Cognitive Linguistics is the most rapidly expanding school in modern Linguistics. It aims to create a scientific approach to the study of language, incorporating the tools of philosophy, neuroscience and computer science. Cognitive approaches to language were initially based on philosophical thinking about the mind, but more recent work emphasizes the importance of convergent evidence from a broad empirical and methodological base. "The Cognitive Linguistics Reader" brings together the key writings of the last two decades, both the classic foundational pieces and contemporary work. The essays and articles - selected to represent the full range, scope and diversity of the Cognitive Linguistics enterprise - are grouped by theme into sections with each section separately introduced. The book opens with a broad overview of Cognitive Linguistics designed for the introductory reader and closes with detailed further reading to guide the reader through the proliferating literature. The Reader is both an ideal introduction to the full breadth and depth of Cognitive Linguistics and a single work of reference bringing together the most significant work in the field.

Context and the Attitudes collects thirteen seminal essays by Mark Richard on semantics and propositional attitudes. These essays develop a nuanced account of the semantics and pragmatics of our talk about such attitudes, an account on which in saying what someone thinks, we offer our words as a 'translation' or representation of the way the target of our talk represents the world. A broad range of topics in philosophical semantics and the philosophy of mind are discussed in detail, including: contextual sensitivity; pretense and semantics; negative existentials; fictional discourse; the nature of quantification; the role of Fregean sense in semantics; 'direct reference' semantics; de re belief and the contingent a priori; belief de se; intensional transitives; the cognitive role of tense; and the prospects for giving a semantics for the attitudes without recourse to properties or possible worlds. Richard's extensive, newly written introduction gives an overview of the essays. The introduction also discusses attitudes realized by dispositions and other non-linguistic cognitive structures, as well as the debate between those who think that mental and linguistic content is structured like the sentences that express it, and those who see content as essentially unstructured.

This book is an exploration of how knowledge about the reliability of information sources manifests itself in linguistic phenomena and use. It focuses on cooperation in language use and on how considerations of reliability influence what is done with the information acquired through language. E. McCready provides a detailed account of the phenomena of hedging and evidentiality and analyses them using tools from game theory, dynamic semantics, and formal epistemology. Hedging is argued to be a mechanism used by speakers to protect their reputations for cooperativity from damage inflicted by infelicitous discourse moves. The pragmatics of evidential use is also discussed in terms of the histories of interaction that influence reputation: the author argues that past experience with the evidence source indexed by the evidential determines how the process of adding information will proceed. The book makes many new connections between seemingly disparate aspects of linguistic meaning and practice. It will be of interest to specialists in semantics, pragmatics, and philosophy of language, as well as those in the fields of philosophy and cognitive science with an interest in language and epistemology.

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.

Claiming to know is more than making a report about one's epistemic position: one also offers one's assurance to others. What is an assurance? In this book, Krista Lawlor unites J. L. Austin's insights about the pragmatics of assurance-giving and the semantics of knowledge claims into a systematic whole. The central theme in the Austinian view is that of reasonableness: appeal to a 'reasonable person' standard makes the practice of assurance-giving possible, and lets our knowledge claims be true despite differences in practical interests and disagreement among speakers and hearers. Lawlor provides an original account of how the Austinian view addresses a number of difficulties for contextualist semantic theories, resolves closure-based skeptical paradoxes, and helps us to tread the line between acknowledging our fallibility and skepticism.

The Medieval Life of Language: Grammar and Pragmatics from Bacon to Kempe explores the complex history of medieval pragmatic theory and ideas and metapragmatic awareness across social discourses. Pragmatic thinking about language and communication is revealed in grammar, semiotics, philosophy, and literature. Part historical reconstruction, part social history, part language theory, Amsler supplements the usual materials for the history of medieval linguistics and discusses the pragmatic implications of grammatical treatises on the interjection, Bacon's sign theory, logic texts, Chaucer's poetry, inquisitors' accounts of heretic speech, and life-writing by William Thorpe and Margery Kempe. Medieval and contemporary pragmatic theory are contrasted in terms of their philosophical and linguistic orientations. Aspects of medieval pragmatic theory and practice, especially polysemy, equivocation, affective speech, and recontextualization, show how pragmatic discourse informed social controversies and attitudes toward sincere, vague, and heretical speech. Relying on Bakhtinian dialogism, critical discourse analysis, and conversation analysis, Amsler situates a key period in the history of linguistics within broader social and discursive fields of practice.

