One of the most basic themes in the philosophy of language is referential uptake, viz., the question of what counts as properly understanding' a referring act in communication. In this inquiry, the particular line pursued goes back to Strawson's work on re-identification, but the immediate influence is that of Gareth Evans. It is argued that traditional and recent proposals fail to account for success in referential communication. A novel account is developed, resembling Evans' account in combining an external success condition with a Fregean one. But, in contrast to Evans, greater emphasis is placed on the action-enabling side of communication. Further topics discussed include the role of mental states in accounting for communication, the impact of re-identification on the understanding of referring acts, and Donnellan's referential/attributive distinction. Readership: Philosophers, cognitive scientists and semanticists.

This book contains articles on the theory, acquisition and processing of island constraints. The book is unique in taking an interdisciplinary approach to a syntactic phenomenon that has been at the center of linguistic debates since the 1960s. Both transformational and non-transformational approaches to island constraints are represented. The papers in the volume show how data from empirical studies of the role of island constraints in processing and acquisition by normals and by special populations can contribute to our understanding of broad issues concerning the representation of linguistic structures in the mind, including the interplay between lexical, pragmatic and syntactic knowledge. In addition, they contribute vital data to specific on-going debates in processing and development, such as the emergence of movement rules in children's grammars and the temporal ordering of events in the analysis of discontinuous dependencies by the language processor. The papers in the volume exploit examples from a variety of languages and use a variety of experimental techniques to marshal arguments for specific models of the theory of island constraints and their deployment in real-time language acquisition and language processing.

In this important and pioneering book Frederick Newmeyer takes on the question of language variety. He considers why some language types are impossible and why some grammatical features are more common than others. The task of trying to explain typological variation among languages has been mainly undertaken by functionally-oriented linguists. Generative grammarians entering the field of typology in the 1980s put forward the idea that cross-linguistic differences could be explained by linguistic parameters within Universal Grammar, whose operation might vary from language to language. Unfortunately, this way of looking at variation turned out to be much less successful than had been hoped for. Professor Newmeyer's alternative to parameters combines leading ideas from functionalist and formalist approaches which in the past have been considered incompatible. He throws fresh light on language typology and variation, and provides new insights into the principles of Universal The book is written in a clear, readable style and will be readily understood by anyone with a couple of years' study of linguistics. It will interest a wide range of scholars and students of language, including typologists, historical linguists, and theorists of every shade.

The Poverty of Structuralism is the first in a sequence of volumes which examine in turn the basic ideas of Saussure, Marx and Freud, and analyse the way in which they have been developed and applied to art, culture and modern textual theory. The text offers a critical introduction to the structuralist foundations of modern literary theory. It gives an account of the way such foundations have been developed, twisted and distorted to become part of the language that contemporary literary and cultural theoreticians use. It also addresses some of the fundamental issues about language and society that are presupposed by the often difficult language of modern literary and cultural theory.

"Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me." This schoolyard rhyme projects an invulnerability to verbal insults that sounds good but rings false. Indeed, the need for such a verse belies its own claims. For most of us, feeling insulted is a distressing-and distressingly common-experience.
In Sticks and Stones, philosopher Jerome Neu probes the nature, purpose, and effects of insults, exploring how and why they humiliate, embarrass, infuriate, and wound us so deeply. What kind of injury is an insult? Is it determined by the insulter or the insulted? What does it reveal about the character of both parties as well as the character of society and its conventions? What role does insult play in social and legal life? When is telling the truth an insult? Neu draws upon a wealth of examples and anecdotes-as well as a range of views from Aristotle and Oliver Wendell Holmes to Oscar Wilde, John Wayne, Katherine Hepburn, and many others-to provide surprising answers to these questions. He shows that what we find insulting can reveal much about our ideas of character, honor, gender, the nature of speech acts, and social and legal conventions. He considers how insults, both intentional and unintentional, make themselves felt-in play, Freudian slips, insult humor, rituals, blasphemy, libel, slander, and hate speech. And he investigates the insult's extraordinary power, why it can so quickly destabilize our sense of self and threaten our moral identity, the very center of our self-respect and self-esteem.
Entertaining, humorous, and deeply insightful, Sticks and Stones unpacks the fascinating dynamics of a phenomenon more often painfully experienced than clearlyunderstood.

Norris presents a series of closely linked chapters on recent developments in epistemology, philosophy of language, cognitive science, literary theory, musicology and other related fields. While to this extent adopting an interdisciplinary approach, Norris also very forcefully challenges the view that the academic "disciplines" as we know them are so many artificial constructs of recent date and with no further role than to prop up existing divisions of intellectual labour. He makes his case through some exceptionally acute revisionist readings of diverse thinkers such as Derrida, Paul de Man, Wittgenstein, Chomsky, Michael Dummett and John McDowell. In each instance Norris stresses the value of bringing various trans-disciplinary perspectives to bear while none-the-less maintaining adequate standards of area-specific relevance and method. Most importantly he asserts the central role of recent developments in cognitive science as pointing a way beyond certain otherwise intractable problems in philosophy of mind and language.

