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This book presents the author's personal overview of Speech Prosody, and in particular the different areas in which he has been especially interested over the last few decades. These include the acoustics of speech prosody, prosodic transcription, the relationship between lexical and non-lexical prosody, the nature of prosodic structure, the phonology of prosody, the modeling of rhythm and of melody, and the central question of the various and at times quite mysterious ways in which prosody contributes to the interpretation of an utterance. In a final chapter the author briefly outlines the directions which he believes may prove the most productive and fruitful for future work in the field of Speech Prosody.

A novel theory of argument structure based on the order in which verbs and their arguments combine across a variety of languages and language families.Merge is the structure-building operation in Chomsky's Minimalist Program. In When Arguments Merge, Elise Newman develops a new Merge-based theory of the syntax of argument structure, taking inspiration from wh- questions. She uncovers new connections between disparate empirical phenomena and provides a unified analysis of patterns across many languages and language families, from Mayan to Bantu to Indo-European languages (among others). The result is a syntactic theory with a small inventory of features and categories that can combine in a limited number of ways, capturing the range of argument configurations that we find cross-linguistically in both declarative and interrogative contexts. Newman's novel approach to argument structure is based on the time at which different kinds of arguments merge and move in the verbal domain. Assuming that all kinds of Merge are driven by features, she proposes that subset relationships between elements bearing different sets of features can constrain the distribution of arguments in unexpected ways and that different feature bundles can predict unusual interactions between arguments in many contexts. The positions of arguments in different contexts have consequences for agreement alignment and case assignment, which are reflected in the Voice of the clause. Examining the order in which verbs and their arguments are combined, she explores the consequences of different orders of combination for the kinds of utterances observed across languages.

In diesem Buch geht es um die faszinierende Fähigkeit der menschlichen Sprache, mit Hilfe winziger (mikrosemantischer) Morpheme als Hilfsmittel komplizierte logische (mathematische) Bedeutungen auszudrücken. Sprachen markieren Bedeutungen mit identischen Schlussfolgerungen, indem sie identische Partikel verwenden, und diese Partikel schleichen sich so in eine Vielzahl von Ausdrücken ein. Aufgrund ihrer Multitasking-Fähigkeit, scheinbar disparate Bedeutungen auszudrücken, werden sie als Superpartikel bezeichnet. Diese Partikel sind perfekte Fenster in die Verzahnung mehrerer grammatischer Module und die Art der Interaktion dieser Module im Laufe der Zeit. Fest verankert in dem Modul, in dem die grammatischen Knochen gebaut und zusammengesetzt werden (enge Morphosyntax), erhalten Superpartikel je nach der Struktur, in der sie vorkommen, unterschiedliche Interpretationen (im begrifflich-intentionalen Modul - Semantik). Darüber hinaus sind einige der Interpretationen, die diese Partikelauslösen, inferentiell und gehören nach der Standardrechnung in den Bereich der Pragmatik. Wie können so winzige Partikel, die selten länger als eine Silbe sind, so mächtige und übergreifende Wirkungen im intermodularen grammatischen Raum haben? Dies ist der platonische Hintergrund, vor dem dieses Buch steht.

This volume investigates Eric Weil's innovative conceptualization of the place of violence in the philosophical tradition with a focus on violence's relationship to language and to discourse. Weil presents violence as the central philosophical problem. According to this reading, the western philosophical tradition commonly conceptualizes violence as an expression of error or as a consequence of the weakness of will. However, by doing so, it misses something essential about the role that violence plays in our conceptual development as well as the place violence holds in our discursive practices.The author draws comparisons between Weil's work and that of Robert Brandom. Brandom's inferentialism creates a sophisticated program at the junction of pragmatics and semantics, philosophy of language, logic, and philosophy of mind. The monograph builds on these insights in order to show how an inferentialist reading of Eric Weil is fruitful for both Weilian studies and for inferentialism. This volume will notably be of interest to scholars in philosophy, argumentation theory, and communication studies.

This volume develops a theory of meaning and a semantics for both mathematical and empirical sentences inspired to Chomsky's internalism, namely to a view of semantics as the study of the relations of language not with external reality but with internal, or mental, reality. In the first part a theoretical notion of justification for a sentence A is defined, by induction on the complexity of A; intuitively, justifications are conceived as cognitive states of a particular kind. The main source of inspiration for this part is Heyting's explanation of the intuitionistic meaning of logical constants.In the second part the theory is applied to the solution of several foundational problems in the theory of meaning and epistemology, such as Frege's puzzle, Mates'puzzle about synonymy, the paradox of analysis, Kripke's puzzle about belief, the de re/de dicto distinction, the specific/non-specific distinction, Gettier's problems, the paradox of knowability, and the characterization oftruth. On a more general philosophical level, throughout the book the author develops a tight critique of the neo-verificationism of Dummett, Prawitz and Martin-Löf, and defends a mentalist interpretation of intuitionism.

