How are non-declarative sentences understood? How do they differ semantically from their declarative counterparts? Answers to these questions once made direct appeal to the notion of illocutionary force. When they proved unsatisfactory, the fault was diagnosed as a failure to distinguish properly between mood and force. For some years now, efforts have been under way to develop a satisfactory account of the semantics of mood. In this paper, we consider the current achievements and future prospects of the mood-based semantic programme.

_ Convention_ was immediately recognized as a major contribution to the subject and its significance has remained undiminished since its first publication in 1969. Lewis analyzes social conventions as regularities in the resolution of recurring coordination problems-situations characterized by interdependent decision processes in which common interests are at stake. Conventions are contrasted with other kinds of regularity, and conventions governing systems of communication are given special attention.

A study of the contribution semantics makes to the syntactic patterns of English: an intepretive theory of grammar.

First published in 1976, this book presents a view of language as a matter of systematic communicative behaviour.

This reissue of his collection of early essays, Logico-Linguistic Papers, is published with a brand new introduction by Professor Strawson but, apart from minor ...

Noam Chomsky and other linguists and psychologists have suggested that human linguistic behavior is somehow governed by a mental representation of a transformational grammar. Challenges to this controversial claim have often been met by invoking an explicitly computational perspective: It makes perfect sense to suppose that a grammar could be represented in the memory of a computational device and that this grammar could govern the device's use of a language. This paper urges, however, that the claim that humans are such (...) a device is unsupported and that it seems unlikely that linguists and psychologists really want to claim any such thing. Evidence for the linguists' original claim is drawn from three main sources: the explanation of language comprehension and other linguistic abilities; evidence for formal properties of the rules of the grammar; and the explanation of language acquisition. It is argued in this paper that none of these sources provides support for the view that the grammar governs language processing in something like the way a program governs the operation of a programmed machine. The computational approach, on the contrary, suggests ways in which linguistic abilities can be explained without the attribution of any explicit representation of rules governing linguistic behavior. (shrink)

Dan Sperber, Deirdre Wilson; IX*—Loose Talk, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 86, Issue 1, 1 June 1986, Pages 153–172, https://doi.org/10.1093/ar.

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.

By a `denoting phrase' I mean a phrase such as any one of the following: a man, some man, any man, every man, all men, the present King of England, the present King of France, the center of mass of the solar system at the first instant of the twentieth century, the revolution of the earth round the sun, the revolution of the sun round the earth. Thus a phrase is denoting solely in virtue of its form. We may distinguish (...) three cases: (1) A phrase may be denoting, and yet not denote anything; e.g., `the present King of France'. (2) A phrase may denote one definite object; e.g., `the present King of England' denotes a certain man. (3) A phrase may denote ambiguously; e.g. `a man' denotes not many men, but an ambiguous man. The interpretation of such phrases is a matter of considerably difficulty; indeed, it is very hard to frame any theory not susceptible of formal refutation. All the difficulties with which I am acquainted are met, so far as I can discover, by the theory which I am about to explain. (shrink)

By a `denoting phrase' I mean a phrase such as any one of the following: a man, some man, any man, every man, all men, the present King of England, the present King of France, the center of mass of the solar system at the first instant of the twentieth century, the revolution of the earth round the sun, the revolution of the sun round the earth. Thus a phrase is denoting solely in virtue of its form. We may distinguish (...) three cases: (1) A phrase may be denoting, and yet not denote anything; e.g., `the present King of France'. (2) A phrase may denote one definite object; e.g., `the present King of England' denotes a certain man. (3) A phrase may denote ambiguously; e.g. `a man' denotes not many men, but an ambiguous man. The interpretation of such phrases is a matter of considerably difficulty; indeed, it is very hard to frame any theory not susceptible of formal refutation. All the difficulties with which I am acquainted are met, so far as I can discover, by the theory which I am about to explain. (shrink)

In the course of the discussion, Professor Quine pinpoints the difficulties involved in translation, brings to light the anomalies and conflicts implicit in our ...

