Diminutive constructions in English provides an analysis of form and meaning of English diminutives with selected suffixes and suffix combinations: -let, -ling, -ette, -er+ -s, -kin + -s, and -ie+ -kin +-s. The empirical study is done within the framework of Construction Grammar, Construction Morphology as depicted by Geert Booij (2010; 2013), and a Construction-Grammar-based approach to translation proposed by Izabela Szymanska (2011). On the basis of an exhaustive corpus of language material, the author proposes new schemas for English diminutives and related formations. Moreover, the work provides supporting evidence for the distinction of analytic A + N constructions as a valid type of diminutive formation in the English language.

This is an introduction and guide to the key thinkers in the study of the philosophy of language, from Gottlob Frege to Ludwig Wittgenstein and Jacques Derrida. Philosophers have raised and struggled with questions relating to human language for more than 2000 years. "Philosophy of Language: The Key Thinkers" offers a comprehensive historical overview of this fascinating field. Thirteen specially commissioned essays introduce and explore the contributions of those philosophers who have shaped the subject and the central issues and arguments therein. Philosophical questions relating to language have been subjected to particularly intense scrutiny since the work of Gottlob Frege in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This book concentrates on the development of philosophical views on language over the last 130 years, offering coverage of all the leading thinkers in the field including Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein, Austin, Quine, Chomsky, Grice, Davidson, Dummett and Kripke. Crucially the book demonstrates how the ideas and arguments of these key thinkers have contributed to our understanding of the theoretical account of language use and its central concepts. Ideal for undergraduate students, the book lays the necessary foundations for a complete and thorough understanding of this fascinating subject. "The Key Thinkers" series is aimed at undergraduate students and offers clear, concise and accessible edited guides to the key thinkers in each of the central topics in philosophy. Each book offers a comprehensive overview of the major thinkers who have contributed to the historical development of a key area of philosophy, providing a survey of their major works and the evolution of the central ideas in that area.

The primary objective of An Inquiry into the Nature of Aesthetic Theory in Its Relation to Theory of Knowledge in Kant's Critical Philosophy is to investigate Kant's aesthetic theory and its problematic relation to theory of knowledge in his transcendental philosophy. In the Critique of Judgment, Kant constructs his aesthetic theory by arguing that the aesthetic experience is based on a certain type of feeling, namely, the feeling of pleasure, rather than a concept. He grounds such a feeling on the aesthetic judgment of reflection. In spite of its nonconceptual and subjective characteristic, an aesthetic reflective judgment still has a claim to be universally valid. Here, the feeling of pleasure in beautiful is produced by the free harmonious relation between the imagination and the understanding. Judgment, in its reflective employment, does not determine its object but determines the feeling of pleasure in the judging subject. On the other hand, the categories, as pure concepts of the understanding, carry nearly all the weight in his theory of knowledge presented in the Critique of Pure Reason. The imagination, in this case, is strictly bound up by the rules that are imposed by the concepts of the understanding. By this way, judgment, as a cognitive faculty, determines its object and gains its objective validity. In this context, this book discusses the nature of Kant's aesthetic theory and the components that constitute a pure aesthetic judgment of reflection and attempts to clarify its proper place in critical philosophy regarding his theory of knowledge.

The Critical Imagination is a study of metaphor, imaginativeness, and criticism of the arts. Since the eighteenth century, many philosophers have argued that appreciating art is rewarding because it involves responding imaginatively to a work. Literary works can be interpreted in many ways; architecture can be seen as stately, meditative, or forbidding; and sensitive descriptions of art are often colourful metaphors: music can 'shimmer', prose can be 'perfumed', and a painter's colouring can be 'effervescent'. Engaging with art, like creating it, seems to offer great scope for imagination. Hume, Kant, Oscar Wilde, Roger Scruton, and others have defended variations on this attractive idea. In this book, James Grant critically examines it. The first half explains the role imaginativeness plays in criticism. To do this, Grant answers three questions that are of interest in their own right. First, what are the aims of criticism? Is the point of criticizing a work to evaluate it, to explain it, to modify our response to it, or something else? Second, what is it to appreciate art? Third, what is imaginativeness? He gives new answers to all three questions, and uses them to explain the role of imaginativeness in criticism. The book's second half focuses on metaphor. Why are some metaphors so effective? How do we understand metaphors? Are some thoughts expressible only in metaphor? Grant's answers to these questions go against much current thinking in the philosophy of language. He uses these answers to explain why imaginative metaphors are so common in art criticism. The result is a rigorous and original theory of metaphor, criticism, imaginativeness, and their interrelations.

