Download or read book The Unity of Linguistic Meaning written by John Collins and published by Oxford University Press (UK). This book was released on 2011-09-29 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: John Collins presents an analysis of the problem of the unity of the proposition - how propositions can be both single things and complexes at the same time. He surveys previous investigations of the problem and offers his own solution, which is defended from both philosophical and linguistic perspectives.
Download or read book Unraveling the Unity of Linguistic Meaning written by Scott Forsythe and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 60 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Unity and Diversity of Languages written by P. G. J. van Sterkenburg and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2008 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Permanent International Committee of Linguists (Comité International Permanent des Linguistes, CIPL) has organized the 18th Congress of Linguists in Seoul (July 21-26, 2008), in close collaboration with the Linguistic Society of Korea. In this book one finds the invited talks which address hot topics in various subdisciplines presented by outstanding and internationally well known experts. In addition, the state-of-the-art papers provide an overview of the most important research areas of contemporary linguistics.
Download or read book Introduction to Typology written by Lindsay J. Whaley and published by SAGE. This book was released on 1997 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ideal in introductory courses dealing with grammatical structure and linguistic analysis, Introduction to Typology overviews the major grammatical categories and constructions in the world's languages. Framed in a typological perspective, the constant concern of this primary text is to underscore the similarities and differences which underlie the vast array of human languages.
Download or read book The Unity of Wittgenstein s Philosophy written by José Medina and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2012-02-01 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Exposing the myth of "the two Wittgensteins," this book provides a detailed account of the unity in Wittgenstein's thought from the Tractatus to the Philosophical Investigations. Unlike recent interpretations in the literature, this account is not the story of the unfolding of a single view, but instead the story of an ongoing conversation and its internal logic. Throughout his career, Wittgenstein argued that philosophical problems about the necessary and the impossible, on the one hand, and about the meaningful and the nonsensical, on the other, might be dissolved by means of an elucidation of ordinary language use. This approach always relied on the same strategy, namely contextualism. He identified decontextualization as the main source of philosophical confusion and argued that philosophical understanding consists of situating concepts in the normative contexts in which they function. This critical reconstruction contributes to the understanding of Wittgenstein's philosophy and illuminates contemporary debates concerning necessity, intelligibility, and the normativity of language.
Download or read book Unity and Plurality written by Massimiliano Carrara and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Unity and Plurality presents novel ways of thinking about plurality while casting new light on the interconnections among the logical, philosophical, and linguistic aspects of plurals. The volume brings together new work on the logic and ontology of plurality and on the semantics of plurals in natural language. Plural reference, the view that definite plurals such as 'the students' refer to several entities at once (the individual students), is an approach favoured by logicians and philosophers, who take sentences with plurals ('the students gathered') not to be committed to entities beyond individuals, entities such as classes, sums, or sets. By contrast, linguistic semantics has been dominated by a singularist approach to plurals, taking the semantic value of a definite plural such as 'the students' to be a mereological sum or set. Moreover, semantics has been dominated by a particular ontological view of plurality, that of extensional mereology. This volume aims to build a bridge between the two traditions and to show the fruitfulness of nonstandard mereological approaches. A team of leading experts investigates new perspectives that arise from plural logic and non-standard mereology and explore novel applications to natural language phenomena.
Download or read book An Introductory Course to Philosophy of Language written by Ufuk Özen Baykent and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2016-08-17 with total page 115 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Language is what we all share and is our common concern. What is the nature of language? How is language related to the world? How is communication possible via language? What is the impact of language on our reasoning and thinking? Many people are unaware that misunderstandings and conflicts during communication occur as a result of the way we use language. This book introduces the central issues in the history of philosophical investigations about the concept of language. Topics are structured with reference to the world’s foremost philosophers of language. The book will encourage the reader to explore the depths of the concept of language and will raise an awareness of this distinctive human capacity.
