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Books > Language & Literature > Language & linguistics > Philosophy of language
The theory of signifying (significs), formulated and introduced by
Victoria Welby for the first time in 1890s, is at the basis of much
of twentieth-century linguistics, as well as in other language and
communication sciences such as sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics,
translation theory and semiotics. Indirectly, the origins of
approaches, methods and categories elaborated by analytical
philosophy, Wittgenstein himself, Anglo-American speech act theory,
and pragmatics are largely found with Victoria Lady Welby. Indeed,
it is no exaggeration to say, in addition, that Welby is the
"founding mother" of semiotics. Some of Peirce's most innovative
writings - for example, those on existential graphs - are
effectively letters to Lady Welby. She was an esteemed
correspondent of scholars such as Bertrand Russell, Charles K.
Ogden, Herbert G. Wells, Ferdinand S. C. Schiller, Michel Breal,
Andre Lalande, the brothers Henry and William James, and Peirce, as
well as Frederik van Eeden, Mary Everst Boole, Ferdinand Toennies,
and Giovanni Vailati. Her writings directly inspired the Signific
Movement in the Netherlands, important for psycholinguistics,
linguistics and semantics and inaugurated by van Eeden and
developed by such authors as Gerrit Mannoury. This volume,
containing introductions and commentaries, presents a selection
from Welby's published and unpublished writings delineating the
whole course of her research through to developments with the
Significs Movement in the Netherlands and still other
ramifications, contemporary and subsequent to her. A selection of
essays by first-generation significians contributing to the
Signific Movement in the Netherlands completes the collection,
testifying to the progress of significs after Welby and even
independently from her. This volume contributes to the
reconstruction on both the historical and theoretical levels of an
important period in the history of ideas. The aim of the volume is
to convey a sense of the theoretical topicality of significs and
its developments, especially in semiotics, and in particular its
thematization of the question of values and the connection with
signs, meaning, and understanding, therefore with human verbal and
nonverbal behavior, language and communication.
Discourse analysis is a wide ranging area of study that examines
the features of language beyond the limits of a sentence -
including vocal, written and sign language, along with any
significant semiotic events. It has been employed from a number of
interdisciplinary perspectives in an attempt to reveal a person's
socio-psychological characteristics through the practical analysis
of naturally-occurring language rather than artificially created
examples. Routledge Library Editions: Discourse Analysis brings
together an extensive collection of scholarship that reflects the
broad scope of the subject area, examining the relationship of
discourse to a number of closely related fields including
stylistics, pragmatics, speech, conversation, context, anaphora,
grammar and psychology. This set, published between 1979 and 1993,
provides a thorough grounding in this key discipline for students
of linguistics and psychology, and social sciences in general.
Semantics and semiology are two of the most important branches of
linguistics and have proven to be fecund areas for research. They
examine language structures and how they are dictated by both the
meanings and forms of communication employed - semantics by
focusing on the denotation of words and fixed word combinations,
and semiology by studying sign and sign processes. As numerous
interrelated fields connect to and sub-disciplines branch off from
these major spheres, they are essential to a thorough grounding in
linguistics and crucial for further study. 'Routledge Library
Editions: Semantics and Semiology' collects together wide-ranging
works of scholarship that together provide a comprehensive overview
of the preceding theoretical landscape, and expand and extend it in
numerous directions. A number of interrelated disciplines are also
discussed in conjunction with semantics and semiology such as
anaphora, pragmatics, syntax, discourse analysis and the philosophy
of language. This set reissues 14 books originally published
between 1960 to 2000 and will be of interest to students of
linguistics and the philosophy of language.
This set reissues 22 books on syntax, originally published between
1971 and 1994. Together, the volumes cover key topics within the
larger subject of syntax, including reflexivization, morphology and
syntactical theory. Written by an international set of scholars,
particular volumes focus on languages such as French and Spanish,
whilst other volumes are devoted specifically to syntax in the
English language. This collection provides insight and perspective
on various elements of syntax over a period of over 20 years and
demonstrates its enduring importance as a field of research.
This unique volume focuses on religion and spirituality, along with
rituals, practices and symbols, discussed and analysed from a
semiotic perspective. It covers both cognitive and social
dimensions of religious practices and beliefs, various aspects of
spirituality, multiple forms of representation, as well as spheres
of religious beliefs and practices. The volume is an outcome of the
Signum-Idea-Verbum-Opus project initiated by Umberto Eco’s
keynote address during his visit at the University of Åódź in
2015. More theoretical insights and further explorations into
contemporary semiosphere can be found in Current Perspectives in
Semiotics: Signs, Signification and Communication and Current
Perspectives in Semiotics: Texts, Genres and Representations,
published by Peter Lang.