What are the things that we assert, believe, and desire? The orthodox view among philosophers is eternalism: these are contents that have their truth-values eternally. Transient Truths provides the first book-length exposition and defense of the opposing view, temporalism: these are contents that can change their truth-values along with changes in the world. Berit Brogaard argues that temporal contents are contents and propositions in the full sense. This project involves a thorough analysis of how we talk about and retain mental states over time, an examination of how the phenomenology of mental states bear on the content of mental states, an analysis of how we pass on information in temporally extended conversations, and a revival of a Priorian tense logic. The view suggests a broader view according to which some types of representation have a determinate truth-value only relative to features about the subject who does the representing. If this view is right, successful semantic representation requires an eye on our own position in the world.

Pragmatists have traditionally been enemies of representationalism but friends of naturalism, when naturalism is understood to pertain to human subjects, in the sense of Hume and Nietzsche. In this volume Huw Price presents his distinctive version of this traditional combination, as delivered in his Rene Descartes Lectures at Tilburg University in 2008. Price contrasts his view with other contemporary forms of philosophical naturalism, comparing it with other pragmatist and neo-pragmatist views such as those of Robert Brandom and Simon Blackburn. Linking their different 'expressivist' programmes, Price argues for a radical global expressivism that combines key elements from both. With Paul Horwich and Michael Williams, Brandom and Blackburn respond to Price in new essays. Price replies in the closing essay, emphasising links between his views and those of Wilfrid Sellars. The volume will be of great interest to advanced students of philosophy of language and metaphysics.

A team of leading philosophers presents original work on theories of parthood and of location. Topics covered include how we ought to axiomatise our mereology, whether we can reduce mereological relations to identity or to locative relations, whether Mereological Essentialism is true, different ways in which entities persist through space, time, spacetime, and even hypertime, conflicting intuitions we have about space, and what mereology and propositions can tell us about one another. The breadth and accessibility of the papers make this volume an excellent introduction for those not yet working on these topics. Further, the papers contain important contributions to these central areas of metaphysics, and thus are essential reading for anyone working in the field.

Should philosophy of language use experimental methods, or can it be pursued in the armchair? Advances in Experimental Philosophy of Language represents a balanced variety of positions on this extensively discussed question. In the first collection of its kind, leading experts in the field present a number of different perspectives on the relevance of experimental methods in philosophy of language, ranging from complete dismissals of traditional methods to defences of armchair approaches. As well as exploring possible novel experimental techniques, Advances in Experimental Philosophy of Language evaluates the philosophical relevance of existing experimental results and presents new data from new experimental studies. For scholars looking to stay ahead of the latest developments and trends in the philosophy of language, this important contribution to the field brings the reader up-to-date.

By tracing the traditional progression of rhetoric from the Greek Sophists to contemporary theorists, this textbook gives students a conceptual framework for evaluating and practicing persuasive writing and speaking in a wide range of settings and in both written and visual media. The book's expansive historical purview illustrates how persuasive public discourse performs essential social functions and shapes our daily worlds, drawing on the ideas of some of history's greatest thinkers and theorists. The seventh edition includes greater attention to non-Western rhetorics, feminist rhetorics, the rhetoric of science, and European and American critical theory. Known for its clear writing style and contemporary examples throughout, The History and Theory of Rhetoric emphasizes the relevance of rhetoric to today's students. This revised edition serves as a core textbook for rhetoric courses in both English and communication programs covering both the historical tradition of rhetoric and contemporary rhetoric studies. This edition includes an instructor's manual and practice quizzes for students at www.routledge.com/cw/herrick