This book explores the construction of agreement in the argumentative process, aiming to investigate how the activation of shared knowledge, values and beliefs leads to the creation of a common ground between the speaker and the audience in the pursuit of persuasion. In the first part of the book, the authors examine agreement from a historical and theoretical perspective, setting in relation major ancient and contemporary approaches to argumentation, with special regard for the notions of ethos, objects of agreement, starting points and topoi, all with a focus on their deployment in discourse. This is complemented with a compendium of linguistic resources that can be exploited for the discursive construction of agreement, offering a principled selection of structures across different levels of language description. The second part of the book is devoted to the investigation of actual uses of agreement in a choice of institutional genres within the domain of the US presidential elections: the Presidential Announcement, the TV debate and the Inaugural Address. Due to their political relevance and cultural salience, these genres provide an ideal interface for observing the interplay of discursive and argumentative components, against the backdrop of a shared cultural heritage, rich with intertextual references. The application of the theoretical framework developed in the first part of the book to the analysis of real political discourse carried out in the second is the distinguishing feature of this volume, making it of interest to linguists and argumentation scholars, as well as to political scientists and communicators.

The lectures in this book are immensely Chomskyan in spirit, recursive-syntactic in nature, and tethered to a framework which takes as the null hypothesis the notion that language is an innate, pre-determined biological system—a system which by definition is multi-complex, human-specific, and analogous to a philosophy highly commensurate of Descartes'great proverbial adage which announces the calling for a ‘ghost-in-the-machine'. The book begins with a gradual assessment of the kinds of complex constructs students of syntax need to work-up. Leading to the classic ‘Four-Sentences'—each of which bears as a kind of post-mark its own decade of Chomskyan analysis—we trace the origins of generative grammar from the fields of child language acquisition (of the 1960s), to psycholinguistics (of the 1970s), to where we stand today within the Minimalist Program. Various spin-off proposals have been spawned by envisioned analyses which treat syntactic movement as the quintessential human processing—a processing which would give rise to human language. Such spin-offs include ‘Proto-language'and a new treatment of the so-called morpho-syntactic ‘Dual Mechanism Model'.

Jazyk není jen nástrojem kódování a sdělování informací, ani prostředkem přenášení myšlenek od jednotlivce k jednotlivci. Podílí se na jejich formování a jako podstatně společenská instituce pomáhá každému z nás porozumět vlastní orientaci na pozadí hodnotového horizontu, jenž dohromady skládá dlouhodobá síť společenských vztahů. Kniha významného kanadského filozofa, nositele Templetonovy ceny Charlese Taylora přináší plody jeho mnoho desítek let trvajícího promýšlení tradičních dilemat filozofie jazyka.

The volume is published on the occasion of the birth centennial of Eugenio Coseriu (1921–2002). It is the first collective volume to appear in English in which various scholars present a variety of perspectives on Coseriu's scholarly work and discuss its continuing relevance for the language sciences. Coseriu's international reputation has suffered from his commitment to publish in languages such as Spanish, German, French, Italian, Romanian and Portuguese, to the detriment of English. As a consequence, his work is less well-known outside Romance and German linguistics. The volume aims to raise the general awareness of Coseriu's work among linguists around the world, in accordance with Coseriu's own adage that it takes a constructive mindset (acknowledging'accomplishments and limitations') to do justice to all scholarly work in the humanities. The articles are organized into three major thematic clusters: 1) philosophy of language, 2) history of the language sciences and 3) theory and practice of'Integral Linguistics'. The volume is essential reading for anyone working in these fields and for those seeking to gain deeper understanding of Coseriu's goal to develop a unitary approach to language which takes as its point of departure the'activity of speaking'.

Together with the first volume “Inquiries in philosophical pragmatics: Theoretical developments,” this book collects contributions that represent the state of the art on the interconnection between pragmatics and philosophy. While the first volume presents the philosophical dimension of pragmatics, showing the path from theoretical advances to practical uses and approaches, this second volume offers a specular view on this discipline. Instead of adopting the top-down view of the first volume, this collection of eleven chapters starts from the analysis of linguistic data – which include texts and discourses in different languages, different types of dialogues, different types of interactions, and different modes for expressing meaning – looking for the regularities that govern our production and processing. The chapters are ordered according to their relationship with the themes and methods that define the field of pragmatics. The more explored and classical linguistic issuessuch as prototype-based generalizations, scalar implicatures, and temporal ordering, lead gradually to the more recent and debated topic of slurs and pejorative language, and finally to the interdisciplinary and more pioneering works addressing specific context of language use, such as marketplace interactions, courtroom speeches, schizophrenic discourse, literary texts for children, and multimedia communication.Chapter 12 is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

This book is all about the captivating ability that the human language has to express intricately logical (mathematical) meanings using tiny (microsemantic) morphemes as utilities. Languages mark meanings with identical inferences using identical particles and these particles thus creep up in a wide array of expressions. Because of their multi-tasking capacity to express seemingly disparate meanings, they are dubbed Superparticles. These particles are perfect windows into the interlock of several grammatical modules and the nature of the interaction of these modules through time. With a firm footing in the module where grammatical bones are built and assembled (narrow morpho-syntax), superparticles acquire varied interpretation (in the conceptual-intentional module – semantics) depending on the structure they fea- ture in. What is more, some of the interpretations these particles trigger are inferential and belong, under the standard account, to the realm of pragmatics. How can suchtiny particles, rarely exceeding a syllable of sound, have such powerful and over-arching effects across the inter-modular grammatical space? This is the Platonic background against which this book is set.