The notion of what someone says is, perhaps surprisingly, some what less clear than we might be entitled to expect. Suppose that I utter to my class the sentence 'I want you to write a paper reconciling the things Russell claims about propositions in The Philosophy of Mathematics for next week'. A student who was unable to get up in time for class that day asks another what I said about the assignment. Several replies are in the offing. One, an oratio recta or direct speech report, is 'He said, "I want you to write a paper reconciling the things Russell claims about propositions in The Philosophy of Mathematics for next week. '" Another, an oratio obliqua or indirect speech report, consists in the response 'He said that he wants us to write a paper reconciling . . . '. Yet another, reflecting a perhaps accurate estimate of the task involved, editorializes: 'He said he wants us to do the impossible'. Or, aware of both this and my quaint custom of barring those who have not successfully completed the assignment from the classroom, one might retort 'He said he doesn't want to meet next week'. Since 'says' is construable in these various ways, it is at best unhelpful to write something like 'Alice said "Your paper is two days late," thereby saying that Tom's paper was two days late."

In this book Archibald describes two studies conducted within a parametric framework in the area of second language acquisition. The studies are designed to investigate the acquisition of English stress patterns (via both production and perception tasks) by adult speakers of Polish and Hungarian. Archibald argues that interlanguage grammars can be understood as a mix of L1 transfer and the effects of Universal Grammar. Metrical parameters related to such things as quantity--sensitivity, extrametricality, and word--tree dominance determine the structure of the interlanguage. The author reports that the subjects are remarkably successful at acquiring English stress and do not appear to violate proposed universals of metrical phonology. This book is one of the few attempts to investigate the acquisition of L2 phonology within a UG framework. Empirical support is provided for the parametric model to an extent uncommon in most syntactic studies.

"This collection of essays brings about a current interdisciplinary debate on explicit communication. With Robyn Carston's pragmatics at the core of the discussion, special attention is drawn to linguistic underdeterminacy, the explicit/implicit divide and also to the construction or recruitment of concepts in on-line utterance comprehension, which is a particularly contentious area within the broader theme of the limits of explicitness in linguistic communication. Carston contributes with her current views and responds to some of the issues and criticisms raised"--

o. COMPARATIVE GERMANIC SYNTAX This volume contains 13 papers that were prepared for the Seventh Workshop on Comparative Germanie Syntax at the University of Stuttgart in November 1991. In defining the theme both of the workshop and of this volume, we have taken "comparative" in "comparative Germanic syntax" to mean that at least two languages should be analyzed and "Germanic" to mean that at least one of these languages should be Germanic. There was no require ment as such that the research presented should be situated within the framework known as Principles and Parameters Theory (previously known as Government and Binding Theory), though it probably is no accident that this nevertheless turned out to be the case. Within this theory, it is seen as highly desirable to be able to account for several differences on the surface by deriving them from fewer under lying differences. The reason is that, in order to explain the ease with which children acquire language, it is assumed that not all knowledge of any given language is the result of learning, but that instead children already possess part of this knowledge at birth (the innate part of linguistic knowledge will obviously be the same for all human beings, and thus this theory also provides an explanation of language universals). The fewer "real" (i.e."

Hans-Christian Schmitz argues that a speaker has to utter a sentence in a way that makes the hearer perceive at least those words that are sufficient for understanding the entire sentence. In spoken language the speaker has to accentuate these words. Semantics effects of accentuation appear as epi-phenomena of their pragmatic function. The author defines a formal model for the interpretation of incompletely recognized sentences and derives a context-sensitive rule of accentuation. The rule of accentuation is experimentally evaluated.

The present book is a collection of scholarly reflections on the theme of humanism from an integrational linguistic perspective. It studies humanist thought in relation to the philosophy of language and communication underpinning it and considers the question whether being a 'humanist' binds one to a particular view of language. The contributions to this volume explore whether integrational linguistics, being informed by a non-mainstream semiology and adopting a lay linguistic perspective, can provide better answers to contentious ontological and epistemological questions concerning the humanist project - questions having to do with the self, reason, authenticity, creativity, free agency, knowledge and human communication. The humanist perspectives adopted by the contributors to this volume are critical insofar as they start from semiological assumptions that challenge received notions within mainstream linguistics, such as the belief that languages are fixed-codes of some kind, that communication serves the purpose of thought transfer, and that languages are prerequisites for communication.