By tracing the traditional progression of rhetoric from the Greek Sophists to contemporary theorists, this textbook gives students a conceptual framework for evaluating and practicing persuasive writing and speaking in a wide range of settings and in both written and visual media. The book's expansive historical purview illustrates how persuasive public discourse performs essential social functions and shapes our daily worlds, drawing on the ideas of some of history's greatest thinkers and theorists. The seventh edition includes greater attention to non-Western rhetorics, feminist rhetorics, the rhetoric of science, and European and American critical theory. Known for its clear writing style and contemporary examples throughout, The History and Theory of Rhetoric emphasizes the relevance of rhetoric to today's students. This revised edition serves as a core textbook for rhetoric courses in both English and communication programs covering both the historical tradition of rhetoric and contemporary rhetoric studies. This edition includes an instructor's manual and practice quizzes for students at www.routledge.com/cw/herrick

Anthony Everett defends the commonsense view that there are no such things as fictional people, places, and things. More precisely he develops and defends a pretense theoretic account on which there are no such things as fictional objects and our talk and thought that purports to be about them takes place within the scope of a pretense. Nevertheless we may mistakenly suppose there are fictional objects because we mistake the fact that certain utterances count as true within the pretense, and convey veridical information about the real world, for the genuine truth of those utterances. In the first half of The Nonexistent an account of this form is motivated, developed in detail, and defended from objections. The second half of the book then argues against fictional realism, the view that we should accept fictional objects into our ontology. First it is argued that the standard arguments offered for fictional realism all fail. Then a series of problems are raised for fictional realism. The upshot of these is that fictional realism provides an inadequate account of a significant range of talk and thought that purports to concern fictional objects. In contrast the pretense theoretic account developed earlier provides a very straightforward and attractive account of these cases and of fictional character discourse in general. Overall, Everett argues that we gain little but lose much by accepting fictional realism.

To clarify and facilitate our inquiries we need to define a disquotational truth predicate that we are directly licensed to apply not only to our own sentences as we use them now, but also to other speakers' sentences and our own sentences as we used them in the past. The conventional wisdom is that there can be no such truth predicate. For it appears that the only instances of the disquotational pattern that we are directly licensed to accept are those that define "is true" for our own sentences as we use them now. Gary Ebbs shows that this appearance is illusory. He constructs an account of words that licenses us to rely not only on formal (spelling-based) identifications of our own words, but also on our non-deliberative practical identifications of other speakers' words and of our own words as we used them in the past. To overturn the conventional wisdom about disquotational truth, Ebbs argues, we need only combine this account of words with our disquotational definitions of truth for sentences as we use them now. The result radically transforms our understanding of truth and related topics, including anti-individualism, self-knowledge, and the intersubjectivity of logic.

The problem of the unity of the proposition is almost as old as philosophy itself, and was one of the central themes of early analytical philosophy, greatly exercising the minds of Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein, and Ramsey. The problem is how propositions or meanings can be simultaneously unities (single things) and complexes, made up of parts that are autonomous of the positions they happen to fill in any given proposition. The problem has been associated with numerous paradoxes and has motivated general theories of thought and meaning, but has eluded any consensual resolution; indeed, the problem is sometimes thought to be wholly erroneous, a result of atomistic assumptions we should reject. In short, the problem has been thought to be of merely historical interest. Collins argues that the problem is very real and poses a challenge to any theory of linguistic meaning. He seeks to resolve the problem by laying down some minimal desiderata on a solution and presenting a uniquely satisfying account. The first part of the book surveys and rejects extant 'solutions' and dismissals of the problem from (especially) Frege and Russell, and a host of more contemporary thinkers, including Davidson and Dummett. The book's second part offers a novel solution based upon the properties of a basic syntactic principle called 'Merge', which may be said to create objects inside objects, thus showing how unities can be both single things but also made up of proper parts. The solution is defended from both philosophical and linguistic perspectives. The overarching ambition of the book, therefore, is to strengthen the ties between current linguistics and contemporary philosophy of language in a way that is genuinely sensitive to the history of both fields.