A Border Disputeintegrates the latest work in logic and semantics into a theory of language learning and presents six worked examples of how that theory revolutionizes cognitive psychology. Macnamara's thesis is set against the background of a fresh analysis of the psychologism debate of the 19th-century, which led to the current standoff between logic and psychology. The book presents psychologism through the writings of John Stuart Mill and Immanuel Kant, and its rejection by Gottlob Frege and Edmund Husserl. It then (...) works out the general thesis that logic ideally presents a competence theory for part of human reasoning and explains how logical intuition is grounded in properties of the mind. The next six chapters present examples that illustrate the relevance of logic to psychology. These problems are all in the semantics of child language (the learning of proper names, personal pronouns, sortals or common nouns, quantifiers, and the truth-functional connectives) and reflect Macnamara's rich background in developmental psychology, particularly child language - a field, he points out, that embraces all of cognition. Technical problems raised by but not included in the examples in the main part of the text are dealt with in a separate chapter. The book concludes by describing laws in cognitive psychology, or the type of science made possible by Macnamara's new theory. John Macnamara is Professor of Psychology and Director of the Program in the History and Philosophy of Science, McGill University. A Bradford Book. (shrink)

In the opening sections of this paper, we defined ambiguity in terms of distinct sentences (for a single sentence-string) with, in particular, distinct sets of truth conditions for the corresponding negative sentence-string. Lexical vagueness was defined as equivalent to disjunction, for under conditions of the negation of a sentence-string containing such an expression, all the relevant more specific interpretations of the string had also to be negated. Yet in the case of mixed quantification sentences, the strengthened, more specific, interpretations of (...) some such positive string are not all of them necessarily implied to be false if the corresponding negative sentence-string is asserted. On the contrary, as we saw in section 6, a negative sentence-string can be used to deny one of the more specific interpretations of the corresponding positive string without also denying other weaker interpretations of that same string. One might therefore argue that the only empirical evidence availble for assessing quantified sentences suggests clearly that these sentence-strings are ambiguous. Indeed logicians, many of whom restrict their attention to propositions, MUST recognise logical ambiguity at this point. For the contextualisation of the negative sentences in section 6 showed that it was possible to assert the falsity of some proposition P expressed by the sentence S while asserting a further proposition which was compatible with the truth of S. However the corresponding conclusion that such sentence-strings are sententially ambiguous is not a necessary conclusion for the linguist: for the alternative account of postulating a single semantic representation plus a set of semantic procedures is also compatible with the negation evidence. Moreover we have seen independent reasons for thinking that if sentential ambiguity is assumed to be in one-to-one correspondence with what we should now call logical ambiguity, a considerable body of generalisations is lost. For the maximal ambiguity account, it should be recalled, is committed to assigning at least thirteen distinct propositions and hence thirteen distinct sentence outputs for every sentence-string containing no more than two quantifiers, for three out of the four interpretations originally outlined in this paper can be understood with each numeral taken either in an ’exactly’ sense or in an ’at least’ sense. Moreover there is no explanation of why just these interpretations are available-they are merely an arbitrary list, no more connected than are the two interpretations of John saw her duck, with no reason to predict that the ambiguity would carry over from language to language. If then it is granted that an ambiguity account fails to capture appropriate generalisations, only two alternative accounts of mixed quantification sentence-strings remain viable-an analysis proposing an initial co-ordinate logical form like the logical form III, which is the strongest form compatible with each of the propositional interpretations of sentence-string Two examiners marked six scripts, and the radically weak form in which only existential quantification (both over sets and over members of those sets) is invoked. Since there are strong arguments to suggest that the procedures which both analyses require are semantic, there seems no reason not to adopt the radical vagueness account, with its considerably greater simplicity. (shrink)

INTRODUCTION Linguists who work within the tradition of transformational generative grammar tend to regard semantics as an intractable, perhaps ultimately ...

Definite descriptions, I shall argue, have two possible functions. 1] They are used to refer to what a speaker wishes to talk about, but they are also used quite differently. Moreover, a definite description occurring in one and the same sentence may, on different occasions of its use, function in either way. The failure to deal with this duality of function obscures the genuine referring use of definite descriptions. The best known theories of definite descriptions, those of Russell and Strawson, (...) I shall suggest, are both guilty of this. Before discussing this distinction in use, I will mention some features of these theories to which it is especially relevant. (shrink)

