Critical Pragmatics develops three ideas: language is a way of doing things with words; meanings of phrases and contents of utterances derive ultimately from human intentions; and language combines with other factors to allow humans to achieve communicative goals. In this book, Kepa Korta and John Perry explain why critical pragmatics provides a coherent picture of how parts of language study fit together within the broader picture of human thought and action. They focus on issues about singular reference, that is, talk about particular things, places or people, which have played a central role in the philosophy of language for more than a century. They argue that attention to the 'reflexive' or 'utterance-bound' contents of utterances sheds new light on these old problems. Their important study proposes a new approach to pragmatics and should be of wide interest to philosophers of language and linguists.

Imposters are third person DPs that are used to refer to the speaker/writer or addressee, such as : (i) Your humble servant finds the time before our next encounter very long. (ii) This reporter thinks that the current developments are extraordinary. (iii) Daddy will be back before too long. (iv) The present author finds the logic of the reply faulty. This volume explores verbal and pronominal agreement with imposters from a cross-linguistic perspective. The central questions for any given language are: (a) How do singular and plural imposters agree with the verb? (b) When a pronoun has an imposter antecedent, what are the phi-features of the pronoun? The volume reveals a remarkable degree of variation in the answers to these questions, but also reveals some underlying generalizations. The contributions describe imposters in Bangla, Spanish, Albanian, Indonesian, Italian, French, Romanian, Mandarin and Icelandic.

Preface This book is about semantics and logic. More specifically, it is about the semantics and logic of natural language; and, even more specifically than that, it is about a particular way of dealing with those subjects, known as Discourse Representation Theory, or DRT. DRT is an approach towards natural language semantics which, some thirteen years ago, arose out of attempts to deal with two distinct problems. The first of those was the semantic puzzle that had been brought to contempo rary attention by Geach's notorious "donkey sentences" - sentences like If Pedro owns some donkey, he beats it, in which the anaphoric connection we perceive between the indefinite noun phrase some donkey and the pronoun it may seem to conflict with the existential meaning of the word some. The second problem had to do with tense and aspect. Some languages, for instance French and the other Romance languages, have two morphologically distinct past tenses, a simple past (the French Passe Simple) and a continuous past (the French Imparfait). To articulate precisely what the difference between these tenses is has turned out to be surprisingly difficult."

This book presents a comprehensive description of collocation, covering both the theoretical and practical background and the implications and applications of the concept as language model and analytical tool. It provides a definitive survey of currently available techniques and a detailed description of their implementation.

There are in this volume sentences written as long ago/ as 1957. What was then projected as the third part of a modest discussion of then current issues has, through some fifteen revisions, now expanded into its own three parts. Of the project as originally conceived, the first part, itself grown too large, was published (prematurely, I now believe) in 1965 (Stratification of Behaviour). The second part, which was to be on language proper, was abandoned around 1967; such materials on language as I need for the present work are now mostly compressed into Chapter 1, with some scatterings retained in Chapters 2 and 14. My scheme discovered problems with which I have been much preoccupied. I have been less enjoyably delayed by missteps. Additions were put on and the renovations have been incessant. Even in the course of my ultimate revisions, I ran into slippery stretches and soft spots I could only gesture at repairing. But now time is running out and my energy is ebbing, and I must allow the work to come to its conclusion, with reservations certainly and not without a sense of despair. If the reception of this volume warrants, the two following parts will be wound up in what I hope may be fairly short order.

Understanding Pragmatics takes an interdisciplinary approach to provide an accessible introduction to linguistic pragmatics. This book discusses how the meaning of utterances can only be understood in relation to overall cultural, social and interpersonal contexts, as well as to culture specific conventions and the speech events in which they are embedded. From a cross-linguistic and cross-cultural perspective, this book: debates the core issues of pragmatics such as speech act theory, conversational implicature, deixis, gesture, interaction strategies, ritual communication, phatic communion, linguistic relativity, ethnography of speaking, ethnomethodology, conversation analysis, languages and social classes, and linguistic ideologies incorporates examples from a broad variety of different languages and cultures takes an innovative and transdisciplinary view of the field showing linguistic pragmatics has its predecessor in other disciplines such as philosophy, psychology, ethology, ethnology, sociology and the political sciences. Written by an experienced teacher and researcher, this introductory textbook is essential reading for all students studying pragmatics.

The theory of language acquisition is a young but increasingly active field. Language Acquisition and Syntactic Theory presents one of the first detailed studies of comparative syntax acquisition. It is informed by the view that linguists and acquisitionists are essentially working on the same problem, that of explaining grammar learnability. The author takes cross-linguistic data from child language as evidence for recent proposals in syntactic theory. Developments in the structure of children's sentences during the first few years of life are traced to changes in the setting of specific grammatical parameters. Some surprising differences between the early child grammars of French and English are uncovered, differences that can only be explained on the basis of subtle distinctions in inflectional structure. This motivates the author's claim that functional or nonthematic categories are represented in the grammars of very young children. The book also explores the relationship between acquisition and diachronic change in French and English. It is argued that findings in acquisition, when viewed from a parameter setting perspective, provide answers to important questions arising in the study of language change. The book promises to be of interest to all those involved in the formal, psychological or historical study of linguistic knowledge.