This book offers innovative investigations of the concept of life in art and in theory. It features essays that explore biopoetics and look at how insights from the natural sciences shape research within the humanities. Since literature, works of art, and other cultural products decisively shape our ideas of what it means to be human, the contributors to this volume examine the question of what literature, literary and cultural criticism, and philosophy contribute to the distinctions (or non-distinctions) between human, animal, and vegetal existence. Coverage combines different methodological aspects and addresses a wide field of comparative literary studies. The essays consider the question of language (as a distinctive feature of human existence) in a number of different contexts, which range from Aristotle's works, through several historical layers of the philosophical discourse on the origins of speech, to modern anthropology, and 20th century continental philosophy. In addition, the volume includes concrete case studies to the current post-humanism debate and provides literary, art historian, and philosophical perspectives on animal studies. The historical multiplicity of the various cultural representations of biological existence (be that human, animal, vegetal, or mixed) might serve as a productive foundation for discussing the nature and forms of literature's critical contributions to our understanding of these fundamental categories. This volume opens up this subject to students and scholars of literature, art, philosophy, ethics, and cultural studies, and to anyone with a theoretical interest in the questions of life.

The book comprises a selection of papers concerning the general theme of cultural conceptualizations in language. The focus of Part 1, which includes four papers, is on Metaphor and Culture, discussing general as well as language-specific metaphoricity.Part 2, which also includes three papers, is on Cultural Models, dealing with phenomena relating to family and home, nation and kinship, blood, and death in different cultures. Six papers in Part 3, which refers to questions of Identity and Cultural Stereotypes, both in general language and in literature, discuss identity in native and migration contexts and take up motifs of journey and migration, as well as social and cultural stereotypes and prejudice in transforming contexts. Three papers in the last Part 4 of the book, Linguistic Concepts, Meanings, and Interaction, focus on the semantic interpretation of the changes and differences which occur in their intra- as well as inter-linguistic contexts.

Cet ouvrage propose une évaluation du legs de Ferdinand de Saussure en linguistique. Il mesure la portée et la valeur de ce legs en étudiant les œuvres de trois auteurs qui, de toute évidence, s'en sont inspirés : Lev S. Vygotski, Jean Piaget et Jean-Pierre Changeux. Son contenu se situe au carrefour de six champs disciplinaires : la linguistique, l'épistémologie génétique, la psycholinguistique, l'épistémologie, la neuro-biologie et la psychanalyse.

This book considers the work and influence of Charles Sanders Peirce, showing how the concepts and ideas he developed continue to impact and shape contemporary research issues. Written by a team of leading international scholars of semiotics, linguistics and philosophy, this Companion examines the growing impact of Peirce's thought and semiotic theories on a range of different fields. Discussing topics such as narrative, architecture, design, aesthetics and linguistics, the book furthers understanding of the contemporary pertinence of Peircean concepts in theoretical and empirical fashion. The Bloomsbury Companion to Contemporary Peircean Semiotics is the definitive guide to the enduring legacy of one of the world's greatest semioticians.

This volume presents eight papers and a draft monograph by T. Price Caldwell on topics in linguistics, semiotics and philosophy of language. From the beginning of his professional career onwards, Caldwell wrote short fiction and poetry, and he taught English literature. The relevance to these of philosophy of language, semiotics and certain areas of linguistics increasingly caught his interest. This book presents the fruits of this later work. Of the papers included here, two are abstract and theoretical, focusing on linguistic methodology and Caldwell's overarching views on the nature of meaning-in-context. His position here, which he called Molecular Sememics, echoes early Structuralism and Functionalism, but addresses shortfalls in each. Two other papers apply the method and theory to topics within semantics and pragmatics, including especially the structuring of discourse. The remaining four papers connect Caldwell's theoretical insights to his life-long interests in fiction and pedagogy. The monograph – which Caldwell was left unfinished due to illness – aims to present as a single intellectual package the theory and the applications.