This dictionary provides a full and authoritative guide to the meanings of the terms, concepts, and theories employed in pragmatics, the study of language in use.
Pragmatics is a central subject in linguistics and philosophy and an increasingly important topic in fields such as cognitive science, informatics, artificial intelligence, neuroscience, and pathology. Its rapid development has produced new theories, methods, approaches, and schools of thought. These in turn have resulted in a vast vocabulary of new terms and in modified meanings for existing terms. Such terms help advance research and facilitate discussion, but they can also cause confusion and act as barriers to understanding and communication. Yan Huang defines and explains them all, from the most traditional to the most recent. Covering every branch of research and all theoretical approaches and with the needs of students and researchers firmly in mind he writes each entry in the simplest possible terms for the subject in question, gives references to relevant seminal and recent work, provides numerous cross-references to related entries, and shows how each term and concept is applied and used in different contexts.
Written by one of the leading experts in the field, Professor Huang's dictionary, the first of its kind ever published, will be a much valued resource for students and researchers in every aspect of the field.

New Essays on Singular Thought presents ten new, specially written essays on an issue central to philosophy of mind, language, and perception: the nature of our thought about the external world.
Is our thought about objects in the world always descriptive, mediated by our conceptions of those objects? Or is some of our thought somehow more direct, singular, associated more intimately with our perceptual, linguistic, and socially mediated relations to them? Leading experts in the field contributing to this volume make the case for the singularity of thought and debate a broad spectrum of issues it raises, including the structure of singular thought, the role of acquaintance in perception- and communication-based reference, the semantics of fictional and mythical terms, and the merits of epistemic, cognitive, and linguistic conditions on singular thought. Their essays explore new directions for future research and will be an important resource for anyone working at the interface of semantics and mental representation.

A generic statement is a type of generalization that is made by asserting that a "kind" has a certain property. For example we might hear that marshmallows are sweet. Here, we are talking about the "kind" marshmallow and assert that individual instances of this kind have the property of being sweet. Almost all of our common sense knowledge about the everyday world is put in terms of generic statements. What can make these generic sentences be true even when there are exceptions? A mass term is one that does not "divide its reference;" the word water is a mass term; the word dog is a count term. In a certain vicinity, one can count and identity how many dogs there are, but it doesn't make sense to do that for water--there just is water present. The philosophical literature is rife with examples concerning how a thing can be composed of a mass, such as a statue being composed of clay. Both generic statements and mass terms have led philosophers, linguists, semanticists, and logicians to search for theories to accommodate these phenomena and relationships.
The contributors to this interdisciplinary volume study the nature and use of generics and mass terms. Noted researchers in the psychology of language use material from the investigation of human performance and child-language learning to broaden the range of options open for formal semanticists in the construction of their theories, and to give credence to some of their earlier postulations--for instance, concerning different types of predications that are available for true generics and for the role of object recognitions in the development of count vs. mass terms. Relevant data also is described by investigating the ways children learn these sorts of linguistic items: children can learn how to sue generic statements correctly at an early age, and children are adept at individuating objects and distinguishing them from the stuff of which they are made also at an early age.

Language, Cognition, and Human Nature collects together for the first time Steven Pinker's most influential scholarly work on language and cognition. Pinker is a highly eminent cognitive scientist, and his research emphasizes the importance of language and its connections to cognition, social relationships, child development, human evolution, and theories of human nature. The thirteen essays in this eclectic collection span Pinker's thirty-year career, ranging over topics such as language acquisitions, visual cognition, the meaning and syntax of verbs, regular and irregular phenomena in language and their implications for the mechanisms of cognition, and the social psychology of direct and indirect speech. Each outlines a major theory - such as evolution, or nature vs. nurture - or takes up an argument with other prominent scholars such as Stephen Jay Gould, Noam Chomsky, or Richard Dawkins. Featuring a new introduction by Pinker that discusses his books and scholarly work, this book represents a major contribution to the field of cognitive science, by one of the field's leading thinkers.

