puts forth a dynamic approach that examines (direct) speech representation at the local and the broader socio-cultural context in which it is embedded. The concept of community of practice accounts for direct speech variation, and direct speech is seen as the linguistic manifestation of shared repertoire of particular communities of practice. The book combines qualitative with quantitative methods of study and brings together relevant theories of speech representation, narrative analysis and self-presentation.

Modality is the way a speaker modifies her declaratives and other speech acts to optimally assess the common ground of knowledge and belief of the addressee with the aim to optimally achieve understanding and an assessment of relevant information exchange. In languages such as German (and other Germanic languages outside of English), this may happen in covert terms. Main categories used for this purpose are modal adverbials ('modal particles') and modal verbs. Epistemic uses of modal verbs (like German sollen) cover evidential (reportative) information simultaneously providing the source of the information. Methodologically, description and explanation rest on Karl Bühler's concept of Origo as well as Roman Jakobson's concept of shifter. Typologically, East Asian languages such as Japanese pursue these semasiological fundaments far more closely than the European languages. In particular, Japanese has to mark the source of a statement in the declarative mode such that the reliability may be assessed by the hearer. The contributions in this collection provide insight into these modal techniques.

Semantic externalism is the view that the meanings of referring terms, and the contents of beliefs that are expressed by those terms, are not fully determined by factors internal to the speaker but are instead bound up with the environment.The debate about semantic externalism is one of the most important but difficult topics in philosophy of mind and language, and has consequences for our understanding of the role of social institutions and the physical environment in constituting language and the mind. In this long-needed book, Jesper Kallestrup provides an invaluable map of the problem. Beginning with a thorough introduction to the theories of descriptivism and referentialism and the work of Frege and Kripke, Kallestrup moves on to analyse Putnam's Twin Earth argument, Burge's arthritis argument and Davidson's Swampman argument. He also discusses how semantic externalism is at the heart of important topics such as indexical thoughts, epistemological skepticism, self-knowledge, and mental causation.Including chapter summaries, a glossary of terms, and an annotated guide to further reading, Semantic Externalism an ideal guide for students studying philosophy of language and philosophy of mind.

Tropen sind nicht nur rhetorische Mittel, die in der Dichtung und in der öffentlichen Rede als kreative und/oder persuasive Sprachmittel Verwendung finden. Sie sind auch ein kognitives Instrumentarium, mit dessen Hilfe sich die Menschen die Welt verständlich machen und durch das sich ihr Weltverständnis ausdrückt. Indem sie unserer Weltwahrnehmung und auch schon unserem alltäglichen Sprechen zugrunde liegen, muss ‑ spätestens seit Nietzsches grundsätzlicher Wahrheitsskepsis angesichts der Ubiquität des sog. „übertragenen Sprachgebrauchs“ ‑ die Frage nach der Möglichkeit der Wahrheit Tropen enthaltender Sätze gestellt werden. ‑ 18 Beiträge von Linguisten, Philosophen, Psychologen und Literaturwissenschaftlern sind im vorliegenden Band versammelt. Ihre 21 Autoren versuchen, Metapher, Metonymie, Synekdoche, Ironie, Euphemismus, Antonomasie und Hyperbel aus ihrer jeweiligen fachlichen bzw. paradigmatischen Sicht zu bestimmen, vor allem aber gehen sie den Fragen nach, ob und inwieweit die genannten Tropen enthaltende Äußerungen auf den Ausdruck von Wahrheit (oder Falschheit) überhaupt Anspruch erheben können.

A masterful overview of the philosophy of language from one of its most important thinkersIn this book one of the world's foremost philosophers of language presents his unifying vision of the field—its principal achievements, its most pressing current questions, and its most promising future directions. In addition to explaining the progress philosophers have made toward creating a theoretical framework for the study of language, Scott Soames investigates foundational concepts—such as truth, reference, and meaning—that are central to the philosophy of language and important to philosophy as a whole. The first part of the book describes how philosophers from Frege, Russell, Tarski, and Carnap to Kripke, Kaplan, and Montague developed precise techniques for understanding the languages of logic and mathematics, and how these techniques have been refined and extended to the study of natural human languages. The book then builds on this account, exploring new thinking about propositions, possibility, and the relationship between meaning, assertion, and other aspects of language use.An invaluable overview of the philosophy of language by one of its most important practitioners, this book will be essential reading for all serious students of philosophy.