This volume focuses on the role language plays at all levels of the argumentation process. It explores the effects that specific linguistic choices may have in the production and the reception of arguments and in doing so, it moves beyond the first, necessary, descriptive stance provided by current literature on the topic. Each chapter provides an original take illuminating one or more of the following three issues: the range of linguistic resources language users draw on as they argue; how cognitive processes of meaning construction may influence argumentative practices; and which discursive devices can be used to fulfil a number of argumentative goals. The volume includes theoretical and empirical or applied stances, providing the reader both with state-of-the-art reflections on the relationship between argumentation and language, and with concrete examples of how this relationship plays out in naturally occurring argumentative practices, such as classroom interaction, and political, parliamentary or journalistic discourse.This is a very original, timely and welcome contribution to the study of argumentation conducted with the tools of the language sciences. The collection of papers relevantly tackles key linguistic, discursive and cognitive aspects of argumentative practices whose treatment is underrepresented in mainstream argumentation studies by offering new and exciting linguistically-grounded theoretical accounts. As such, the volume testifies both to the vigour of the linguistic current within the discipline and to the high standards of scholarly commitment and quality that the younger generation is pushing forward. Without question, this book marks an important milestone in the relationships between linguistics and argumentation theory. Christian Plantin, Professor Emeritus

Ziel dieser Studie ist es, allgemeine Tendenzen der Sprachphilosophie, vor allem aber verschiedene Konstellationen des Problems Sprache, in ihren jeweils wesentlichen Elementen zu beleuchten. Die daraus resultierenden Erkenntnisse werden so für Studierende der deutschen Sprache und der Philosophie fruchtbar gemacht.Es geht dabei weniger um Antworten als um die Rekonstruktion der Probleme, um die sich die ausgewählten Theorien drehen. Diese stehen als exemplarische Modelle für die von der deutschsprachigen Sprachphilosophie seit dem 19. Jahrhundert entworfenen Fragestellungen. Ein solcher Zugang ermöglicht eine Untersuchung der deutschen Sprache nicht nur aus rein sprachwissenschaftlicher, synchronischer, sondern auch und insbesondere aus historischer, kulturwissenschaftlicher Perspektive, die über ein rein zweckorientiertes, funktionales Studium des Deutschen hinausreicht. Die deutsche Sprache wird dabei nicht nur in ihrer Funktionsweise als Objektsprache betrachtet, sondern im Rahmen der Philosophie auch als Metasprache untersucht.

Andreas Stokke presents a comprehensive study of lying and insincere language use. He investigates how lying relates to other forms of insincerity and explores the kinds of attitudes that go with insincere uses of language. Part I develops an account of insincerity as a linguistic phenomenon. Stokke provides a detailed theory of the distinction between lying and speaking insincerely, and accounts for the relationship between lying and deceiving. A novel framework of assertion underpins the analysis of various kinds of insincere speech, including false implicature and forms of misleading with presuppositions, prosodic focus, and semantic incompleteness. Part II sets out the relationship between what is communicated and the speaker's attitudes. Stokke develops the view of insincerity as a shallow phenomenon that is dependent on conscious attitudes rather than deeper motivations. The various of ways of speaking while being indifferent toward what one communicates are covered, and the phenomenon of'bullshitting'is distinguished from lying and other forms of insincerity. Finally, an account of insincere uses of interrogative, imperative, and exclamative utterances is also given.

The aim of the presented collective monograph “Slovanské spisovné jazyky od teorie k praxi. Formování jazykového vědomí a postojů k jazyku (Slavic standard languages from theory to practice. Formation of language awareness and attitude to language)“ is to reveal the way in which the field of linguistics communicates with the wider public, the process of formation of conscious language awareness, and the implementation of theoretical concepts and interventions into practical use. Analysed are the institutions, their actions and means (influence on language function in the public domain, codification interventions and their consequences, language policy in relation to the language situation, the educational system and particularly teacher training, the government of science and its popularization, and many others), as well as the leading actors of language policy. The main focus of the theory of standard language in Slavistics was placed predominantly on pre-existing academic discourse, which gives rise to the theoretical concepts and interventions. Attention is also paid to the subsequent evaluation of the impact and consequences of the implemented policy (standard language forms, mother-tongue speaking competency, language policy making). The contribution from Stanisław Gajda (Język literacki w po-nowoczesności) on the theory of standard language, focussing on the role of language in the post-modern society in an interdisciplinary context, bridges across all of the presented works. According to Gajda, a good theory demonstrates a high degree of ‘reasonableness'with respect to theoretical reality, generalizability (the better the theory, the wider range of observations can be explained), economy (the fewer concepts and theorems require an introduction the better), external and internal consistency (the basic terms and theorems are in line with well-established scientific findings), and explanatory and predictive power. Histories of individual national standard language gains are varied, however in principle they each consider implementation of a common communication tool as a prototype, an idealized construct. A complete theory possesses a complex hierarchical arrangement, identified by three levels: philosophical, theoretical / methodological, and empirical. However, actual science often encounters incomplete theories, which do not contain elaborated levels and are commonly limited to an empirical level. Following presentation and historical description of aspects describing standard lan270 slovanské spisovné jazyky od teorie k praxi guage, S. Gajda focuses on selected aspects of the present state of language theory. In particular, he focuses on the impact of the transformation in communication media and two aspects of current social changes: the character of a post-modern societal environment and the process of socialization on an individual level. In the analyses and syntheses that follow several of these ideas are elaborated, not only empirically, but importantly also in terms of implementation. Ondřej Bláha (Etnická a jazyková identita obyvatel Moravy po roce 1989;) concerns the ethnic and language identity of the Moravians within the framework of the Czech language community. It investigates the relationship between the ethnic and language identities (in general, seven times more people consider themselves as ethnically Moravian, than those who define their language as Moravian). Processes are identified either based on census statistical data (between the years 1991–2011) or on the attempts to codify (or describe) Moravian language. It evidences a subjective and political background behind emancipation tendencies among Moravians and offers a classification of the somewhat naive manifestations of “the search for Moravian language” – efforts to define and standardize a Moravian language, distinct from Czech language, or efforts to introduce aspects of Moravian dialect

