Written in an outstandingly clear and lively style, this 1969 book provokes its readers to rethink issues they may have regarded as long since settled.

Part I The Imperative Mood 'Virtue, then, is a disposition governing our choices '. ARISTOTLE, Eth. Nic. 36 Prescriptive Language. ...

What is it for marks or sounds to have meaning, and what is it for someone to mean something in producing them? Answering these and related questions, Schiffer explores communication, speech acts, convention, and the meaning of linguistic items in this reissue of a seminal work on the foundations of meaning. A new introduction takes account of recent developments and places his theory in a broader context.

Originally published in 1973, this book shows that methods developed for the semantics of systems of formal logic can be successfully applied to problems about the semantics of natural languages; and, moreover, that such methods can take account of features of natural language which have often been thought incapable of formal treatment, such as vagueness, context dependence and metaphorical meaning. Parts 1 and 2 set out a class of formal languages and their semantics. Parts 3 and 4 show that these (...) formal languages are rich enought to be used in the precise description of natural languages. Appendices describe some of the concepts discussed in the text. (shrink)

"The influence of J. L. Austin on contemporary philosophy, which ranks with that of Wittgenstein, was substantial during his lifetime and has grown greatly since his death in 1960, at the height of his powers. His published papers are here gathered together with three pieces that had not been published when this collection first appeared in 1961. This new edition contains two additional papers edited, with the assistance of the original editors, by L. W. Forguson and J. M. E. Moravcsik, (...) that were published till later..." - Back cover. (shrink)

Evidence is presented to show that the role of a generative grammar of a natural language is not merely to generate the grammatical sentences of that language, but also to relate them to their logical forms. The notion of logical form is to be made sense of in terms a natural logic, a logical for natural language, whose goals are to express all concepts capable of being expressed in natural language, to characterize all the valid inferences that can be made (...) in natural language, and to mesh with adequate linguistic descriptions of all natural languages. The latter requirement imposes empirical linguistic constraints on natural logic. A number of examples are discussed. (shrink)

Theories of adverbial modification can be roughly distinguished into two sorts. One kind of theory takes logical form to follow surface grammatical form. Adverbs are treated as unanalyzable logical operators that turn a predicate or sentence into a different predicate or sentence respectively. And new rules of logic are stated for these operators. -/- A different kind of theory does not suppose that logical form must parallel surface grammatical form. It allows that logical form may have more to do with (...) deeper structures that might be studied in transformational grammar. Adverbs are treated as surface forms of the underlying predicates represented by corresponding adjectives and verbs. 'Slowly' is derived from 'slow'; 'intentionally' from 'intentional' or 'intend'; etc. And new rules of logic are avoided where they can be. -/- In this paper I attempt to state some of the advantages of the second sort of theory. My procedure will be this. First, I will try to say in outline what theories of logical form are. Then I will state five principles for evaluating such theories. Next, I will sketch the sorts of analyses acceptance of principles (1)-(5) leads to. In particular I will talk about adverbial phrases (e.g. locatives) that are best analyzed in terms of implicit references to events, relative modifiers (like 'large') which relate something to a comparison class, and 'that' clauses taken as names of propositions. By appealing to principles (1)-(5) I will defend these analyses against certain others, one that appeals to many logical operators, a second that treats all sentences as names of propositions, and a third that sees implicit reference to possible worlds in the language being analyzed. Finally, I will offer a pragmatic defense of my approach in terms of principles (1)-(5) as against a different approach that appeals to possible world semantics. (shrink)

This book contains papers from a colloquium held in 1973 at Kings College, Cambridge. The contributions deal with the number of questions on which a great deal of current linguistic research and writing focus. These include the problem of quantification and reference in natural language; the application of formal logic to natural language semantics; the semantics of non-declarative sentences; the relation between natural language semantics and programming languages; the relation between sentences and their contexts of use; discourse meaning; and the (...) relation between surface syntax and logical meaning. An adequate treatment of these issues requires the interaction of a number of different linguistic approaches. As one of the contributors to the volume points out, there recently have developed three major new developments in areas of research into linguistic phenomena: transformational grammar, formal logic, and speech act theory. Although no one of these are represented singly in this volume, a number of the problems which are discussed involve issues which depend on the interfaces between these various approaches. (shrink)