THE PLACE OF PHILOSOPHY IN COGNITIVE SCIENCE During the last few years, many books have been published and many meetings have been held on Cognitive Science. A cursory review of their contents shows such a diversity of topics and approaches that one might well infer that there are no genuine criteria for classifying a paper or a lecture as a contribution to Cognitive Science. It is as though the only criterion is to have appeared in a book or in the programme of a meeting or title we can find the expression " . . . Cognitive Science" in whose name or something like that. Perhaps this situation is due to the (relative) youth of the field, which is seeking its own identity, still involved in a process of formation and consolidation within the scientific community; but there are actually deep disagreements about how a science of the mind should be worked out, including how to understand its own subject, that is, "the mind. "While for some the term makes reference to a set of phenomena impossible to grasp by any scientific approach, for others "the mind" would be a sort of myth, and the mental terms await elimination by other more handy and empirically tractable terms.

This volume presents new work by leading researchers on central themes in the study of event structure: the nature and representation of telicity, change, and the notion of state. The book advances our understanding of these aspects of event structure by combining foundational semantic research with a series of case studies from a variety of languages. The book begins with an overview of the theoretical issues central to the volume, along with a brief presentation of the remaining chapters and the points of contact between them. The chapters, developed within several different theoretical perspectives, promote cross-theory as well as cross-linguistic comparison. The work will interest scholars and advanced students of morphology, syntax, semantics, and their interfaces. It will also appeal to researchers in philosophy, psycholinguistics, and language acquisition who are interested in the notions of telicity, change, and stativity.

This book integrates the research being carried out in the field of lexical semantics in linguistics with the work on knowledge representation and lexicon design in computational linguistics. It provides a stimulating and unique discussion between the computational perspective of lexical meaning and the concerns of the linguist for the semantic description of lexical items in the context of syntactic descriptions.

Interrogative Phrases and the Syntax-Semantics Interface starts by analyzing the interpretation of interrogative phrases in single and multiple constituent questions, including their interpretation under adverbs of quantification. The results are then put to work in a novel approach to some of the constraints on dependencies between fronted interrogative phrases and the associated gaps: superiority, weak crossover, as well as the so-called weak islands' (the WH-island, the negative island and the Factive Island). It is argued that the possibility of fronting an interrogative phrase out of these configurations is determined by a semantic/pragmatic condition on questions, which requires them to be answerable. The analysis is worked out principally on Romanian, a language which allows multiple wh-fronting. The results are then extended to English. Audience: Researchers and students in syntax, semantics and their interface, as well as linguists studying the relation between the acceptability of sentences and the larger discourse context.

Like the journal TOPOl, the TOPOl Library is based on the assumption that philosophy is a lively, provocative, delightful activity, which constantly challenges our inherited habits, painstakingly elaborates on how things could be different, in other stories, in counterfactual situations, in alternative possible worlds. Whatever its ideology, whether with the intent of uncovering a truer structure of reality or of shooting our anxiety, of exposing myths or of following them through, the outcome of philosophical activity is always the destabilizing, unsettling generation of doubts, of objections, of criticisms. It follows that this activity is intrinsically a dialogue, that philosophy is first and foremost philosophical discussion, that it requires bringing out conflicting points of view, paying careful, sympathetic attention to their structure, and using this dialectic to articulate one's approach, to make it richer, more thoughtful, more open to variation and play. And it follows that the spirit which one brings to this activity must be one of tolerance, of always suspecting one's own blindness and consequently looking with unbiased eye in every comer, without fearing to pass a (fallible) judgment on what is there but also without failing to show interest and respect.

This book is a cross-linguistic examination of the different grammatical means languages employ to represent a general set of semantic relations between clauses. The investigations focus on ways of combining clauses other than through relative and complement clause constructions. These span a number of types of semantic linking. Three, for example, describe varieties of consequence - cause, result, and purpose - which may be illustrated in English by, respectively: Because John has been studying German for years, he speaks it well; John has been studying German for years, thus he speaks it well; and John has been studying German for years, in order that he should speak it well. Syntactic descriptions of languages provide a grammatical analysis of clause types. The chapters in this book add the further dimension of semantics, generally in the form of focal and supporting clauses, the former referring to the central activity or state of the biclausal linking; and the latter to the clause attached to it. The supporting clause may set out the temporal milieu for the focal clause or specify a condition or presupposition for it or a preliminary statement of it, as in Although John has been studying German for years (the supporting clause), he does not speak it well (the focal clause). Professor Dixon's extensive opening discussion is followed by fourteen case studies of languages ranging from Korean and Kham to Iquito and Ojibwe. The book's concluding synthesis is provided by Professor Aikhenvald.

