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This chapter examines John Milton's use of the word perhaps in his works. Though Milton was not often tentative, he used perhaps several times in many of his works including Areopagitica, Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, and Of Reformation. This chapter suggests that the pattern of Milton's use of perhaps is too strong to see as casual, especially when perhaps is nowhere used in a neutral or casual way in his church reform pamphlets.

This chapter explores the potential influences or entailments of nationality on authorial style. Nations have distinct linguistic habits of style. For example, the British have the propensity to drop the word the in front of certain nouns for which American speakers and writers always deploy the article. This explains why the mean relative frequency of the word the is lower in British and Irish novels than in American novels. In this chapter, an analysis of a corpus of 3,346 nineteenth-century American and British novels reveals that British authors use the word the at a rate of 5 percent, compared to 6 percent for their American counterparts. Thus, the word the is a strong indicator of author nationality, at least when trying to differentiate between British and American texts. This chapter discusses the results of author nationality analyses, along with word usage analyses, for British, American, and Irish novels. It demonstrates what stylistic or linguistic feature analyses can provide in terms of separating writers by nationality.

This chapter begins with a consideration of Herder’s best-known thesis in the philosophy of language—that the origins of language are natural rather than divine—but especially emphasizes three theses of much greater relevance today: (1) thought is essentially dependent on and bounded by language; (2) meaning consists in word-usage; and (3) all concepts are rooted in sensations. Theses (1) and (2) essentially founded modern philosophy of language. All three theses play foundational roles in Herder’s hermeneutics and theory of translation. The chapter argues that Herder’s positive arguments for these theses are powerful, and that he also develops sophisticated answers to objections to them based on seeming counterexamples, such as the occurrence of thought and meaning in non-linguistic animals and in non-linguistic art. The chapter concludes with a briefer consideration of additional principles that Herder develops in the philosophy of language, such as that language is fundamentally social in character.

Herder’s theory of translation not only ultimately inspired but is also superior to the most important current theories of translation, those of Berman and Venuti. It is superior to them largely because it continues a traditional conception that faithfully re-expressing the meaning of the source text is a central criterion of success in translation. Like his hermeneutics, Herder’s translation theory rests on his philosophy of language and his principle of radical mental difference. He develops a number of important principles here, including a principle that the way to achieve semantic faithfulness in the face of conceptual differences is to “bend” word-usages in the target language in order to reproduce those in the source language, and a principle that translation must also strive for musical faithfulness. His translation theory not only inspired Schleiermacher’s but also made possible the extraordinary improvements in translation practice that occurred in the generation after him.

James W. Pennebaker reflects on his most underappreciated work: his studies on classical conditioning of begonias, how people's beliefs about their control over bodily functions influence their actual control, and gender differences in word usage (for example, in natural conversation, expressive writing, composition of poems or novels). Pennebaker discusses some of the factors that make people appreciate an idea, such as ideas that are simple, have real-world relevance, and challenge the conventional wisdom.