The area of research on printed word recognition has been one of
the most active in the field of experimental psychology for well
over a decade. However, notwithstanding the energetic research
effort and despite the fact that there are many points of
consensus, major controversies still exist.
This volume is particularly concerned with the putative
relationship between language and reading. It explores the ways by
which orthography, phonology, morphology and meaning are
interrelated in the reading process. Included are theoretical
discussions as well as reviews of experimental evidence by leading
researchers in the area of experimental reading studies. The book
takes as its primary issue the question of the degree to which
basic processes in reading reflect the structural characteristics
of language such as phonology and morphology. It discusses how
those characteristics can shape a language's orthography and affect
the process of reading from word recognition to comprehension.
Contributed by specialists, the broad-ranging mix of articles
and papers not only gives a picture of current theory and data but
a view of the directions in which this research area is vigorously
moving.
This book provides a novel interpretation of the ideas about
language in Wittgenstein's 'Philosophical Investigations'. In
particular, the author places the 'private language argument' in
the context of wider themes in the Investigations, and thereby
develops a picture of what it is for words to bear the meaning they
do. Travis elaborates two versions of a private language argument,
and shows the consequences of these for current trends in the
philosophical theory of meaning.
This book explores how grammatical structure is related to meaning.
The meaning of a phrase clearly depends on its constituent words
and how they are combined. But how does structure contribute to
meaning in natural language? Does combining adjectives with nouns
(as in 'brown dog') differ semantically from combining verbs with
adverbs (as in 'barked loudly')? What is the significance of
combining verbs with names and quantificational expressions (as in
'Fido chased every cat')? In addressing such questions, Paul
Pietroski develops a novel conception of linguistic meaning
according to which the semantic contribution of combining
expressions is simple and uniform across constructions. Drawing on
work at the heart of contemporary debates in linguistics and
philosophy, the author argues that Donald Davidson's treatment of
action sentences as event descriptions should be viewed as an
instructive special case of a more general semantic theory. The
unified theory covers a wide range of examples, including sentences
that involve quantification, plurality, descriptions of complex
causal processes, and verbs that take sentential complements.
Professor Pietroski also provides fresh ways of thinking about much
discussed semantic generalizations that seem to reflect innately
determined aspects of human languages. Designed to be accessible to
anyone with a basic knowledge of elementary logic, Events and
Semantic Architecture will interest a wide range of scholars in
linguistics, philosophy, and cognitive science.
Language acquisition is a human endeavor par excellence. As
children, all human beings learn to understand and speak at least
one language: their mother tongue. It is a process that seems to
take place without any obvious effort. Second language learning,
particularly among adults, causes more difficulty. The purpose of
this series is to compile a collection of high-quality monographs
on language acquisition. The series serves the needs of everyone
who wants to know more about the problem of language acquisition in
general and/or about language acquisition in specific contexts.
Sarah A. Mattice explores contemporary philosophical activity and
the way in which one aspect of language-metaphor-gives shape and
boundary to the landscape of the discipline. The book examines
metaphors of combat, play, and aesthetic experience and emphasizes
how the choices we make in philosophical language are deeply
intertwined with what we think philosophy is and how it should be
practiced. Drawing on a broad range of resources, from cognitive
linguistics and hermeneutics to aesthetics and Chinese philosophy,
Mattice's argument provides insight into the evolution and future
of philosophy itself.
This unique introduction fully engages and clearly explains
pragmatism, an approach to knowledge and philosophy that rejects
outmoded conceptions of objectivity while avoiding relativism and
subjectivism. It follows pragmatism's focus on the process of
inquiry rather than on abstract justifications meant to appease the
skeptic. According to pragmatists, getting to know the world is a
creative human enterprise, wherein we fashion our concepts in terms
of how they affect us practically, including in future inquiry.
This book fully illuminates that enterprise and the resulting
radical rethinking of basic philosophical conceptions like truth,
reality, and reason. Author Cornelis de Waal helps the reader
recognize, understand, and assess classical and current pragmatist
contributions-from Charles S. Peirce to Cornel West-evaluate
existing views from a pragmatist angle, formulate pragmatist
critiques, and develop a pragmatist viewpoint on a specific issue.
