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It is a near truism of philosophy of language that sentences are prior to words. Sentences, it is said, are what we believe, assert, and argue for; uses of them constitute our evidence in semantics; only they stand in inferential relations, and are true or false. Sentences are, indeed, the only things that fundamentally have meaning. Does this near truism really hold of human languages? This book, drawing on a wide body of evidence, argues forcefully that speakers can and do use mere words, not sentences, to communicate complete thoughts. It considers the implications of this empirical result for language-thought relations, various doctrines of sentence primacy, and the semantics-pragmatics boundary. The book is important both for its philosophical and empirical claims, and for the methodology employed. Stainton illustrates how the methods and detailed results of the various cognitive sciences can bear on central issues in philosophy of language. At the same time, he applies philosophical distinctions to show that arguments which seemingly support the primacy of sentences do not really do so.

John Buridan (ca. 1300–1362) has worked out perhaps the most comprehensive account of nominalism in the history of Western thought, the philosophical doctrine according to which the only universals in reality are “names”: the common terms of our language and the common concepts of our minds. But these items are universal only in their signification; they are just as singular entities themselves as are any other items in reality. This book critically examines what is most intriguing to contemporary readers in Buridan’s medieval philosophical system: his nominalist account of the relationships among language, thought, and reality. The main focus of the discussion is Buridan’s deployment of the Ockhamist conception of a “mental language” for mapping the complex structures of written and spoken human languages onto a parsimoniously construed reality. Concerning these linguistic structures themselves, the book carefully analyzes Buridan’s conception of the radical conventionality of written and spoken languages, in contrast to the natural semantic features of concepts. The discussion pays special attention to Buridan’s token-based semantics of terms and propositions, his conception of existential import, ontological commitment, truth, and logical validity. Finally, the book presents a detailed discussion of how these logical devices allow Buridan to maintain his nominalist position without giving up Aristotelian essentialism or yielding to skepticism, always relating the discussion to contemporary concerns with these issues.

This book investigates meaning change in grammaticalization in terms of truth conditional semantics and a well-explicated syntax-semantics interface. Following a survey of earlier theories of grammaticalization, particularly those that focus on the meaning side, four major case studies of meaning change in grammaticalization probe the hypothesis that this type of change is best viewed as a restructuring at the syntax-semantics interface. The case studies cover the emergence of going to future in English, the negation particles in French, the emergence of the scalar particle selbst (even) in German as well as the quasi determiner lauter (many/only) in German. Each study starts with a presentation of data that illustrates the change in question, and lists open issues about these data that could not be answered (or even formulated) in earlier theoretical frameworks. A careful investigation of the neat interplay of syntax and semantics in the phase of change demonstrates that speakers ingenuously exploit the structures of language in order to adjust it to new needs, while at the same time keeping it a well-defined tool of communication.

This a research study about logic. Logic is both part of and has roles in many disciplines, including inter alia, mathematics, computing, and philosophy. The topic covered here — the mathematical theory of reductive logic and proof-search — draws upon the techniques and cultures of all three disciplines, but is mainly about mathematics and computation. Since its earliest presentations, mathematical logic has been formulated as a formalization of deductive reasoning: given a collection of hypotheses, a conclusion is derived. However, the advent of computational logic has emphasized the significance of reductive reasoning: given a putative conclusion, what are sufficient premises? Whilst deductive systems typically have a well-developed semantics of proofs, reductive systems are typically well-understood only operationally. Typically, a deductive system can be read as a corresponding reductive system. The process of calculating a proof of a given putative conclusion, for which non-deterministic choices between premises must be resolved, is called proof-search and is an essential enabling technology throughout the computational sciences. This study suggests that the reductive view of logic is as fundamental as the deductive view, and discusses some of the problems that must be addressed in order to provide a semantics of proof-searches of comparable value to the corresponding semantics of proofs. Just as the semantics of proofs is intimately related to the model theory of the underlying logic, so too should be the semantics of reductions and of proof-search. The study discusses how to solve the problem of providing a semantics for proof-searches in intuitionistic logic, which adequately models both not only the logical but also via an embedding of intuitionistic reductive logic into classical reductive logic, the operational aspects, i.e., control of proof-search, of the reductive system. It concludes with a naturally motivated example of our semantics of proof-search: a class of games.