A mind-expanding, deeply humane tour of language by the bestselling author of Born on a Blue Day and Thinking in Numbers. Is vocabulary destiny? Why do clocks'talk'to the Nahua people of Mexico? Will A.I. researchers ever produce true human-machine dialogue? In this mesmerizing collection of essays, Daniel Tammet answers these and many other questions about the intricacy and profound power of language. In Every Word Is a Bird We Teach to Sing, Tammet goes back in time to London to explore the numeric language of his autistic childhood; in Iceland, he learns why the name Blær became a court case; in Canada, he meets one of the world's most accomplished lip readers. He chats with chatbots; contrives an'e'-less essay on lipograms; studies the grammar of the telephone; contemplates the significance of disappearing dialects; and corresponds with native Esperanto speakers - in their mother tongue. A joyous romp through the world of words, letters, stories, and meanings, Every Word Is a Bird We Teach to Sing explores the way communication shapes reality. From the art of translation to the lyricism of sign language, these essays display the stunning range of Tammet's literary and polyglot talents.

First published in 1990, this book argues that any theory of language constructs its ‘object'by separating ‘relevant'from ‘irrelevant'phenomena — excluding the latter. This leaves a ‘remainder'which consists of the untidy, creative part of how language is used — the essence of poetry and metaphor. Although this remainder can never be completely formalised, it must be fully recognised by any true account of language and thus this book attempts the first ‘theory of the remainder'. As such, whether it is language or the speaker who speaks is dealt with, leading to an analysis of how all speakers are ‘violently'constrained in their use of language by social and psychological realties.

This volume sheds a new light on Philosophical Investigations, Ludwig Wittgenstein's master opus, by taking a new approach to its first stretch (sections §§1-88), with special emphasis on its atypical opening. The methodological conviction that subtends the volume is that the highly unconventional form assumed by the book is internal to its content and crucial to its reconception of the relation between logic and language. This disconcerting form is dictated by the new modes of criticism deployed by Wittgenstein as he engages the philosophical tradition in the new terms afforded by the revolutionary “method of language-games”. In the essays collected here, seven authors, including some of the most influential figures in the field, offer close and often unorthodox readings of pivotal passages from the beginning of the book. These readings are also shaped by the conviction that the Philosophical Investigations are hardly intelligible apart from an appreciation of the concerns that they inherit from Wittgenstein's early work, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. The authors contend that we need to consider the continuities between the early and the later works if we are to disclose the true discontinuities between them.

This book discusses developments in the study of implicatures and presuppositions, drawing on recent linguistic and psycholinguistic literature. It provides original discussions of specific formal aspects of the theoretical reconstruction of these phenomena. The authors offer innovative experimental analyses in which crucial processing questions are addressed, and new experimental methodologies are introduced. The result is an advanced debate featuring broad empirical coverage of the issues, as well as an informed discussion of the connections between a Compositional Semantics and a Pragmatic Theory of Implicit Communication, in light of the empirical data coming from Experimental Semantics and Pragmatics. This book will be a worthwhile read for those with interests in both the formal and methodological aspects of these arguments.

By highlighting relations between experimental and theoretical work, this volume explores new ways of addressing one of the central challenges in the study of language and cognition. The articles bring together work by leading scholars and younger researchers in psychology, linguistics and philosophy. An introductory chapter lays out the background on concept composition, a problem that is stimulating much new research in cognitive science. Researchers in this interdisciplinary domain aim to explain how meanings of complex expressions are derived from simple lexical concepts and to show how these meanings connect to concept representations. Traditionally, much of the work on concept composition has been carried out within separate disciplines, where cognitive psychologists have concentrated on concept representations, and linguists and philosophers have focused on the meaning and use of logical operators. This volume demonstrates an important change in this situation, where convergence points between these three disciplines in cognitive science are emerging and are leading to new findings and theoretical insights. This book is open access under a CC BY license.