Making pragmatics accessible to a wide range of students and instructors without dumbing down the content of the field, this text for language professionals:

• raises awareness and increases knowledge and understanding of how human beings use language in real situations to engage in social action
• fosters the ability to think critically about language data and use
• helps readers develop the ability to "do pragmatics"

The book features careful explanations of topics and concepts that are often difficult for uninitiated readers, a wealth of examples, mostly of natural speech from collected data sources, and attention to the needs of readers who are non-native speakers of English, with non-Western perspectives offered when possible. Suggested Readings, Tasks, Discussion Questions, and Data Analysis sections involve readers in extending and applying what they are reading. The exercises push readers to recall and synthesize the content, elicit relevant personal experiences and other sources of information, and engage in changing their own interactional strategies. The activities go beyond a predictable framework to invite readers to carry out real life observations and experiment to make doing pragmatics a nonjudgmental everyday practice.

Conditionals, Paradox, and Probability brings together fifteen original essays by experts in philosophy and linguistics. These specially written chapters draw on themes from the work of Dorothy Edgington, the first woman to hold a chair in philosophy at the University of Oxford. The contributors to this volume focus on the key topics to which Edgington has made many important contributions, including conditionals, vagueness, the paradox of knowability, and probability. Their insights will be of interest to philosophers, linguists, and psychologists working in philosophical logic, natural language semantics, and reasoning.

This book provides an in-depth typological account of the forms, functions, and histories of serial verb constructions. Serial verbs, in which several verbs combine to form a single predicate, describe what is conceptualized as a single event. The verbs in the construction have the same tense, aspect, mood, modality, and evidentiality values, cannot be negated or questioned separately, and usually share the same subject and object. They are a powerful means of portraying various facets of one event, and can express grammatical meanings such as aspect, direction, and causation, particularly in languages where few other means are available. In this volume, Alexandra Aikhenvald seeks to answer unresolved questions such as: What are the parameters of variation in serial verbs? How do serial verbs differ from other, superficially similar multi-verb constructions? How do serial verbs emerge, and what happens to them over time? What role do they play in the representation of event structure? The book uses an inductively-based framework for the analysis and draws on data from languages with different typological profiles and genetic affiliations. It will be of interest to researchers and students from a wide range of fields of linguistics, especially typology, anthropological linguistics, and language contact.

Academic Discourse and Global Publishing offers a coherent argument for changes in published academic writing over the past 50 years. Demonstrating how published writing represents academics' decisions about how best to present their work, their readers and themselves in the global context of a rapidly shifting university system, this book provides: An up-to-date reference on contemporary topics in specialist discourse analysis, current research methodologies and innovative approaches to the study of writing; New insights into conceptual and theoretical issues related to the analysis of academic writing; An accessible introduction to diachronic research in EAP and a case for the value of the diachronic study of texts using corpus techniques; A clear overview of how texts work in interaction and how they relate to evolving institutional and political contexts; Links between the practices of different disciplines and the environments in which they operate, as well as observations on the ways in which they differ. This volume is essential reading for students and researchers of EAP/ESP and Applied Linguistics and will also be of significant interest to academics and students looking to have their work published.

In our everyday speech we represent events and situations, but we also provide commentary on these representations, situating ourselves and others relative to what we have to say and situating what we say in larger contexts. The present volume examines this activity of discourse marking from an enunciative perspective, providing the first English-language study of the highly influential Theory of Enunciative and Predicative Operations. This semantic/pragmatic theory is popular among academics who specialize in linguistics, discourse analysis, translation studies and didactics in France, but has not yet been widely adopted elsewhere. The tools of this theory are applied to a variety of specific discourse markers in contemporary English and semantic hypotheses are tested using the data-based approach of corpus linguistics. This book therefore provides an English-speaking readership with the keys to understand the theory underlying the author's analysis of a selection of markers ('anyway', 'indeed', 'in fact', 'yet', 'still', 'like' and 'I think'). This book will provide a valuable resource for students and researchers in linguistics with an interest in discourse markers, natural language argumentation, formal semantics, the interfaces between syntax, semantics and pragmatics, linguistic theorisation and French - or "poststructural" - models of discourse analysis.

Corpus Linguistics for Pragmatics provides a practical and comprehensive introduction to the growing field of corpus pragmatics. Taking a hands-on approach to showcase the applications of corpora in the exploration of core topics within pragmatics, this book: * covers six key areas of corpus-pragmatic research including speech acts, deixis, pragmatic markers, evaluation, conversational structure, and multimodality; * demonstrates the use of freely-available corpora, corpus interfaces and corpus analysis tools to conduct original pragmatic analyses; * is accompanied by an e-resource which hosts multimodal data sets for additional exercises. Featuring case studies and practical tasks within each chapter, Corpus Linguistics for Pragmatics is an essential guide for students and researchers studying or conducting their own corpus-based research in pragmatics.

Semantics for Reasons is a book about what we mean when we talk about reasons. It not only brings together the theory of reasons and natural language semantics in original ways but also sketches out a litany of implications for metaethics and the philosophy of normativity. In their account of how the language of reasons works, Bryan R. Weaver and Kevin Scharp propose and defend a view called Question Under Discussion (QUD) Reasons Contextualism. They use this view to argue for a series of novel positions on the ontology of reasons, indexical facts, the reasons-to-be- rational debate, moral reasons, and the reasons-first approach.