Ce volume rassemble une série d'articles qui accordent une attention particulière à des phénomènes qui mettent spécifiquement en relation le niveau sémantique et pragmatique de l'interprétation. Les textes ici présentés font directement appel à des notions comme la représentation d'événements, la prise en charge, le contexte narratif, la sémantique historique, la structure informationnelle, qui sont toutes, dans leur diversité, des notions à la fois sémantiques et pragmatiques. Rassemblant des contributions de chercheurs de grand renom (Georges Kleiber, Carl Vetters, Liliane Tasmowski, Bertrand Vérine) et de chercheurs plus jeunes, ce volume se structure en fonction de thématiques. Il s'ouvre ainsi par des réflexions sur le futur, puis traite des emplois modaux du conditionnel et du verbe pouvoir, puis de l'imparfait narratif à l'oral, puis le gérondif. Deux articles sont ensuite consacrés au subordonnées introduites par quando (en italien) et cuando (en espagnol). Enfin, la position du passé simple en français est revisitée à la lumière de l'interlangue d'apprenants anglophones.

The problem of the nature of fiction and the problem of nonexistence are closely tied because fiction often talks about nonexistent entities. In Fiction, Reference, and Nonexistence, A. P. Martinich and Avrum Stroll, two of America's leading philosophers, explore fiction and undertake an analytic philosophical study of fiction and its reference and its relation to truth. Included in the discussion is the authors'new, contemporary theory of fiction developed as an extension of the speech act theory of H. P. Grice, as well as the relationship between nonexistence and Bertrand Russell's well-known theory of definite descriptions, and Hilary Putnam's theory of the relationship between common names and the world.

Whereas the relationship between truth and propositional content has already been intensively investigated, there are only very few studies devoted to the task of illuminating the relationship between truth and illocutionary acts. This book fills that gap. This innovative collection addresses such themes as: the relation between the concept of truth and the success conditions of assertions and kindred speech acts the linguistic devices of expressing the truth of a proposition the relation between predication and truth.

How to Show Things with Words is an interdisciplinary research study at the interface between linguistics and philosophy which sheds new light on the narrative-theoretical issue of proximal vs. distal stance adoption in discourse. Narrative distance ultimately depends on the epistemological source of the information conveyed, but English and other Indo-European languages have no inflectional systems for (en)coding that source of knowledge. To fill in the gap, speech act theory is (re)considered in the light of philosophical research on linguistic functions and a parallel is drawn between grammaticalized evidential categories and the objectifying acts of Husserl's phenomenology of constitution. These intuitive vs. signitive intentional acts do, indeed, roughly correspond to direct vs. indirect evidentiary forms and can be inferred from the temporal-perspectival organization of discourse by the so-called intimation or announcement function of language-systems. It turns out that perspectival immediacy requires tenses with overlapping event- and reference-points, but predictions of the sort are non-monotonic forms of reasoning defeasible by quantificational aspect distinctions, on the one hand, and inherent meaning considerations, on the other. To substantiate this claim, the bulk of the book provides an in-depth formal semantic account of tense, aspect and Aktionsart, interwoven with a detailed analysis of the cognitive processes associated with eventuality-description types. The book adresses an audience of linguists in general, formal semanticists, cognitive scientists, philosophers and narratologists with an interest in natural language semantics.

This comprehensive introduction to Language and the Law looks at the common areas of interaction between linguistics and the legal process. Each chapter presents a language issue or problem relevant to the law. This is then examined using excerpts from cases where judges in their decisions have had to confront that particular issue. Professor Schane considers each issue both from the legal point of view and from a linguistic point of view, to show how each are relevant to each other. Issues covered include: • Ambiguity • Vagueness • Metaphor • Legal fiction • Presuppositions • Leading questions • Legal hearsay The book requires no previous legal or linguistic background, and all concepts and notions from the two fields are explained in a non-technical manner. This fascinating introduction to Language and the Law will be of interest to students and academics encountering this area for the first time. Student friendly features include: exercises, suggestions for further reading, glossary and excerpts from relevant cases.

This book revives the study of conventional implicatures in natural language semantics. H. Paul Grice first defined the concept. Since then his definition has seen much use and many redefinitions, but it has never enjoyed a stable place in linguistic theory. Christopher Potts returns to the original and uses it as a key into two presently under-studied areas of natural language: supplements (appositives, parentheticals) and expressives (e.g., honorifics, epithets). The account of both depends on a theory in which sentence meanings can be multidimensional. The theory is logically and intuitively compositional, and it minimally extends a familiar kind of intensional logic, thereby providing an adaptable, highly useful tool for semantic analysis. The result is a linguistic theory that is accessible not only to linguists of all stripes, but also philosophers of language, logicians, and computer scientists who have linguistic applications in mind.

The shaping of complex meanings depends on punctual and relational coding and inferencing. Coding is viewed as a vector which can run either from expression to content or from concepts to (linguistic) forms to mark independent conceptual relations. While coding relies on systematic resources internal to language, inferencing essentially depends on a layered system of autonomous shared conceptual structures, which include both cognitive models and consistency criteria grounded in a natural ontology. Inference guided by coding is not a residual pragmatic device but it is a direct way to long-ter.