The book discusses: Classical pragmatists, including Peirce, James,
Dewey, and Addams; Contemporary figures, including Rorty, Putnam,
Haack, and West; Connections with other twentieth-century
approaches, including phenomenology, critical theory, and logical
positivism; Peirce's pragmatic maxim and its relation to James's
Will to Believe; Applications to philosophy of law, feminism, and
issues of race and racism.
Existential semiotics is a new paradigm which combines classical
semiotics with continental philosophy. It does not mean a return to
existentialism, albeit philosophers from Hegel and Kierkegaard to
Heidegger, Jaspers and Sartre are its sources of inspiration. It
introduces completely new sign categories and concepts to the
field, recasting the whole of semiotics, communication and
signification as integral to a transcendental art. The volume
contains essays on music, the voice, silence, calligraphy,
metaphysics, myth, aesthetics, entropy, cultural heritage, film,
the Bible, among other subjects.
Truth and Paradox offers a comprehensive account of truth values
and the norms governing claims about truth, based on a new approach
to logic and semantics. Since the seminal work of Tarski in the
mid-twentieth century, the Liar paradox and other related paradoxes
have stood in the way of a precise philosophical account of truth.
Tim Maudlin draws on analogies from mathematical physics to
explicate the origin of classical truth-value gaps, and to provide
an account of truth that avoids any hierarchy of languages or of
truth predicates. He also closely investigates our reasoning about
truth, including apparently unobjectionable reasoning about the
paradoxical sentences. The fallacies in that reasoning are located
not in any inferences concerning truth, but in the foundations of
standard logic. Blocking the paradoxical arguments requires
emendation of classical logic, and the requisite emendations call
into question the existence of any a priori logical truths. Maudlin
also includes a discussion of facts and factuality, most
particularly the question of whether there are any facts about
truth. All philosophers interested in logic and language will find
this a stimulating read.
This book presents a unique approach to the semantics of verbs. It
develops and specifies a decompositional representation framework
for verbal semantics that is based on the Unified Modeling Language
(UML), the graphical lingua franca for the design and modeling of
object-oriented systems in computer science. The new framework
combines formal precision with conceptual flexibility and allows
the representation of very complicated details of verbal meaning,
using a mixture of graphical elements as well as linearized
constructs. Thereby, it offers a solution for different semantic
problems such as context-dependency and polysemy. The latter, for
instance, is demonstrated in one of the two well-elaborated
applications of the framework within this book, the investigation
of the polysemy of German setzen. Besides the formal specification
of the framework, the book comprises a cognitive interpretation of
important modeling elements, discusses general issues connected
with the framework such as dynamic and static aspects of verbal
meanings, questions of granularity, and general constraints
applying to verbal semantics. Moreover, first steps towards a
compositionalsemanticsare undertaken, and a new verb classification
based on this graphical approach is proposed. Since the framework
is graphical in nature, the book contains many annotated figures,
and the framework's modeling elements are illustrated by example
diagrams. Not only scholars working in the field of linguistics, in
particular insemantics, will find this book illuminating because of
its new graphical approach, but also researchers of cognitive
science, computational linguistics and computer science in general
will surely appreciate it.
Dialetheism is the view that some contradictions are true. This is
a view which runs against orthodoxy in logic and metaphysics since
Aristotle, and has implications for many of the core notions of
philosophy. Doubt Truth to Be a Liar explores these implications
for truth, rationality, negation, and the nature of logic, and
develops further the defense of dialetheism first mounted in
Priest's In Contradiction, a second edition of which is also
available.
This introduction to the role of information structure in grammar
discusses a wide range of phenomena on the syntax-information
structure interface. It examines theories of information structure
and considers their effectiveness in explaining whether and how
information structure maps onto syntax in discourse. Professor
Erteschik-Shir begins by discussing the basic notions and
properties of information structure, such as topic and focus, and
considers their properties from different theoretical perspectives.
She covers definitions of topic and focus, architectures of
grammar, information structure, word order, the interface between
lexicon and information structure, and cognitive aspects of
information structure. In her balanced and readable account, the
author critically compares the effectiveness of different
theoretical approaches and assesses the value of insights drawn
from work in processing and on language acquisition, variation, and
universals. This book will appeal to graduate students of syntax
and semantics in departments of linguistics, philosophy, and
cognitive science.