In der Welt werden munter die'Lügenfahnen'(Goethe) entrollt, und daran wird sich wohl auch so rasch nichts ändern. Was aber geht eigentlich mit der Sprache vor sich, wenn die Wahrheit zur Lüge verdreht wird? Können nicht nur Sätze, sondern auch Wörter lügen? Und wie ist das Verhältnis der Ironie zur Lüge? Harald Weinrichs fulminanter Essay ist ein linguistisches Kabinettstück und eine kleine Anleitung zum Denken des Wahren.

This book contains an original analysis of the existential there-sentence from a philosophical-linguistic perspective. At its core is the claim that there-sentences'form is distinct from that of ordinary subject–predicate sentences, and that this fundamental difference explains the construction's unusual grammatical and discourse properties.

Looking at the work of J.L. Austin, who subjected language to a close and intense analysis, this book deals with his examination of the various things we do with words, and with the philosophical insights he believed could be gained by closely examining the uses of words by non-philosophers.

Austronesian languages have long raised interesting questions for generative theories of syntax and morphology. The papers in this volume encompass some of these traditional questions and place them in newer theoretical contexts. Some of the papers also address new issues which add to our understanding of members of this language family on one side and the nature of linguistic theories on the other. There are three broad issues that re-occur throughout the volume - the role and analysis of verbal morphology, the nature of the subject or the topic in these languages, and the interaction of syntax and specificity. The papers in this volume show that as formal theories become more precise, a wider range of language data can be captured, and as the inventory of language data grows, the accuracy of formal linguistic theories improves.

In recent years, the study of events and their role as implicit arguments of predicates has been at the center of much important work in semantics and the syntax/semantics interface. This volume brings together fourteen original studies by leading scholars in semantics and the syntax/semantics interface, covering a broad spectrum of research into the role of events in grammar. The papers extensively address the following topics, among others: event arguments and thematic argument structure; the role of events in verbal aspectual distinctions; events and the distinction between stage and individual level predicates; the role of events in the analysis of plurality and scope relations, the mass/count distinction, and propositional attitudes.

Like the journal TOPOl, the TOPOl Library is based on the assumption that philosophy is a lively, provocative, delightful activity, which constantly challenges our inherited habits, painstakingly elaborates on how things could be different, in other stories, in counterfactual situations, in alternative possible worlds. Whatever its ideology, whether with the intent of uncovering a truer structure of reality or of shooting our anxiety, of exposing myths or of following them through, the outcome of philosophical activity is always the destabilizing, unsettling generation of doubts, of objections, of criticisms. It follows that this activity is intrinsically a dialogue, that philosophy is first and foremost philosophical discussion, that it requires bringing out conflicting points of view, paying careful, sympathetic attention to their structure, and using this dialectic to articulate one's approach, to make it richer, more thoughtful, more open to variation and play. And it follows that the spirit which one brings to this activity must be one of tolerance, of always suspecting one's own blindness and consequently looking with unbiased eye in every comer, without fearing to pass a (fallible) judgment on what is there but also without failing to show interest and respect.

1. 1 OBJECTIVES The main objective of this joint work is to bring together some ideas that have played central roles in two disparate theoretical traditions in order to con­ tribute to a better understanding of the relationship between focus and the syn­ tactic and semantic structure of sentences. Within the Prague School tradition and the branch of its contemporary development represented by Hajicova and Sgall (HS in the sequel), topic-focus articulation has long been a central object of study, and it has long been a tenet of Prague school linguistics that topic-focus structure has systematic relevance to meaning. Within the formal semantics tradition represented by Partee (BHP in the sequel), focus has much more recently become an area of concerted investigation, but a number of the semantic phenomena to which focus is relevant have been extensively investi­ gated and given explicit compositional semantic-analyses. The emergence of'tripartite structures'(see Chapter 2) in formal semantics and the partial simi­ larities that can be readily observed between some aspects of tripartite structures and some aspects of Praguian topic-focus articulation have led us to expect that a closer investigation of the similarities and differences in these different theoretical constructs would be a rewarding undertaking with mutual benefits for the further development of our respective theories and potential benefit for the study of semantic effects of focus in other theories as well.

How is linguistic theory related to linguistic practice? What do theoretical notions and models tell us about real-life language use? Are there any limits to what such notions and models can reasonably be taken to accomplish? These questions are fundamental to any serious investigation into the phenomena of human communication. The essays in this book show that philosophers and linguists of quite different brands have tended to give undue priority to their own favourite theoretical framework, and have presupposed that the descriptive scheme invoked by that framework constitutes a pattern to which any linguistic practice somehow has to conform. What unites the contributors to this volume is a critical attitude towards such essentialist aspirations. By investigating several concrete examples of this tendency - examples collected from such seemingly disparate areas as structuralism, contemporary analytic philosophy and feminist epistemology - the authors collectively manage to cast doubt on the very attempt to fit the whole of linguistic practice into a general theoretical mould.