Humankind has always been fascinated and troubled by the way languages and dialects differ. Linguistically based differences in point of view have preoccupied many original minds of the past, such as Kant, and remain at the forefront of language study: in philosophy, anthropology, literary criticism, and other fields. Paul Friedrich's The Language Parallax argues persuasively that the'locus and focus'of differences among languages lies not so much in practical or rational aspects as in the complexity and richness of more poetic dimensions—in the nuances of words, or the style and voice of an author. This poetic reformulation of what has been called'linguistic relativism'is grounded in the author's theory of the imagination as a main source of poetic indeterminacy. The reformulation is also based on the intimate relation of the concentrated language of poetry to the potential or possibilities for poetry in ordinary conversation, dreams, and other experiences. The author presents challenging thoughts on the order and system of language in their dynamic relation to indeterminacy and, ultimately, disorder and chaos. Drawing on his considerable fieldwork in anthropology and linguistics, Friedrich interweaves distinct and provocative elements: the poetry of language difference, the indeterminacy in dialects and poetic forms, the discovery of underlying orders, the workings of different languages, the strength of his own poetry. The result is an innovative and organic whole. The Language Parallax, then, is a highly original work with a single bold thesis. It draws on research and writing that has involved, in particular, English, Russian, and the Tarascan language of Mexico, as well as the personal and literary study of the respective cultures. Anthropologist, linguist, and poet, Friedrich synthesizes from his experience in order to interrelate language variation and structure, the creative individual, ideas of system-in-process, and questions of scientific and aesthetic truth. The result is a new view of language held to the light of its potentially creative nature.

Die vorliegende Untersuchung, die einerseits theoretische Überlegungen zur Logik des Diskurses enthält, andererseits auch eine Art Handbuch für den Umgang mit der Kommunikation darstellt, soll zum Nachdenken und zum zielbewußten Gedankenaustausch anregen. So soll sie den Menschen dienen, die - zu Hause, auf der Straße, im Beruf - ein Gespräch mit ihren Mitmenschen führen. Es zeigt sich dann, daß der eine Gesprächspartner, der eine Behauptung aufstellen oder einen Vorschlag vorbringen und dabei den anderen zur'Zusammenarbeit bei der Auslegung'gewinnen will, normalerweise eher den Weg der Sinnhaftigkeit als den der reinen, bisweilen jedoch kühlen Wahrheit einschlägt. Was sinnhaft ist, entspricht letzten Endes auch der Wahrheit; einer sinnhaften Wahrheit, die - gerade weil sie dem Leben entspringt - hinreißend und überzeugend wirkt. Im Werk werden die wichtigsten - sehr breiten und sehr schmalen - Wege der Sinnhaftigkeit aufgezeigt, die im lebhaften, das Buch abschließenden Lexikon der Phänomenologie des kreativen Gedankens zusammengefaßt und erläutert werden. Es werden sprachliche, philosophische, logische und epistemologische Aspekte angeführt und besprochen, allerdings nicht als theoretisch-abstrakte Erkenntnisobjekte, sondern im Lichte des Erfahrungsbewußtseins der Gesprächspartner und ihrer Lebenswelt und unter Zuhilfenahme des phänomenologischen Instrumentariums von Edmund Husserl. Letzten Endes liefert das Werk also Überlegungen für den aktivierenden Einsatz der Sprache. Dabei wird die Welt der Sprachakte betreten, die hier erstmalig unter Berücksichtigung der konkreten, zwischenmenschlichen Beziehungen untersucht werden. So wird die Mitteilung zum Aktionsmittel, zur wahren Energie unserer Zeit.

What is the nature of communicative competence? Carol Kates addresses this crucial linguistic question, examining and finally rejecting the rationalistic theory proposed by Noam Chomsky and elaborated by Jerrold J. Katz, among others. She sets forth three reasons why the rationalistic model shoudl be rejected: (1) it has not been supported by empirical tests; (2) it cannot accommodate the pragmatic relation between speaker and sign; and (3) the theory of universal grammar carries with it unacceptable metaphysical implications unless it is interpreted in light of empiricism. Kates proposes an empiricist model in place of the rationalistic theory—a model that, in her view, is more consistent with recent findings in linguistics and psycholinguistics.In attempting to clarify the nature of utterance meaning, Kates develops theoretical perspectives on phenomenological empiricism and produces an account of reference and intentionality directly relevant to empiricaly based theories of speaking and understanding.Among the major topics addressed in the book are transformational-generative and universal grammer, cognitive theories of language acquisition, pragmatic structure, predication and topic-comment structure, and empiricism and the philosophical problem of universals.An innovative and probing work, Pragmatics and Semantics will be welcomed by philosophers, linguists, and psycholinguists.