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Books > Language & Literature > Language & linguistics > Philosophy of language
Exploring the nature of possible relationships between Integrational Linguistics and Southern Epistemologies, this volume examines various ways in which Integrational Linguistics can be used to support the decolonizing interests of Southern Epistemologies, particularly the lay-oriented nature of Integrational Linguistics that Southern Epistemologies find productive as a 'positive counter-discourse.' As both an anti-elitist and antiestablishment way of thinking, these chapters consider how Integrational Linguistics can be consistent with the decolonial aspirations of Southern Epistemologies. They argue that the relationship between Southern Epistemologies and Integrational Linguistics is complicated by the fact that, while Integrational Linguistics is critical of what it calls a segregationist view of language, i.e., 'the language myth,' Southern Epistemologies in language policy and planning and minority language movements find the language myth helpful in order to facilitate social transformation. And yet, both Integrational Linguistics and Southern Epistemologies are critical of approaches to multilingualism that are founded on notions of 'named' languages. They are also both critical of linguistics as a decontextualized, and institutionalized extension of ordinary metalinguistic practices, which at times influence the prejudices, preconceptions and ideologies of dominant western cultures. This book will prove to be an essential resource for scholars and students not only within the field of integrational linguistics, but also in other language and communication fields, in particular the dialogic, distributed, and ecological-enactive approaches, wherein integrational linguistics has been subjected to scrutiny and criticism.
Tropes are not only rhetorical means, which are used as a creative and / or persuasive linguistic means in poetry and public speech. They are also a cognitive tool which helps people to understand the world and to express their world. As they are the basis on which our worldview and even our everyday speech is founded, the question must be posed as to whether utterances containing tropes can be said to be true. This has been an epistemological problem since Nietzsche expressed his doubts about the possibility that figurative language could give access to truth. However, since then research has paid little attention to this question. -18 papers by linguists, philosophers, psychologists and literary scholars have been collected in this volume. Their 21 authors use various approaches or paradigms in order to define metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, irony, euphemism, antonomasia and hyperbole and find an answer to the crucial epistemological questions, namely whether and to what extent utterances containing tropes can be said to be true or false.
This book presents essays and commentaries that continue on Thomas Kuhn's work from where he left off at the time of his death. Contrary to other books, this volume picks up the gauntlet to develop, from a contemporary perspective, some points that can be improved in the light of recent findings and conceptualizations in metatheory. Thus, this work pays a visit to the classical Kuhnian landscapes, but rather proposing interpretations, it takes them as the starting point to go further. One hundred years after Kuhn's birth, the editors and authors rekindle the passion and interest that have always surrounded the work of the great Boston philosopher and historian.
At a superficial examination, English has different types of nominals with similar meaning and distribution: (1)a. John's performance ofthe song b. J ohn' s performing of the song c. John's performing the song d. the fact that John performs the song These nominals are also perceived by English speakers to be related to the same sentential construction: (2) John performs the song A more accurate inspection reveals, however, that the nominals in (1) differ both in their distribution and in the range of interpretations they allow. An adequate theory of nominalization should explicate rigorously how nominals of the types in (1) are related to sentential construction (2), and should also account for their distributional differences and meaning differences. The task of this book is to develop such a theory. I defend two main theses. The first is that, in order to provide an adequate semantics for the nominals in (1), one needs to distinguish among three types of entities in the domain of discourse (in addition to the type of ordinary individuals): events, propositions, and states xiii XIV PREFACE of affairs. I argue that the nominals in (1) differ in their ability to denote entities of these types and that predicates differ in their ability to select for them.
The fourteenth volume of the Second Edition covers central topics in philosophical logic that have been studied for thousands of years, since Aristotle: Inconsistency, Causality, Conditionals, and Quantifiers. These topics are central in many applications of logic in central disciplines and this book is indispensable to any advanced student or researcher using logic in these areas. The chapters are comprehensive and written by major figures in the field.
CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE SOCIOLOGY OF LANGUAGE brings to students, researchers and practitioners in all of the social and language-related sciences carefully selected book-length publications dealing with sociolinguistic theory, methods, findings and applications. It approaches the study of language in society in its broadest sense, as a truly international and interdisciplinary field in which various approaches, theoretical and empirical, supplement and complement each other. The series invites the attention of linguists, language teachers of all interests, sociologists, political scientists, anthropologists, historians etc. to the development of the sociology of language.
Anti-realism is a doctrine about logic, language, and meaning with roots in the work of Wittgenstein and Frege. In this book, the author clarifies Dummett's case for anti-realism and develops his arguments further. He concludes by advocating a radical reform of our logical practices.
A revival of interest in morphology has taken place during recent years and the subject is seen now as a relatively autonomous subdiscipline of linguistics. As one of the important areas of theoretical research in formal linguistics, morphology has attracted linguists to investigate its relations to syntax, semantics, phonology, psycholinguistics and language change. The aim of the Yearbook of Morphology, therefore, is to support and enforce the upswing of morphological research and to give an overview of the current issues and debates at the heart of this revival.