Recent years have seen a revival of interest in morphology. The Yearbook of Morphology series supports and enforces this upswing of morphological research and gives an overview of the current issues and debates at the heart of this revival. The Yearbook of Morphology 1994 focuses on prosodic morphology, i.e. the interaction between morphological and prosodic structure, on the semantics of word formation, and on a number of related issues in the realm of inflection: the structure of paradigms, the relation between inflection and word formation, and patterns of language change with respect to inflection. There is also discussion of the relevance of the notion `level ordering'for morphological generalizations. All theoretical and historical linguists, morphologists, and phonologists will want to read this book.

A revival of interest in morphology has occurred during recent years. The aim of the Yearbook of Morphology series is to support and enforce this upswing of morphological research and to give an overview of the current issues and debates at the heart of this revival. The Yearbook of Morphology 1995 focuses on an important issue in the current morphological debate: the relation between inflection and word formation. What are the criteria for their demarcation, in which ways do they interact and how is this distinction acquired by children? The papers presented here concur in rejecting the `split morphology hypothesis'that claims that inflection and word formation belong to different components of the grammar. This volume also deals with the marked phenomenon of subtractive morphology and its theoretical implications. Theoretical and historical linguists, morphologists, phonologists and psycholinguists interested in linguistic issues will find this book of interest.

A revival of interest in morphology has occurred during recent years. Since 1988, the Yearbook of Morphology book series has proven to be an eminent platform for the growth of morphological research, containing articles on topics that are central in the current theoretical debates. The Yearbook of Morphology 1996 focuses on the relationship between morphology and psycholinguistics. Basic questions such as the following are discussed. To what extent does the morphological structure of a word play a role in its perception and production? Are regular complex words created anew each time they are used, or are they stored in the lexicon? The relevant evidence comes from a variety of European languages. Another important theme in this yearbook is the degree of autonomy of morphology: in which respect does it differ from other modules of the grammar? The present yearbook also contains articles on periphrasis, the nature of inflectional morphology and syncretism in derivational morphology. Audience: Theoretical and historical linguists, morphologists, phonologists and psycholinguists will find this book of interest.

Recent years have seen a revival of interest in morphology. The Yearbook of Morphology series supports and enforces this upswing of morphological research and gives an overview of the current issues and debates at the heart of this revival. The Yearbook of Morphology 1993 focuses on prosodic morphology, i.e. the interaction between morphological and prosodic structure, on the semantics of word formation, and on a number of related issues in the realm of inflection: the structure of paradigms, the relation between inflection and word formation, and patterns of language change with respect to inflection. There is also discussion of the relevance of the notion `level ordering'for morphological generalizations. All theoretical and historical linguists, morphologists, and phonologists will want to read this volume.

This volume contains the majority of the papers presented at the Fifth Annual Meeting of the Semiotic Society of America, held in Lubbock, Texas, October 16-19, 1980. The varied styles topics, methodologies, and intellectual traditions represented here reflect the current state of flux in semiotics--a healthy chaos, in which new ideas vie for survival and experiment is at a premium. Because of this variety, we have kept our editorial in­ terventions to a minimum. In addition, we have refrained from imposing any topical classification. While we could have used the panel titles as a taxonomic principle, this would not have produced a sufficiently even format. We have therefore uti­ lized the alphabetical order of authors'surnames as being os­ tensibly the least'loaded.'These Proceedings represent a current view of the'semi­ otic scene,'especially in the U.S.A. They also include some work representative of architectural semiotics from the U.K. We have tried to bring the volume to publication rapidly, since the immediacy of the contents would seem to be the pri­ mary asset of any such project. We would like to express the Society's collective grati­ tude to the 1980 Program Committee chaired by Richard Bauman (University of Texas-Austin), the Lubbock Local Arrangements Committee chaired by Nancy P. Hickerson (Texas Tech Universi­ ty), and our special thanks to Laurel Phipps of the School of Continuing Education at Texas Tech University.

Speakers can get to know the meaning of any of indefinitely many sentences that they have never heard before. This statement encapsulates the problem of linguistic creativity, which lies at the core of philosophy of language and theoretical linguistics. It has also sparked off a considerable amount of work on the philosophy of mind. After establishing the failure of the familiar compositional approach to the problem, the book adopts a radically new start. It develops core elements of the later Wittgenstein's conception of philosophy, putting them to work to`dissolve'the problem, proving it ill-framed by clarifying the questions posing it and breaking the spell of mistaken analogies that inform it. This sharply focused monograph thus has a dual aim: coping with a crucial problem that turns out to be a lot tougher than is generally supposed, and presenting a precise and rigorous demonstration of an unfamiliar and exciting philosophical approach. Audience: Clearly written and lucidly structured, the book addresses professional philosophers and advanced undergraduates alike.