This book sets out views about some of the deepest questions in philosophy. The fundamental question of metaphysics is: what does reality consist of? To answer this it is necessary to say what kinds of fact obtain, and what constitutes their holding good. Facts correspond with true propositions, or true thoughts: when we know which propositions, or thoughts, in general, are true, we shall know what facts there are in general. This book considers the relation between metaphysics, our conception of the constitution of reality, and semantics, the theory that explains how statements are determined as true or as false in terms of their composition out of their constituent expressions. The book investigates the two concepts on which the bridge that connects semantics to metaphysics rests, meaning and truth, and the role of justification in a theory of meaning. It then examines the special semantic and metaphysical issues that arise with relation to time and tense, putting forward the author's controversial view of reality as indeterminate: there may be no fact of the matter about whether an object does or does not have a given property. We have to relinquish our deep-held realist understanding of language, the illusion that we know what it is for any proposition that we can frame to be true independently of our having any means of recognizing its truth, and accept that truth depends on our capacity to apprehend it. The book concludes with a chapter about God.

This book revives the study of conventional implicatures in natural language semantics. The label ‘conventional implicature’ dates back to H. Paul Grice’s early work on the foundations of linguistic semantics and pragmatics. Since its introduction, it has seen many diverse applications, but it has never enjoyed a stable place in linguistic theory. This book seeks to change that. Grice’s original discussion is used as a key into two presently understudied areas of natural language: supplements (appositives, parentheticals, utterance modifiers) and expressives (epithets, honorifics). The account of both depends on a multidimensional theory in which individual sentences can express more than one independent meaning. The theory is logically and intuitively compositional, and it minimally extends a familiar kind of intensional logic, thereby providing an adaptable tool for general semantic analysis. The result is a linguistic theory that is accessible not only to linguists of all stripes, but also to philosophers of language, logicians, and computer scientists who have linguistic applications in mind.

This book introduces the reader to the basic methods for the study of the internal structure of words, and to the theoretical issues raised by analyses of word structure concerning the organization of the grammars of natural languages. Data from more than sixty languages are used to illustrate these descriptive and theoretical issues. The book is structured into three main parts. In the first part the basic notions of morphology and morphological analysis are introduced, and attention is given to word formation (derivation and compounding), the basics of inflection, and inflectional systems. The second part, reflecting an important characteristic of this book, is the discussion of the interface between morphology and other modules of the grammar such as phonology, syntax, and semantics. It is shown that the formal structure of complex words is not necessarily isomorphic to their phonological or semantic structure. This book is comprehensive since it also deals, in its third part, with the relation between morphology and mind. Facts concerning the processing of complex words are used as a window on the human mind. Language change in the domain of word structure is also approached from that perspective. In a final summarizing chapter, it is shown how the book has taught a theoretically sophisticated notion ‘word’ and that there are different notions ‘word’ that should be recognized in a proper linguistic analysis. An index and glossary of terms, exercises (with answers), a language index, and advice for further reading are also provided.

This book focuses on some of the most puzzling case marking patterns in the Slavic languages and ties this pattern to different types of aspectual phenomena. It demonstrates that the accusative versus lexical case marking contrast on an internal argument with two-place verbs is directly linked to whether the lexical/semantic aspect of a so-called ‘base’ verb is compositional or not. It also shows that the instrumental versus case agreement dichotomy on a predicate in depictive, participle, and copular constructions in the East Slavic languages is linked to a grammatical aspect contrast, namely to whether the eventuality denoted by a predicate is bounded or unbounded in time.