Today, English is the global lingua franca and competent English communication skills should be one of the rights of all educated individuals irrespective of any socio-cultural limits. By introducing a new method, this book focuses on helping any learner to get sufficient communication skills in English as much as in the native language. This method helps one to avoid translating from mother tongue to English. And by using the method of thinking in English, one could acquire the required English bilingual skills naturally. The method is founded on the philosophical idea of mentalese-mind language as the base language of thinking available for humans for constructing thoughts. The proposed English Bilingual Project (EBP) helps one to transfer thoughts from a structureless mentalese to the grammatical structure of any language English/Japanese/Chinese. The method described in this book works in two ways: one it helps one to intuitively understand the working of mentalese; the other is by practicing think in English with the mentalese, one could generate the bilingual brain. The main procedure for transferring thoughts from the mentalese to English is through writing one's thoughts. This helps one to think effectively in English like one's own mother tongue. This method works as a prime requirement model for one to generate multilingual skills. The book resourced the idea of mentalese from the classical philosophy, reflects it with the modern generative theories, links it with the studies in neuro-linguistic studies on bilingualism and the bilingual brain.
In The Natural Background to Meaning Denkel argues that meaning in language is an outcome of the evolutionary development of forms of animal communication, and explains this process by naturalising the Locke-Grice approach. The roots of meaning are contained in observable regularities, which are manifestations of objective connections such as essences and causal relations. Denkel's particularistic ontology of properties and causation leads to a view of time that harmonises B-theory with transience. Time's passage, he argues, is a necessary condition of communication and meaning. The book connects some central topics in the philosophies of language, science and ontology, treating them within the framework of a single theory. It will interest not only professional philosophers doing research on meaning, universals, causation and time, but also students, who can consult it as a textbook examining Grice's theory of meaning.
This essay contains material which will hopefully be of interest not only to philosophers, but also to those social scientists whose research concerns the analysis of communication, verbal or non-verbal. Although most of the topics taken up here are central to issues in the philosophy of language, they are, in my opinion, indistinguishable from topics in descriptive social psychology. The essay aims to provide a conceptual framework within which various key aspects of communication can be described, and it presents a formal language, using techniques from modern modal logic, in which such descriptions can themselves be formulated. It is my hope that this framework, or parts of it, might also turn out to be of value in future empirical work. There are, therefore, essentially two sides to this essay: the development of a framework of concepts, and the construction of a formal language rich enough to express the elements of which that framework is composed. The first of these two takes its point of departure in the statement quoted from Lewis (1972) on the page preceding this introduction. The distinction drawn there by Lewis is accepted as a working hypothesis, and in one sense this essay may be seen as an attempt to explore some of the consequences of that hypothesis.
This volume discusses some crucial ideas of the founders of the analytic philosophy: Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein, or the 'golden trio'. The book shows how these 'old' ideas are still present and influential in the current philosophical debates and to what extent these debates echo the original ideas. The collection aim is twofold: to better understand these fruitful ideas by placing them in the original setting, and to systematically examine these ideas in the context of the current debates animating philosophical discussions today. Divided into five sections, the book first sets the stage and offers a general introduction to the background influences, as well as delimitations of the initial foundational positions. This first section contains two papers dedicated to the discussion of realism and the status of science at that time, followed by two papers that tackle the epistemic status of logical laws. The next three sections constitute the core of the volume, each being dedicated to the most important figures in the early analytic tradition: Frege, Russell, and Wittgenstein. The last section gathers several essays that discuss either the relation between two or more analytic thinkers, or various important concepts such as 'predicativism' and 'arbitrary function', or the principles of abstraction and non-contradiction.
The book links the concept of intention to human action. It provides answers to questions like: Why do we act intentionally? Which impact do reasons and motives have on our decisions? Certain events are identified as intentional actions when they are considered as being rationalized by reasons. The linguistic description of such events enables us to reveal the structure of intention. The mental and the linguistic constitute irreducible ways of understanding events. Among the topics discussed are intentionality, actions, the linguistic form to talk about intentionality and actions, Brentano's view of intentionality, the phenomenological approach to intention and Wittgenstein's proposals. The contributions by Wolfgang Kunne, Peter Simons, Christian Bermes, Kevin Mulligan, Severin Schroeder, Antonio Marques, Margit Gaffal, Michel Le Du, Jesus Padilla Galvez, Bernhard Obsieger and Amir Horowitz show that actions and decisions are guided by intentional considerations.