This book is a collection of original research articles on the representation and in­ terpretation of indefinite and definite noun phrases, anaphoric pronouns, and closely related issues such as reference, scope and quantifier movement. A variety of frame­ works for the formal analysis of discourse semantics are represented, including dis­ course representation theory, file change semantics, dynamic Logic, E-type theories, and choice function approaches, which was one of the main issues the Konstanz project were concerned with. All of these frameworks are couched in the tradition of Montague Grammar, even though they extend the classical formalism in different directions. The developments emerged from the modern discussion of problems for the representation of cross-sentential anaphoric relations involving pronouns, and the interpretation of definite and indefinite noun phrases. After a decade of controversy, these approaches are merging together, enriching each other's formal mechanisms rather than expressing opposition. Thus, the articles in this volume concentrate on fundamental semantic questions, and also extend the current formalisms in order to capture more data. The roots of this book lie in the workshop'Reference and Anaphoric Relations', which was held at the University of Konstanz in June 1996. Five main issues were discussed: (i) the Stoic and scholastic treatment of reference and anaphora; (ii) quan­ tification and scope, (iii) anaphoric reference; (iv) the representation of indefinite NPs with choice functions; and (v) the relation between linguistic expressions, their rep­ resentations and their meanings.

Der Essay zur Natur der Sprache entwickelt eine neue und unvoreingenommene Sicht auf Sprache, die die wichtigsten Sprachbegriffe zunächst dekonstruiert, um daraufhin nach möglichen Rekonstruktionen zu suchen. Dabei werden nicht nur die aktuellen Diskurse der Bewusstseinsphilosophie, Sprachphilosophie und Allgemeinen Sprachwissenschaft, sondern auch der evolutionären Anthropologie und Kognitionspsychologie neu bewertet und zusammengeführt. Denn den einen Sprachbegriff gibt es nicht und ihn stets schon vorauszusetzen, wenn wir über Sprache diskutieren, bedeutet, bei der Suche nach der Sprache und den Antworten auf die Fragen, die von ihr abhängen, im Kreis zu gehen.

As its title states, this work formulates in language a sense of language, a sense of our involvement in speaking and listening, reading and writing. What it works out may be called the sense, only because it provides, or hopes to provide, an access to the myriad possibilities of language. In fact, if the four Chapters in any way'grind an axe', they do so with a view to decapitating the overweening contemporary tendency to hedge in language, to make some­ thing of a prison out of it... for ourselves. The reader should bear in mind that the purport of the work lies in learning the sense of language, not in teaching it. I grant a book is utterly worthless unless something of importance can be learned from it, but I also believe a philosophical book can not and (even if it tries) does not teach anything. There are indeed good books which teach and exposit material for the reader, but they are peripheral to the reflective domain. In my career as a teacher of sorts, I have discovered how difficult works like Aristotle's Metaphysics suddenly make sense to students when they finally read them as manuals for learning, handbooks suggesting what the reader can examine in order to understand not the book primarily, but his own experience of and thought upon things. My own work here will, I hope, be taken as something of a handbook.

This volume differs from the volume, Semiotics 1980, in that it is no longer an experimental product, but the result of a permanent commitment of the Semiotic Society of America to publish each year henceforward those papers presented at its Annual Meeting which are submitted to the Secretariat in timely and proper form. Thus Semiotics 1981 marks the beginning, following upon the experimental Semiotics 1980 volume, of an indefinite series of volumes presenting the cross-fertilization of styles, topics, methodologies, and traditions'in which new ideas vie for survival and experiment is at a premium.'It is this cross­ fertilization which is at the heart of the vitality and integration and redistribution of the world of knowledge. The historical value of such a record is obvious. But the more immediate objective of these volumes of annual proceedings is to promote participation in the work of'semioticizing'traditional perspectives and disciplines by providing a forum in which young scholars can meet regularly and find an outlet for their efforts at interdisciplinary thinking which are not always welcome in the journals and proceedings devoted to the promotion only of traditionally specialized perspectives.

The thirty-two papers in this collection are offered to Professor S.-Y. Kuroda by his friends, as a ge sture of their deep respect and enduring affection. One of the many ways in which Professor Kuroda has impressed us all is in the breadth of his interests and areas of expertise. He is one of those rare scholars whose work and interests span the whole range of his discipline. He is a figure of such intellectual stature that he has inspired, influenced, and encouraged researchers in an astonishing variety of projects. He continues to do so at an unslackened pace today, just as his own productivity remains vigorous. But mention of Yuki's inspiration and influence is inadequate without mention of his special humorousness, his mischievous wit, his charm and as a friend, has added a unique warmth. Knowing Yuki, and counting him quality to our lives. We who have contributed to this collection have done so in partial acknowledgement of, and gratitude for, this benign and masterful influence. The contributions to the collection reflect the range of Yuki's own interests, and cover a rich variety of approaches to the analysis of natural language. These include papers in philosophy, psychology, computer sciencel artificial intelligence, and linguistics, and, within linguistics, the entire breadth of the field: phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and computation. Though diverse in their themes, language areas, and foci, the papers are bound by their authors'common bond to Yuki.