Reading a paragraph of Latin without attention to the word order entails losing access to a whole dimension of meaning, or at least using inferential procedures to guess at what is actually overtly encoded in the syntax. This book introduces the linguistic concepts, formalism, and analytical techniques necessary for the study of Latin word order. It then presents and analyzes a representative selection of data in sufficient detail to foster both an intuitive grasp of the often rather subtle principles controlling Latin word order and a theoretically grounded understanding of the system that underlies it. Combining the rich empirical documentation of traditional philological approaches with the deeper theoretical insight of modern linguistics, this book aims to reduce the intricate surface patterns of Latin word order to a simple and general cross-categorical system of syntactic structure which translates more or less directly into constituents of pragmatic and semantic meaning.

Expressivism — the sophisticated contemporary incarnation of the noncognitivist research program of Ayer, Stevenson, and Hare — is no longer the province of metaethicists alone. Its comprehensive view about the nature of both normative language and normative thought has also recently been applied to many topics elsewhere in philosophy. Yet the semantic commitments of expressivism are still poorly understood and have not been very far developed. Expressivists have not yet even managed to solve the ‘negation problem’ — to explain why atomic normative sentences are inconsistent with their negations. As a result, it is far from clear that expressivism even could be true. This book evaluates the semantic commitments of expressivism by showing how an expressivist semantics would work, what it can do, and what kind of assumptions would be required, in order for it to do it. Building on a highly general understanding of the basic ideas of expressivism, it argues that expressivists can solve the negation problem — but only in one kind of way. It shows how this insight paves the way for an explanatorily powerful, constructive expressivist semantics, which solves many of what have been taken to be the deepest problems for expressivism, including making unprecedented progress in attacking the well-known Frege-Geach problem for noncognitivist theories. But it also argues that any account which can attain these advantages will face further, even more formidable, obstacles. Expressivism, it is argued, is coherent and interesting, but false.

Relativism has dominated many intellectual circles, past and present, but the 20th century saw it banished to the fringes of mainstream analytic philosophy. Of late, however, it is making something of a comeback within that loosely configured tradition, a comeback that attempts to capitalize on some important ideas in foundational semantics. This book aims not merely to combat analytic relativism but also to combat the foundational ideas in semantics that led to its revival. Doing so requires a proper understanding of the significance of possible worlds semantics, an examination of the relation between truth and the flow of time, an account of putatively relevant data from attitude and speech act reporting, and a careful treatment of various operators. This book contrasts relativism with a view according to which the contents of thought and talk are propositions that instantiate the fundamental monadic properties of truth simpliciter and falsity simpliciter. Such propositions, it argues, are the semantic values of sentences (relative to context), the objects of illocutionary acts, and, unsurprisingly, the objects of propositional attitudes.

This book examines some recent answers to the questions of how and where to draw the divide between semantics (roughly, features of the literal meaning of linguistic items) and pragmatics (roughly, features emerging from the context within which such items are being used). In particular, the book defends what is commonly known as ‘minimal semantics’ (aka ‘semantic invariantism’ or ‘insensitive semantics’). Minimal semantics, as the name suggests, offers a pretty minimal account of the inter-relation between semantics and pragmatics. Specifically, it holds that while context can affect literal semantic content in the case of genuine (i.e. lexically or syntactically marked) context-sensitive items (e.g. indexicals, demonstratives, tense markers), this is the extent of pragmatic influence within the semantic realm. Minimalism, then, prohibits what are here called ‘free pragmatic effects’: putative effects on semantic content which are not required by any lexico‐syntactic item in a sentence. The book opens with an exploration of the current positions in this debate, introducing the main approaches of minimalism, indexicalism, contextualism, relativism, and occasionalism and offers some initial reasons for being concerned about many of the positions opposing minimalism. The main arguments against minimalism are then explored, looking at the argument that minimal contents are explanatorily irrelevant, the argument that at least some sentences fail to express minimal contents, and the argument that the kinds of word meanings which minimalism requires are either impossible or explanatorily inadequate. The ultimate conclusion of the book is that none of these arguments are compelling and that minimalism in fact provides an attractive and plausible account of the literal meanings of natural language sentences.