First published in 1925, A Theory of Direct Realism is divided in two parts: the first part is an attempt to formulate a realistic theory of Perception and of the physical world, and the second part is an exposition of Hegelian idealism and its compatibility with realism. This book on direct realism will be of interest to students of philosophy, history and literature.

In Oughts and Thoughts, Anandi Hattiangadi provides an innovative response to the argument for meaning scepticism set out by Saul Kripke in Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language. Kripke asks what makes it the case that anybody ever means anything by any word, and argues that there are no facts of the matter as to what anybody ever means. Kripke's argument has inspired a lively and extended debate in the philosophy of language, as it raises some of the most fundamental issues in the field: namely, the reality, privacy, and normativity of meaning. Hattiangadi argues that in order to achieve the radical conclusion that there are no facts as to what a person means by a word, the sceptic must rely on the thesis that meaning is normative, and that this thesis fails. Since any 'sceptical solution' to the sceptical problem is irremediably incoherent, Hattiangadi concludes that there must be a fact of the matter about what we mean. In addition to providing an overview of the debate on meaning and content scepticism, Hattiangandi presents a detailed discussion of the contributions made by Simon Blackburn, Paul Boghossian, Robert Brandom, Fred Dretske, John McDowell, and Crispin Wright, among others, to the controversy surrounding Kripke's argument. The issues considered include the normativity of meaning and its relation to the normativity of moral judgments, reductive and non-reductive theories of meaning, deflationism about truth and meaning, and the privacy of meaning.

In this volume, international experts in negation provide a comprehensive overview of cross-linguistic and philosophical research in the field, as well as accounts of more recent results from experimental linguistics, psycholinguistics, and neuroscience. The volume adopts an interdisciplinary approach to a range of fundamental questions ranging from why negation displays so many distinct linguistic forms to how prosody and gesture participate in the interpretation of negative utterances. Following an introduction from the editors, the chapters are arranged in eight parts that explore, respectively, the fundamentals of negation; issues in syntax; the syntax-semantics interface; semantics and pragmatics; negative dependencies; synchronic and diachronic variation; the emergence and acquisition of negation; and experimental investigations of negation. The volume will be an essential reference for students and researchers across a wide range of disciplines, and will facilitate further interdisciplinary work in the field.

Between Logic and the World presents a theory of generic sentences and the kind-directed modes of thought they express. The theory closely integrates compositional semantics with metaphysics to solve the problem that generics pose: what do generics mean? Generic sentences are extremely simple, yet if there are patterns to be discerned in terms of which are true and which are false, these patterns are subtle and complex. Ravens are black, lions have manes, sea-turtles are long-lived, and bishops in chess move along diagonals. Statistical measures cannot do justice to the facts, but what else is there that at least has a hope of giving us insight into what we are capturing across so many domains? Bernhard Nickel argues that generics are the top of a fundamentally explanatory iceberg. By focusing on blackness in ravens and manes in lions, for instance, we can place the kinds into a framework structured by explanatory considerations. Between Logic and the World argues that this explanatory framework is deeply intertwined with the semantics of the language we use to express them, and in giving its integrated semantic and metaphysical theory of generics, it aims to solve old puzzles and draw attention to new phenomena.

Robert Brandom's rationalist philosophy of language, expounded in his highly influential Making It Explicit, has been the subject of intense scrutiny and debate, establishing him as one of the leading philosophers of his generation. In A Spirit of Trust, Brandom presents the fruits of his thirty-year engagement with Hegel. He submits that the Phenomenology of Spirit holds not only many lessons for today's philosophy of language, but also a moral lesson much needed in today's increasingly polarized societies, in the form of a postmodern ethics of trust. In this outstanding collection, leading philosophers examine and assess A Spirit of Trust. The twelve specially commissioned chapters explore topics including: negation and truth empirical and speculative concepts experience conflict and recognition varieties of idealism premodern ethical life and modern alienation a postmodern ethics of trust. Reading Brandom: On A Spirit of Trust is essential reading for all students and scholars of Brandom's work and those in philosophy of language. It will also be important reading for those studying nineteenth-century philosophy, particularly Hegel and the Phenomenology of Spirit.

