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...

Metaphors and Logic Metaphors are among the most vigorous offspring of the creative mind; but their vitality springs from the fact that they are logical organisms in the ecology of l- guage. I aim to use logical techniques to analyze the meanings of metaphors. My goal here is to show how contemporary formal semantics can be extended to handle metaphorical utterances. What distinguishes this work is that it focuses intensely on the logical aspects of metaphors. I stress the role of lo...

This anthology of papers analyzes a range of specificity markers found in natural languages. It reflects the fact that despite intensive research into these markers, the vast differences between the markers across languages and even within single languages have been less acknowledged. Commonly regarded specific indefinites are by no means a homogenous class, and so this volume fills a gap in our understanding of the semantics and pragmatics of indefinites.The papers explore differe...

The book combines a historical and philosophical study of Russell's theory of descriptions. It defends, develops and extends the theory as a contribution to natural language semantics while also arguing for a reassessment of the important of linguistic inquiry to Russell's philosophical project.

This book showcases the history and theory of pragmatism and its alignment to the sensibilities of contemporary analytic philosophy. It does this not only by describing its mode of operation and explaining its legitimating rationale, but also by substantiating its claims by a series of instructive case studies.The unifying insight of this approach is that the natural criterion of merit within any goal-oriented enterprise—be its orientation practical or cognitive—pivots on its contr...

Are natural languages genuinely compositional? What roles does context play in linguistic communication, and by what means? In particular, does context interfere with the compositional determination of truth conditions? What meanings should theorists assign to sentences if compositionality is to be retained? These are the central questions of this important volume of new philosophical essays in honour of Ernie Lepore.

The authors explore some of the ways in which standardization, ideology and linguistics are interrelated. Through a number of case studies they show how concepts such as grammaticality and structural change covertly rely on a false conceptualization of language, one that derives ultimately from standardization.

Covering a strikingly diverse range of languages from 12 linguistic families, this handbook is based on responses to a questionnaire constructed by the editors. Focusing on the formation, distribution and semantic interpretation of quantificational expressions, the book explores 17 languages including German, Italian, Russian, Mandarin Chinese, Malagasy, Hebrew, Pima, Basque, and more. The language data sets enable detailed crosslinguistic comparison of numerous features. These include sem...

Victor Dudman's revolutionary English Grammar brings grammar and logic together by conceiving grammar as 'the necessary preliminary to logic'. The focus, for logicians, is the discussion of 'conditionals'; for grammarians it is the concise and accurate explanation of the infamous English modals.

In this book we hope to acquaint the reader with the fundamentals of truth conditional model-theoretic semantics, and in particular with a version of this developed by Richard Montague in a series of papers published during the 1960's and early 1970's. In many ways the paper 'The Proper Treatment of Quantification in Ordinary English' (commonly abbreviated PTQ) represents the culmination of Montague's efforts to apply the techniques developed within mathematical logic to the semantics of n...

This volume presents studies on pronouns in embedded contexts, and offers fundamental insights into this central area of research. Much of the recent research on pronouns has shown that embedded environments, such as clausal complements of attitude predicates, provide a window into the nature of pronouns. Pronouns in such environments not only exhibit familiar distinctions such as that between bound and referential pronouns; if they refer to the attitude holder, they also participate in a ...

Kaun&ddotu;abhatta's Vaiyakarana-bhusana is a massive work on semantic theory written in India in the 17th century. Kaun&ddotu;abhatta belonged to the tradition of Sanskrit grammar and in this work he consolidated the philosophy of language developed in the Paninian tradition of Sanskrit grammar. Kaun&ddotu;abhatta's work takes account of the philosophical debate which occurred in classical and medieval India among the philosophers and grammarians from about 500 B.C. to the 17th c...