Future Times, Future Tenses examines how the future is expressed by means of tense, aspect, and modality across a wide range of languages, among them French, Polish, Basque, Turkish, and West Greenlandic. From the present point of view, the future is not fixed: while there is arguably only one past, the future is largely open and/or indeterminate. Reference to the future has thus become one of the most hotly-debated topics in contemporary linguistics: the interactions of future tense with future time, and of future tense with the semantics of possible worlds, are crucial to any satisfactory account of temporal linguistics. This book considers and seeks a resolution to outstanding issues in the field by uniting linguistic and philosophical perspectives on future reference in natural language. Scholars from different parts of the world approach these issues from a variety of theoretical perspectives, including those of linguistic typology, formal semantics, pragmatics, and philosophy of language. In the process they question the very validity of the traditional notion of a specific marker for future tense. The book shows the close connections between linguistic, logical, metaphysical, ontological, and epistemological issues concerning the future and reveals the value of linking linguistic considerations of tense and aspect to philosophical approaches to modality and time.

Most of the time our utterances are automatically interpreted as speech acts: as assertions, conjectures and testimonies; as orders, requests and pleas; as threats, offers and promises. Surprisingly, the cognitive correlates of this essential component of human communication have received little attention. This book fills the gap by providing a model of the psychological processes involved in interpreting and understanding speech acts. The theory is framed in naturalistic terms and is supported by data on language development and on autism spectrum disorders. Mikhail Kissine does not presuppose any specific background and addresses a crucial pragmatic phenomenon from an interdisciplinary perspective. This is a valuable resource for academic researchers and graduate and undergraduate students in pragmatics, semantics, cognitive linguistics, psycholinguistics and philosophy of language.

Imperative sentences usually occur in speech acts such as orders, requests, and pleas. However, they are also used to give advice, and to grant permission, and are sometimes found in advertisements, good wishes and conditional constructions. Yet, the relationship between the form of imperatives, and the wide range of speech acts in which they occur, remains unclear, as do the ways in which semantic theory should handle imperatives. This book is the first to look systematically at both the data and the theory. The first part discusses data from a large set of languages, including many outside the Indo-European family, and analyses in detail the range of uses to which imperatives are put, paying particular attention to controversial cases. This provides the empirical background for the second part, where the authors offer an accessible, comprehensive and in-depth discussion of the major theoretical accounts of imperative semantics and pragmatics.

Imperative sentences usually occur in speech acts such as orders, requests, and pleas. However, they are also used to give advice, and to grant permission, and are sometimes found in advertisements, good wishes and conditional constructions. Yet, the relationship between the form of imperatives, and the wide range of speech acts in which they occur, remains unclear, as do the ways in which semantic theory should handle imperatives. This book is the first to look systematically at both the data and the theory. The first part discusses data from a large set of languages, including many outside the Indo-European family, and analyses in detail the range of uses to which imperatives are put, paying particular attention to controversial cases. This provides the empirical background for the second part, where the authors offer an accessible, comprehensive and in-depth discussion of the major theoretical accounts of imperative semantics and pragmatics.

Most of the time our utterances are automatically interpreted as speech acts: as assertions, conjectures and testimonies; as orders, requests and pleas; as threats, offers and promises. Surprisingly, the cognitive correlates of this essential component of human communication have received little attention. This book fills the gap by providing a model of the psychological processes involved in interpreting and understanding speech acts. The theory is framed in naturalistic terms and is supported by data on language development and on autism spectrum disorders. Mikhail Kissine does not presuppose any specific background and addresses a crucial pragmatic phenomenon from an interdisciplinary perspective. This is a valuable resource for academic researchers and graduate and undergraduate students in pragmatics, semantics, cognitive linguistics, psycholinguistics and philosophy of language.

This book, Utterance Interpretation and Cognitive Models, is a collection of papers that stems from the conference of the same name held at the Free University of Brussels in June 2006. Our main objective is to reconcile armchair theorising about the semantics-pragmatics interface with hypotheses about cognitive architecture. For that reason, the papers in the collection place some of the hottest questions in contemporary philosophy of language within the scope of a psychologically plausible theory of human communication. The collection is articulated into three parts. The first concerns the cognitive counterparts of lexical meanings. The second explores the links between moods and forces. The third looks at the epistemological status of semantic theory from the point of view of human psychology.