Joseph LaPorte offers a new account of the connections between the
reference of words for properties and kinds, and theoretical
identity statements. Some terms for concrete objects, such as
'Hesperus' and 'Phosphorus', are rigid, and the rigidity of these
terms is important because it helps to determine whether certain
statements containing them, including identity statements like
'Hesperus = Phosphorus', are necessary or contingent. These
observations command broad agreement. But there has been much less
agreement about whether and how designators for properties are
rigid: terms like 'white', 'brontosaur', 'beautiful', 'heat',
'H2O', 'pain', and so on. In Rigid Designation and Theoretical
Identities, LaPorte articulates and defends the position that terms
for properties are rigid designators. Furthermore, he argues that
property designators' rigidity is put to good use in important
philosophical arguments supporting and impugning certain
theoretical identity statements. The book as a whole constitutes a
broad defense of a tradition originating largely in seminal work
from Saul Kripke, which affirms the truth and necessity of
theoretical identities such as 'water = H2O', 'heat = the motion of
molecules' and the like, and which looks skeptically upon
psychophysical identities like 'pain = c-fiber firing'. LaPorte
responds to detractors of the Kripkean tradition whose objections
and challenges indicate where development and clarification is
needed, as well as to sympathizers who have put forward important
contributions toward such ends. Specific topics discussed by way of
defending the Kripkean tradition include conventionalism and
empiricism, nominalism about properties, multiple realizability,
supervenience, analytic functionalism, conceptual dualism and 'new
wave' or a posteriori materialism, the explanatory gap, scientific
essentialism (more broadly: scientific necessitarianism), and
vitalism.
• Thoroughly integrates the treatment of semantics and
pragmatics, providing a more accessible, realistic, coherent and
contemporary account of linguistic meaning than can be achieved by
treating the two topics separately • Betty Birner’s lively and
student-friendly writing style engages even students new to the
study of linguistics with this fascinating subject • Includes
chapters on topical and cutting-edge subjects such as meaning,
machines and artificial intelligence.
The Measure of Mind provides a sustained critique of a widely held
representationalist view of propositional attitudes and their role
in the production of thought and behavior. On this view, having a
propositional attitude is a matter of having an explicit
representation that plays a particular causal/computational role in
the production of thought and behavior. Robert J. Matthews argues
that this view does not enjoy the theoretical or the empirical
support that proponents claim for it; moreover, the view
misconstrues the role of propositional attitude attributions in
cognitive scientific theorizing.
The Measure of Mind goes on to develop an alternative
measurement-theoretic account of propositional attitudes and the
sentences by which we attribute them. On this account, the
sentences by which we attribute propositional attitudes function
semantically like the sentences by which we attribute a quantity of
some physical magnitude (e.g., having a mass of 80 kilos). That is,
in much the same way that we specify a quantity of some physical
magnitude by means of its numerical representative on a measurement
scale, we specify propositional attitude of a given type by means
of its representative in a linguistically-defined measurement
space. Propositional attitudes turn out to be causally efficacious
aptitudes for thought and behavior, not semantically evaluable
mental particulars of some sort. Matthews' measurement-theoretic
account provides a more plausible view of the explanatorily
relevant properties of propositional attitudes, the semantics of
propositional attitude attributions, and the role of such
attributions in computational cognitive scientific theorizing.
"Deflationism" has emerged as one of the most significant
developments in contemporary philosophy. It is best known as a
story about truth -- roughly, that the traditional search for its
underlying nature is misconceived, since there can be no such
thing. However, the scope of deflationism extends well beyond that
particular topic. For, in the first place, such a view of truth
substantially affects what we should say about neighboring concepts
such as "reality," "meaning," and "rationality." And in the second
place, the anti-theoretical meta-philosophy that lies behind that
view -- the idea that philosophical problems are characteristically
based on confusion and should therefore be dissolved rather than
solved -- may fruitfully be applied throughout the subject, in
epistemology, ethics, the philosophy of science, metaphysics, and
so on.
The essays reprinted here were written over the last twenty five
years. They represent Paul Horwich's development of the
deflationary perspective and demonstrate its considerable power and
fertility. They concern a broad array of philosophical problems:
the nature of truth, realism vs. anti-realism, the creation of
meaning, epistemic rationality, the conceptual role of "ought,"
probabilistic models of scientific reasoning, the autonomy of art,
the passage of time, and the trajectory of Wittgenstein's
philosophy. They appear as originally published except for the
correction of obvious mistakes, the interpolation of clarifying
material, and the inclusion of new footnotes to indicate Horwich's
subsequent directions of thought.
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