This volume attempts to solve a grave problem about critical self-reflection. The worry is that we critical thinkers are all in "epistemic bad faith" in light of what psychology tells us. After all, the research shows not merely that we are bad at detecting "ego-threatening" thoughts a la Freud. It also indicates that we are ignorant of even our ordinary thoughts-e.g., reasons for our moral judgments of others (Haidt 2001), and even mundane reasons for buying one pair of stockings over another! (Nisbett & Wilson 1977) However, reflection on one's thoughts requires knowing what those thoughts are in the first place. So if ignorance is the norm, why attempt self-reflection? The activity would just display naivety about psychology. Yet while respecting all the data, this book argues that, remarkably, we are sometimes infallible in our self-discerning judgments. Even so, infallibility does not imply indubitability, and there is no Cartesian ambition to provide a "foundation" for empirical knowledge. The point is rather to explain how self-reflection as a rational activity is possible.

This book offers a comprehensive account of logic that addresses fundamental issues concerning the nature and foundations of the discipline. The authors claim that these foundations can not only be established without the need for strong metaphysical assumptions, but also without hypostasizing logical forms as specific entities. They present a systematic argument that the primary subject matter of logic is our linguistic interaction rather than our private reasoning and it is thus misleading to see logic as revealing "the laws of thought". In this sense, fundamental logical laws are implicit to our "language games" and are thus more similar to social norms than to the laws of nature. Peregrin and Svoboda also show that logical theories, despite the fact that they rely on rules implicit to our actual linguistic practice, firm up these rules and make them explicit. By carefully scrutinizing the project of logical analysis, the authors demonstrate that logical rules can be best seen as products of the so called reflective equilibrium. They suggest that we can profit from viewing languages as "inferential landscapes" and logicians as "geographers" who map them and try to pave safe routes through them. This book is an essential resource for scholars and researchers engaged with the foundations of logical theories and the philosophy of language.

The limit of language is one of the most pervasive notions found in Wittgenstein's work, both in his early Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and his later writings. Moreover, the idea of a limit of language is intimately related to important scholarly debates on Wittgenstein's philosophy, such as the debate between the so-called traditional and resolute interpretations, Wittgenstein's stance on transcendental idealism, and the philosophical import of Wittgenstein's latest work On Certainty. This collection includes thirteen original essays that provide a comprehensive overview of the various ways in which Wittgenstein appeals to the limit of language at different stages of his philosophical development. The essays connect the idea of a limit of language to the most important themes discussed by Wittgenstein-his conception of logic and grammar, the method of philosophy, the nature of the subject, and the foundations of knowledge-as well as his views on ethics, aesthetics, and religion. The essays also relate Wittgenstein's thought to his contemporaries, including Carnap, Frege, Heidegger, Levinas, and Moore.

This book carries forward the discourse on the mind's engagement with the world. It reviews the semantic and metaphysical debates around internalism and externalism, the location of content and the indeterminacy of meaning in language. The volume analyzes the writings of Jackson, Chomsky, Putnam, Quine, Bilgrami and others, to reconcile opposing theories of language and the mind. It ventures into Cartesian ontology and Fregean semantics to understand how mental content becomes world-oriented in our linguistic communication. Further, the author explores the liaison between the mind and the world from the phenomenological perspective, particularly, Husserl's linguistic turn and Heidegger's intersubjective entreaty for Dasein. The book conceives of thought as a biological and socio-linguistic product which engages with the mind-world question through the conceptual and causal apparatuses of language. A major intervention in the field of philosophy of language, this book will be useful for scholars and researchers interested in philosophy, phenomenology, epistemology and metaphysics.

David Lewis (1941-2001) was a celebrated and influential figure in analytic philosophy. When Lewis died, he left behind a large body of unpublished notes, manuscripts, and letters. This volume contains two longer manuscripts which Lewis had originally intended to turn into books, and thirty-one shorter items. The longer manuscripts are 'The Paradoxes of Time Travel', his David Gavin Young Lectures at the University of Adelaide, and 'Confirmation Theory', which is based on a graduate course on probability and logic that he gave at UCLA. Lewis's described his purposes in 'The Paradoxes of Time Travel' as being, `(1) to solve a philosophical problem hitherto largely ignored or casually mis-solved by philosophers […]; (2) to introduce the layman to various topics in metaphysics, since our problem turns out to connect with many more familiar ones; and (3) to show of several of my favorite doctrines and methods in metaphysics'. By contrast, 'Confirmation Theory' is a technical work in which Lewis aimed to present in a unified fashion what he considered to be the best from competing theories of confirmation. Lewis described the work as 'Mathematically self-contained, with proofs for the major theorems; but the mathematics is kept down to hairy high-school algebra'. The thirty-one shorter items cover such topics as causation, freedom of the will, probability, counterparts, reference, logic, value, and divine evil. They are included here both for their intrinsic philosophical interest and their historical value. This volume also contains an intellectual biography of the young David Lewis by the editors.

