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Language and music are said to be uncommonly close in Africa. This chapter explores the dimensions of that closeness by delving into the nature of tone languages and the constraints they impose on melodic structure and on the modes of drumming (signal mode, speech mode, dance mode). The method by which talking drums transmit messages is explained. The chapter also examines the dynamics of word-music interaction in song. The extensive use of ideophones (“picture words”) in spoken African languages is discussed. The chapter finally posits a linguistic residue that constrains various kinds of African performance. A detailed commentary on a hiplife song is included.

This chapter focuses on wars of words and paper bullets during the period of Charles I in England. When Charles I recalled parliament in November 1640, he was led back from the silence of the 1630s to a speech mode of royal representation. Even after relations with parliament broke down, the king continued to make carefully crafted speeches to committees of the Long Parliament, to parliaments called to Oxford, and to assemblies of the gentry in several counties and towns. During the 1640s, Charles discovered eloquence along with an evident new appreciation of the power of the royal word uttered in person. His speeches at his trial and on the scaffold, rather than the last words of a desperate man, conveyed a confidence in the power of his word to be effective well beyond the grave.

This chapter discusses the relation between the Tractatus’ and Carnap’s philosophies of logic, arguing that Carnap’s position in The Logical Syntax of Language is in certain respects much closer to the Tractatus than has been recognized. Explained in Carnapian terms, the goal of the Tractatus is to introduce, by means of quasi-syntactical sentences, logical principles and concepts of a logical language to be used in philosophical clarification in the formal mode. A distinction between the material and formal mode is therefore part of the Tractatus’ view, and contrary to Carnap’s criticism, the sentences of the Tractatus can be clearly distinguished from nonsensical metaphysical statements. Moreover, despite the Tractatus’ rejection of syntactical statements, there is a correspondence between Wittgenstein’s saying–showing distinction and Carnap’s object-language/syntax-language distinction. Both constitute ways to clarify the logical distinction between the logico-syntactical determinations concerning language and the use of language according to such determinations, a distinction absent in Frege and Russell. Wittgenstein’s distinction thus constitutes a precursor of the object-language/syntax-language distinction which the latter in a certain sense affirms. The saying–showing distinction agrees with Carnap’s position also in marking logic as something that is not true/false about either language or reality, a view that underlies Carnap’s principle of tolerance. The standard view that Carnap overcame the philosophy of logic of the Tractatus in the 1930s must therefore be regarded as problematic and misleading.