Download or read book Languages Within Language written by Ivan Fonagy and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2001 with total page 842 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There is little hope of reconstructing by means of comparative or typological studies a lingua adamica essentially different from present-day languages. The distant preverbal past is however still present in live speech. Phonetic, syntactic and semantic rule transgressions, far from being products of a deficient output, are governed by a universal iconic apparatus, a sort of 'anti-grammar' or 'proto-grammar' which enables the speaker and the poet to express preconscious and subconscious mental contents that could not be conveyed by means of the grammar of any language. Secondary messages, generated by the proto-grammar are integrated into the primary grammatical message. The two messages whose structural and semantic divergence represents a chronological distance of hundreds of thousands of years, constitute a dialectic unity which characterize natural languages. The evolutive approach offers a different, perhaps better understanding of questions related to dynamic synchrony, vocal and verbal style, poetic language, language change.Chapters on: Diversity of the lexicon; Dual encoding: vocal style; Syntactic gesturing; Syntactic regressions; Prosodic expression of emotions; Poetry and vocal art; Situation and meaning; A hidden presence: verbal magic; Playing with language: joke and metaphor; Metaphor: a research instrument; Dynamics of poetic language; Semantic structure of possessive constructions; Semantic structure of punctuation marks; Why gestures?; Between acts and words; Language within language: dynamics, change and evolution.
Download or read book The Explanation of Linguistic Causes written by Kees Versteegh and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 1995-05-11 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The ultimate aim of every linguistic tradition is to go beyond the purely descriptive level and seek an explanation for linguistic phenomena. Traditions differ, however, with regard to the class of linguistic phenomena they wish to explain and the framework in which they define their explanation. In this volume the English translation is presented of the treatise on linguistic explanation by the 10th-century Arab grammarian az-Zağğāğī, one of the most original thinkers of the Arabic tradition. He worked in a period in which the influence of Greek logic and philosophy made itself felt in almost all Arabo-Islamic disciplines. Some of the problems he deals with are familiar to modern linguists (e.g., morphological segmentation, categorization of parts of speech), others are comprehensible only within the frame of reference of Arabic linguistics (e.g., the declension of the verb). An extensive commentary on the text analyzes the problems discussed, both within the Arabic tradition and from the point of view of modern linguistics. Apart from the index of names and terms, there is an index of subjects which enables the general reader to consult text and comments on specific key notions.
Download or read book Unity and Plurality written by Massimiliano Carrara and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016-03-18 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Unity and Plurality presents novel ways of thinking about plurality while casting new light on the interconnections among the logical, philosophical, and linguistic aspects of plurals. The volume brings together new work on the logic and ontology of plurality and on the semantics of plurals in natural language. Plural reference, the view that definite plurals such as 'the students' refer to several entities at once (the individual students), is an approach favoured by logicians and philosophers, who take sentences with plurals ('the students gathered') not to be committed to entities beyond individuals, entities such as classes, sums, or sets. By contrast, linguistic semantics has been dominated by a singularist approach to plurals, taking the semantic value of a definite plural such as 'the students' to be a mereological sum or set. Moreover, semantics has been dominated by a particular ontological view of plurality, that of extensional mereology. This volume aims to build a bridge between the two traditions and to show the fruitfulness of nonstandard mereological approaches. A team of leading experts investigates new perspectives that arise from plural logic and non-standard mereology and explore novel applications to natural language phenomena.
Download or read book The Unity of the Proposition written by Richard Gaskin and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2008-10-30 with total page 473 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Richard Gaskin presents a work in the philosophy of language. He analyses what is distinctive about sentences and the propositions they express—what marks them off from mere lists of words and mere aggregates of word-meanings respectively. Since he identifies the world with all the true and false propositions, his account of the unity of the proposition has significant implications for our understanding of the nature of reality. He argues that the unity of the proposition is constituted by a certain infinitistic structure known in the tradition as 'Bradley's regress'. Usually, Bradley's regress has been regarded as vicious, but Gaskin argues that it is the metaphysical ground of the propositional unity, and gives us an important insight into the fundamental make-up of the world.
Download or read book Languages A Very Short Introduction written by Stephen Anderson and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2012-06-28 with total page 153 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How many languages are there? What differentiates one language from another? Are new languages still being discovered? Why are so many languages disappearing? The diversity of languages today is varied, but it is steadily declining. In this Very Short Introduction, Stephen Anderson answers the above questions by looking at the science behind languages. Considering a wide range of different languages and linguistic examples, he demonstrates how languages are not uniformly distributed around the world; just as some places are more diverse than others in terms of plants and animal species, the same goes for the distribution of languages. Exploring the basis for linguistic classification and raising questions about how we identify a language, as well as considering signed languages as well as spoken, Anderson examines the wider social issues of losing languages, and their impact in terms of the endangerment of cultures and peoples. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.