The concept of metaphor as primarily a vehicle for conveying ideas, even if unusual ones, seems to me as wrong as the parent idea that a metaphor has a special meaning. I agree with the view that metaphors cannot be paraphrased, but I think this is not because metaphors say something too novel for literal expression but because there is nothing there to paraphrase. Paraphrase, whether possible or not, inappropriate to what is said: we try, in paraphrase, to say it (...) another way. But if I am right, a metaphor doesn't say anything beyond its literal meaning . This is not, of course, to deny that a metaphor has a point, nor that that point can be brought out by using further words. . . . My disagreement is with the explanation of how metaphor works its wonders. To anticipate: I depend on the distinction between what words mean and what they are used to do. I think metaphor belongs exclusively to the domain of use. It is something brought off by the imaginative employment of words and sentences and depends entirely on the ordinary meanings of those words and hence on the ordinary meanings of the sentences they comprise. Donald Davidson is University Professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago. He is the author of many important essays, including "Actions, Reasons and Causes," "Causal Relations," and "Truth and Meaning," coauthor of Decision-Making: An Experimental Approach, and coeditor of Words and Objections, Semantics of Natural Language, and The Logic of Grammar. (shrink)

The concept of metaphor as primarily a vehicle for conveying ideas, even if unusual ones, seems to me as wrong as the parent idea that a metaphor has a special meaning. I agree with the view that metaphors cannot be paraphrased, but I think this is not because metaphors say something too novel for literal expression but because there is nothing there to paraphrase. Paraphrase, whether possible or not, inappropriate to what is said: we try, in paraphrase, to say it (...) another way. But if I am right, a metaphor doesn't say anything beyond its literal meaning. This is not, of course, to deny that a metaphor has a point, nor that that point can be brought out by using further words.... My disagreement is with the explanation of how metaphor works its wonders. To anticipate: I depend on the distinction between what words mean and what they are used to do. I think metaphor belongs exclusively to the domain of use. It is something brought off by the imaginative employment of words and sentences and depends entirely on the ordinary meanings of those words and hence on the ordinary meanings of the sentences they comprise. Donald Davidson is University Professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago. He is the author of many important essays, including "Actions, Reasons and Causes," "Causal Relations," and "Truth and Meaning," coauthor of Decision-Making: An Experimental Approach, and coeditor of Words and Objections, Semantics of Natural Language, and The Logic of Grammar. (shrink)

Martin Davies; V*—Idiom and Metaphor, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 83, Issue 1, 1 June 1983, Pages 67–86, https://doi.org/10.1093/aristotelia.

In exploring the nature of psychological explanation, this book looks at how psychologists theorize about the human ability to calculate, to speak a language and the like. It shows how good theorizing explains or tries to explain such abilities as perception and cognition. It recasts the familiar explanations of "intelligence" and "cognitive capacity" as put forward by philosophers such as Fodor, Dennett, and others in terms of a theory of explanation that makes established doctrine more intelligible to professionals and their (...) students.In particular, the book shows that vestigial adherence to the positivists' D-N model has distorted the view of philosophers of science about what psychologists (and biologists) do and has masked the real nature of explanation. Major sections in the book cover Analysis and Subsumption; Functional Analysis; Understanding Cognitive Capacities; and Historical Reflections.Robert Cummins is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Illinois, Chicago Circle. A Bradford Book. (shrink)

APA PsycNET abstract: This is the first volume of a two-volume work on Probability and Induction. Because the writer holds that probability logic is identical with inductive logic, this work is devoted to philosophical problems concerning the nature of probability and inductive reasoning. The author rejects a statistical frequency basis for probability in favor of a logical relation between two statements or propositions. Probability "is the degree of confirmation of a hypothesis (or conclusion) on the basis of some given evidence (...) (or premises)." Furthermore, all principles and theorems of inductive logic are analytic, and the entire system is to be constructed by means of symbolic logic and semantic methods. This means that the author confines himself to the formalistic procedures of word and symbol systems. The resulting sentence or language structures are presumed to separate off logic from all subjectivist or psychological elements. Despite the abstractionism, the claim is made that if an inductive probability system of logic can be constructed it will have its practical application in mathematical statistics, and in various sciences. 16-page bibliography. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

Provides a comprehensive introduction to the major philosophical theories attempting to explain the workings of language.

a comprehensive, somewhat Gricean theory of speech acts, including an account of communicative intentions and inferences, a taxonomy of speech acts, and coverage of many topics in pragmatics -/- .