A familiar trope of cognitive science, linguistics, and the philosophy of psychology over the past forty or so years has been the idea of the mind as a modular system-that is, one consisting of functionally specialized subsystems responsible for processing different classes of input, or handling specific cognitive tasks like vision, language, logic, music, and so on. However, one of the major achievements of neuroscience has been the discovery that the brain has incredible powers of renewal and reorganization. This "neuroplasticity," in its various forms, has challenged many of the orthodox conceptions of the mind which originally led cognitive scientists to postulate hardwired mental modules. This book examines how such discoveries have changed the way we think about the structure of the mind. It contends that the mind is more supple than prevailing theories in cognitive science and artificial intelligence acknowledge. The book uses language as a test case. The claim that language is cognitively special has often been understood as the claim that it is underpinned by dedicated-and innate-cognitive mechanisms. Zerilli offers a fresh take on how our linguistic abilities could be domain-general: enabled by a composite of very small and redundant cognitive subsystems, few if any of which are likely to be specialized for language. In arguing for this position, however, the book takes seriously various cases suggesting that language dissociates from other cognitive faculties. Accessibly written, The Adaptable Mind is a fascinating account of neuroplasticity, neural reuse, the modularity of mind, the evolution of language, and faculty psychology.

Michael Forster here presents a ground-breaking study of German philosophy of language in the nineteenth century (and beyond). His previous book, After Herder, showed that the eighteenth-century philosopher J.G. Herder played the fundamental role in founding modern philosophy of language, including new theories of interpretation ('hermeneutics') and translation, as well as in establishing such whole new disciplines concerned with language as anthropology and linguistics. This new volume reveals that Herder's ideas continued to have a profound impact on such important nineteenth-century thinkers as Friedrich Schlegel (the leading German Romantic), Wilhelm von Humboldt (a founder of linguistics), and G.W.F. Hegel (the leading German Idealist). Forster shows that the most valuable ideas about language in this tradition were continuous with Herder's, whereas deviations from the latter that occurred tended to be inferior. This book not only sets the historical record straight but also champions the Herderian tradition for its philosophical depth and breadth.

The Chomskian revolution in linguistics gave rise to a new orthodoxy about mind and language. Michael Devitt throws down a provocative challenge to that orthodoxy. What is linguistics about? What role should linguistic intuitions play in constructing grammars? What is innate about language? Is there a 'language faculty'? These questions are crucial to our developing understanding of ourselves; Michael Devitt offers refreshingly original answers. He argues that linguistics is about linguistic reality and is not part of psychology; that linguistic rules are not represented in the mind; that speakers are largely ignorant of their language; that speakers' intuitions do not reflect information supplied by the language faculty and are not the main evidence for grammars; that the rules of 'Universal Grammar' are largely, if not entirely, innate structure rules of thought; indeed, that there is little or nothing to the language faculty. Devitt's controversial theses will prove highly stimulating to anyone working on language and the mind.

Kathrin Koslicki offers an analysis of ordinary material objects, those material objects to which we take ourselves to be committed in ordinary, scientifically informed discourse. She focuses particularly on the question of how the parts of such objects are related to the wholes which they compose.
Many philosophers today find themselves in the grip of an exceedingly deflationary conception of what it means to be an object. According to this conception, any plurality of objects, no matter how disparate or gerrymandered, itself composes an object, even if the objects in question fail to exhibit interesting similarities, internal unity, cohesion, or causal interaction amongst each other.
This commitment to initially counterintuitive objects follows from the belief that no principled set of criteria is available by means of which to distinguish intuitively gerrymandered objects from commonsensical ones; the project of this book is to persuade the reader that systematic principles can be found by means of which composition can be restricted, and hence that we need not embrace this deflationary approach to the question of what it means to be an object.
To this end, a more full-blooded neo-Aristotelian account of parthood and composition is developed according to which objects are structured wholes: it is integral to the existence and identity of an object, on this conception, that its parts exhibit a certain manner of arrangement. This structure-based conception of parthood and composition is explored in detail, along with some of its historical precursors as well as some of its contemporary competitors.