Originally published in 1985. This study concerns the problem of treating identity as a relation between an object and itself. It addresses the Russellian and Fregean solutions and goes on to present in the first part a surfacist account of belief-context ambiguity requiring neither differences in relative scope nor distinctions between sense and reference. The second part offers an account of negative existentials, necessity and identity-statements which resolves problems unlike the Russell-Frege analyses. This is a detailed work in linguistics and philosophy.

Originally published in 1973. This final collection of thought by founder of the New School for Social Research in New York, Horace M. Kallen, touches on topics from language to death and from freedom to value. The author's treatise explores his understanding of logic and existence.

Originally published in 1967. The common aim of all logical enquiry is to discover and analyse correctly the forms of valid argument. In this book concise expositions of traditional, Aristotelian logic and of modern systems of propositional and predicative logic show how far that aim has been achieved.

Originally published in 1985. This book is about a single famous line of argument, pioneered by Descartes and deployed to full effect by Kant. That argument was meant to refute scepticism once and for all, and make the world safe for science. 'I think, so I exist' is valid reasoning, but circular as proof. In similar vein, Kant argues from our having a science of geometry to Space being our contribution to experience: a different conclusion, arrived at by a similar fallacy. Yet these arguments do show something: that certain sets of opinions, if professed, show an inbuilt inconsistency. It is this second-strike capacity that has kept transcendental arguments going for so long. Attempts to re-build metaphysics by means of such transcendental reasoning have been debated. This book offers an introduction to the field, and ventures its own assessment, in non-technical language, without assuming previous training in logic or philosophy.

Language Isolates explores this fascinating group of languages that surprisingly comprise a third of the world's languages. Individual chapters written by experts on these languages examine the world's major language isolates by geographic regions, with up-to-date descriptions of many, including previously unrecorded language isolates. Each language isolate represents a unique lineage and a unique window on what is possible in human language, making this an essential volume for anyone interested in understanding the diversity of languages and the very nature of human language. Language Isolates is key reading for professionals and students in linguistics and anthropology.

Peirce's Speculative Grammar: Logic as Semiotics offers a comprehensive, philologically accurate, and exegetically ambitious developmental account of Peirce's theory of speculative grammar. The book traces the evolution of Peirce's grammatical writings from his early research on the classification of arguments in the 1860s up to the complex semiotic taxonomies elaborated in the first decade of the twentieth century. It will be of interest to academic specialists working on Peirce, the history of American philosophy and pragmatism, the philosophy of language, the history of logic, and semiotics.

Bertrand Russell and the Nature of Propositions offers the first book-length defence of the Multiple Relation Theory of Judgement (MRTJ). Although the theory was much maligned by Wittgenstein and ultimately rejected by Russell himself, Lebens shows that it provides a rich and insightful way to understand the nature of propositional content. In Part I, Lebens charts the trajectory of Russell's thought before he adopted the MRTJ. Part II reviews the historical story of the theory: What led Russell to deny the existence of propositions altogether? Why did the theory keep evolving throughout its short life? What role did G. F. Stout play in the evolution of the theory? What was Wittgenstein's concern with the theory, and, if we can't know what his concern was exactly, then what are the best contending hypotheses? And why did Russell give the theory up? In Part III, Lebens makes the case that Russell's concerns with the theory weren't worth its rejection. Moreover, he argues that the MRTJ does most of what we could want from an account of propositions at little philosophical cost. This book bridges the history of early analytic philosophy with work in contemporary philosophy of language. It advances a bold reading of the theory of descriptions and offers a new understanding of the role of Stout and the representation concern in the evolution of the MRTJ. It also makes a decisive contribution to philosophy of language by demonstrating the viability of a no-proposition theory of propositions.

First published in 1973, this is the first book on Paul Tillich in which a sustained attempt is made to sort out and evaluate the questions to which Tillich addresses himself in the crucial philosophical parts of his theological system. It is argued that despite the apparent simplicity in his interest in the 'question of being', Tillich in fact conceives of the ontological enterprise in a number of radically different ways in different contexts. Much of the author's work is devoted to the careful separation of these strands in his philosophical thought and to an exploration and assessment of the assumptions associated with them. This book will be of interest to readers of Tillich and philosophers who specialise in ontology and linguistics.

This book discusses the scope and development of the science of language evolution - a newly emergent field that investigates the origin of language. The book is addressed to audiences who are not professionally involved in science and presents the problems of language origins together with introductory information on such topics as the theory of evolution, elements of linguistic theory, the neural infrastructure of language or the signalling theory.

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.