This book makes a novel contribution to our understanding of Romance SE constructions by combining both diachronic and synchronic theoretical perspectives along with a range of empirical data from different languages and dialects. The collection, divided into four sections, proposes that SE constructions may be divided into one class that is the result of grammaticalization of a reflexive pronoun up the syntactic tree, from Voice and above, and another class that has resulted from the reanalysis of reflexive and anticausative morphemes as an argument expletive or verbal morpheme generated in positions from Voice and below. The contributions, while varied in both empirical content and theoretical approach, all serve to highlight different aspects of the overarching idea that SE constructions have evolved from these two distinct grammaticalization paths. The book appeals to researchers and academics in the field and closes with a unified approach to various SE constructions that makes important use of its status as a verbal morpheme. In addition to aligning a novel string of empirical contributions under a new theoretical umbrella, a clear research direction emerges from this volume based on the morphosyntactic nature of SE itself: Is it a clitic, an agreement morpheme, or a verbal morpheme?
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 Łódź 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.
H. P. Grice's theory of implicature provides the leading paradigm for research in pragmatics. Wayne Davis argues controversially that Gricean theory does not work. In developing his argument the author explains that the psycho-social principles actually define the social function of implicature conventions, which contribute to the satisfaction of those principles. By offering a searching and systematic critique of one of the established doctrines in the philosophy of language, this challenging book will be of particular importance to philosophers of language and linguists, especially those working in pragmatics and socio-linguistics.
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.
The writings of six choreographers are assembled in this book and the leap they have taken to go from the medium of choreography into written text constitutes a form of translation. Some of the texts investigate the possibilities of written language as invention, others use it as a means to illustrate specific tenets or describe choreographic projects. All yield insight into the process of coaxing language from the body.
With chapters written by leading international scholars in the field, this is an authoritative reference guide for researchers working in the Philosophy of Language today. "The Continuum Companion to Philosophy of Language" offers the definitive guide to contemporary philosophy of language. The book covers all the fundamental questions asked by the philosophy of language - areas that have continued to attract interest historically as well as topics that have emerged more recently as active areas of research. Ten specially commissioned essays from an international team of experts reveal where important work continues to be done in the area and, most valuably, the exciting new directions the field is taking. The Companion explores issues pertaining to the nature of language, form semantics, theories of meaning, reference, intensional contexts, context-dependence, pragmatics, the normativity of language, analyticity, a priority and modality. Featuring a series of indispensable research tools, including an A to Z of key terms and concepts, a detailed list of resources and a fully annotated bibliography, this is the essential reference tool for anyone working in the philosophy of language. "The Continuum Companions" series is a major series of single volume companions to key research fields in the humanities aimed at postgraduate students, scholars and libraries. Each companion offers a comprehensive reference resource giving an overview of key topics, research areas, new directions and a manageable guide to beginning or developing research in the field. A distinctive feature of the series is that each companion provides practical guidance on advanced study and research in the field, including research methods and subject-specific resources.
La Peste (in English The Plague), originally published in 1947 by the Nobel Prize-winning writer Albert Camus, chronicles the progression of deadly bubonic plague as it spreads through the quarantined Algerian city of Oran. While most discussions of fictional examples within aesthetics are either historical or hypothetical, Camus offers an example of "pestilence fiction." Camus chose fiction to convey facts-about plagues in the past, his own bout with tuberculosis at age seventeen, living under quarantine away from home for several years, and forced separation from his wife who remained in Algiers while he was abroad in Nazi-occupied France. His own lived experiences undergird an imaginative account of shared human realities with which we can identify: vulnerability to the disease, isolation, fear, and finally humanitarianism. The Plague teaches us to neither covet nor expect what we so casually took for granted. This collection of original essays on philosophical themes in The Plague is of special relevance during and in the aftermath of Covid-19 but also provides reflections that will be of lasting value to those interested in this classic work of literature. The novel explores questions of enduring importance. Do we collectively meet the threshold of ethical behaviour posed by Camus who wrote, "What's true of all the evils in the world is true of plague as well. It helps men to rise above themselves"? Or does the absurd undermine the compassionate? Do "heroes" dutifully fight a plague with "common decency," or does human nature resign itself to the normalization of uncontrollable suffering and death? There are myriad ways to approach the novel and this volume encourages readers to ponder human dilemmas in fictional Oran informed by our current pandemic.
This volume contains ten essays on Russian literature and thought of the classical age (1820-1880). It aims to strike a balance between important work on well-known authors such as Pushkin, Lermontov, Turgenev and Dostoevsky, and important work of relatively unknown writers such as Marlinsky, Pisemsky and Boborykin, and studies that relate to thinkers, Chaadaev, Herzen and Bakunin. The essays illuminate texts from various angles by examining literary antecedents, biographical information, published and unpublished correspondence, the many stages in the composition of a work, and even ethnographic material. Several contributors make use of material gathered in Soviet archives.
The volume combines a historical and philosophical study of Russell's theory of descriptions. It defends, develops and extends the theory as a contribution to natural language semantics while also arguing for a reassessment of the important of linguistic inquiry to Russell's philosophical project. |
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