Download or read book Locke s Philosophy of Language written by Walter R. Ott and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2003-11-06 with total page 169 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines John Locke's claims about the nature and workings of language. Walter Ott proposes an interpretation of Locke's thesis in which words signify ideas in the mind of the speaker, and argues that rather than employing such notions as sense or reference, Locke relies on an ancient tradition that understands signification as reliable indication. He then uses this interpretation to explain crucial areas of Locke's metaphysics and epistemology, including essence, abstraction, knowledge and mental representation. His discussion challenges many of the orthodox readings of Locke, and will be of interest to historians of philosophy and philosophers of language alike.
Download or read book Knowledge of Meaning written by Richard K. Larson and published by Bradford Book. This book was released on 1995 with total page 639 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Current textbooks in formal semantics are all versions of, or introductions to, the same paradigm in semantic theory: Montague Grammar. Knowledge of Meaning is based on different assumptions and a different history. It provides the only introduction to truth- theoretic semantics for natural languages, fully integrating semantic theory into the modern Chomskyan program in linguistic theory and connecting linguistic semantics to research elsewhere in cognitive psychology and philosophy. As such, it better fits into a modern graduate or undergraduate program in linguistics, cognitive science, or philosophy. Furthermore, since the technical tools it employs are much simpler to teach and to master, Knowledge of Meaning can be taught by someone who is not primarily a semanticist. Linguistic semantics cannot be studied as a stand-alone subject but only as part of cognitive psychology, the authors assert. It is the study of a particular human cognitive competence governing the meanings of words and phrases. Larson and Segal argue that speakers have unconscious knowledge of the semantic rules of their language, and they present concrete, empirically motivated proposals about a formal theory of this competence based on the work of Alfred Tarski and Donald Davidson. The theory is extended to a wide range of constructions occurring in natural language, including predicates, proper nouns, pronouns and demonstratives, quantifiers, definite descriptions, anaphoric expressions, clausal complements, and adverbs. Knowledge of Meaning gives equal weight to philosophical, empirical, and formal discussions. It addresses not only the empirical issues of linguistic semantics but also its fundamental conceptual questions, including the relation of truth to meaning and the methodology of semantic theorizing. Numerous exercises are included in the book.
Download or read book Introduction to Typology written by Lindsay J. Whaley and published by SAGE. This book was released on 1997 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An overview of the major grammatical categories and constructions in the world's languages, Introduction to Typologyprovides a thorough and comprehensive coverage of typology in the areas of morphology and syntax, while underscoring the similarities and differences that underlie the vast array of human languages. Pedagogically sound, this introductory text includes a glossary and highlights and defines each new term as it appears. Each chapter concludes with a summary of new terminology and concepts as well as a list of additional, related readings. Introduction to Typology assumes neither prior knowledge of typology nor extensive background in linguistics, making it useful as a primary or supplementary text for a variety of courses, particularly those dealing with grammatical structure and linguistic universals.
Download or read book Language written by Edward Sapir and published by . This book was released on 1921 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Professor Sapir analyzes, for student and common reader, the elements of language. Among these are the units of language, grammatical concepts and their origins, how languages differ and resemble each other, and the history of the growth of representative languages--Cover.
Download or read book Humboldt On Language written by Wilhelm von Humboldt and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1999-12-09 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Wilhelm von Humboldt's classic study of human language was first published in 1836, as a general introduction to his three-volume treatise on the Kawi language of Java. It is the final statement of his lifelong study of the nature of language, exploring its universal structures and its relation to mind and culture. Empirically wide-ranging - Humboldt goes far beyond the Indo-European family of languages - it remains one of the most interesting and important attempts to draw philosophical conclusions from comparative linguistics. This 1999 volume presents a translation by Peter Heath, together with an introduction by Michael Losonsky that places Humboldt's work in its historical context and discusses its relevance to contemporary work in philosophy, linguistics, cognitive science, and psychology.