An exploration of the use of images in Middle English texts, tracing out what can be deduced of a theory of language. In the Middle Ages, English did not have any explicit theory or philosophy of language: philosophers wrote in Latin. This book addresses the issue. By closely analysing the images and metaphors used to describe language in MiddleEnglish texts, it explores how English writers thought language works. These images are "reverse-engineered" in an attempt to deduce what underlying theory of language could have created that image. In this way, it is possible togo beyond the clerically-educated Latin thinkers of the medieval period and try to find out what people thought in English. Taking metaphors and images from the poetry of Geoffrey Chaucer, Arthurian romances, bird debates, sermons, handbooks of exempla, and medieval dramas, the book provides new and sometimes surprising readings of such familiar texts as the House of Fame and the Morte Darthur.

An investigation of the developing discourses of English language teachers in teaching and training, showing how teachers are shaped by the discourses they participate in and how they shape these discourses. By analysing professional development through professional discourse the book sheds light on what teachers do and why they do it.

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.

The articles collected in this book are concerned with the treatment of anaphora within generative grammar, specifically, within Chomsky's 'Ex tended Standard Theory' (EST). Since the inception of this theory, and virtually since the inception of generative grammar, anaphora has been a central topic of investigation. In current research, it has, perhaps, become even more central, as a major focus of study in such areas as syntax, semantics, discourse analysis, and language acquisition. Beginning in the early 1970's, and continuing to the present, Chomsky has developed a comprehensive syntactic theory of anaphora. The articles here are all related to stages in the development of that theory, and can best be understood in relation to that development. For that reason, Chapter 1 presents a historical survey of Chomsky's EST proposals on anaphora, along with brief indications of how the present articles fit into that history. Some of the articles here (e.g. Chapters 4, 8, and 9) proposed extensions of Chomsky's basic ideas to a wider range of phenomena."

Stories told within institutions play a powerful role, helping to define not only the institution itself, but also its individual members. How do institutions use stories? How do those stories both preserve the past and shape the future? To what extent does narrative construct both collective and individual identity?
Charlotte Linde's unique and far-reaching study addresses these questions by looking at the interplay of narratives, memory, and identity in a large insurance company. Her detailed ethnography looks at the role of stories within the institution and how they are employed by its members in both private and group settings. Analyzing the re-telling of certain key stories, she shows how the formation of "core" stories and their multiple re-tellings and modifications provide a means of formulating and promoting a cohesive group identity -- which in turn shapes the stories and identities of the individuals within the collective. Linde also looks at silences, and how stories not told also convey their version of the past.
Working the Past shows how stories that might otherwise be seen as part of mundane daily life are in fact utterly essential to the formation and maintenance of individual and group identity. Her original research will appeal to those interested in narrative studies, linguistics, anthropology, sociology, and institutional memory.

Austronesian languages have long raised interesting questions for generative theories of syntax and morphology. The papers in this volume encompass some of these traditional questions and place them in newer theoretical contexts. Some of the papers also address new issues which add to our understanding of members of this language family on one side and the nature of linguistic theories on the other. There are three broad issues that re-occur throughout the volume - the role and analysis of verbal morphology, the nature of the subject or the topic in these languages, and the interaction of syntax and specificity. The papers in this volume show that as formal theories become more precise, a wider range of language data can be captured, and as the inventory of language data grows, the accuracy of formal linguistic theories improves.

Many articles and books dealing with Donald Davidson's philosophy are dedicated to the papers and ideas Davidson put forward in the sixties and seventies. In the last two decades, however, Davidson has continued to work in many areas of philosophy, offering new contributions, many of which are highly regarded by philosophers working in the fields concerned. For instance, Davidson has considerably developed his ideas about interpretation, theory of meaning, irreducibility of the mental, causation, and action theory; he has proposed an innovative externalist conception of the mental content and a new analysis of the concept of truth; and he has partly modified his theses about event, and the supervenience of the mental on the physical. In Interpretations and Causes, some of the leading contemporary analytic philosophers discuss Davidson's new ideas in a lively, relevant, useful, and not always entirely sympathetic way. Davidson himself offers and original contribution.

The Intelligent Mind conceives the psychological reality of thought and language, explaining how intelligence develops from intuition to representation and then to linguistic interaction and thinking. Overcoming the prevailing dogmas regarding how discursive reason emerges, this book secures the psychological possibility of the philosophy of mind.

How should thought and consciousness be understood within a view of the world as being through-and-through physical? Many philosophers have proposed non-reductive, levels-based positions, according to which the physical domain is fundamental, while thought and consciousness are higher-level processes, dependent on and determined by physical processes. In this book, Kevin Morris's careful philosophical and historical critique shows that it is very difficult to make good metaphysical sense of this idea - notions like supervenience, physical realization, and grounding all fail to articulate a viable non-reductive, levels-based physicalism. Challenging assumptions about the mind-body problem and providing new perspectives on the debate over physicalism, this accessible and comprehensive book will interest scholars working in metaphysics, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of science.

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.

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.

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.