Methodology of Linguistics

María José Rincón González nació en Sevilla (España) y reside en República Dominicana desde 1992. Es miembro de número de la Academia Dominicana de la Lengua (ADL) desde el 2011 y directora del Instituto Guzmán Ariza de Lexicografía. Asimismo, es miembro correspondiente de la Real Academia Española (RAE) y miembro del consejo asesor de Fundéu Guzmán Ariza. Con respecto a su formación superior, es doctora en Filología por la Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (UNED) y máster en Lexicografía por (...) la Universidad de Sevilla y la UNED. Ha participado en congresos internacionales y ha contribuido en las ediciones de diccionarios del idioma español. Entre sus publicaciones de artículos, se encuentran las que pertenecen al Diario Libre y el Boletín de la Academia Dominicana de la Lengua, entre otros textos, tales como “La antroponimia femenina dominicana (1945-1995)” (2002), “El Diccionario de la lengua” (2013), “Presentación del Diccionario de americanismos de la ASALE” (2013), “Variantes dialectales del léxico dominicano en el Diccionario de americanismos” (2016), “La lematización de variantes gráficas en el Diccionario del español dominicano” (2017) y “El Diccionario de criollismos, primer diccionario dominicano” (2020). De igual modo, ha publicado en libros y capítulos de libros. Entre ellos se encuentran el Diccionario del español dominicano (2013), “El nacimiento de un nuevo diccionario: el Diccionario del español dominicano” (2017) y De la eñe a la zeta (2019). (shrink)

El propósito de este artículo es caracterizar la fuente de Sucesos en una de las ciudades más peligrosas del mundo. Para ello, se aplicará una metodología de análisis y de sistematización gramatical crítico-descriptivo de la redacción, a la luz de la gramática, de las normas ortográficas y de criterios de lingüistas clásicos, contemporáneos y de periodistas- lingüistas. Estas subcategorías pueden emplearse en otra fuente periodística de cualquier otro medio de comunicación hispanoparlante y también arrojarán un diagnóstico lingüístico sobre la redacción. (...) Aunque se recurre a la lingüística aplicada, el enfoque será periodístico y gramatical. El corpus está compuesto por 149 notas de Sucesos, de las cuales se tomaron en cuenta títulos y cuerpos de las notas. Esta investigación reflejará las implicaciones éticas de, por ejemplo, el uso de la voz pasiva y del gerundio o de la omisión de las comillas. (shrink)

Compte tenu de la critique de la méthodologie de la recherche interdisciplinaire dominante impliquant des études linguistiques comme élément principal, en particulier la linguistique clinique, Cummings (2014) propose qu’« il est peut-être approprié à ce stade de déplacer le débat sur des bases non empiriques ». Dans Cummings (2014), elle entame un tel débat sur la base de la philosophie de la langue et de la pragmatique. Dans cet article, je propose d’élargir ce débat en incluant l’apport de la philosophie (...) de la science. Je présente la façon dont on peut mener des recherches linguistiques dans le paradigme des sciences empiriques tel qu’exposé dans Bunge (1967, 1973, 2003) et limité par l’hypothèse d’Altmann (1978) sur la nature autocréée et autorégulatrice du langage. (shrink)

In view of the critique of the methodology of the dominant interdisciplinary re-search involving language studies as the main component, in particular clinical linguistics, Cummings (2014) proposes that “It is perhaps appropriate at this point to move the debate onto non-empirical grounds.” In Cummings (2014: 113) she starts such a debate on the grounds of the philosophy of language and pragmatics. In this article, I propose to expand that debate by including the input of the philosophy of science. I start (...) the discussion by presenting the way one may carry out language research in the paradigm of empirical sciences from the perspective outlined in Bunge (1967, 1973, 2003) and constrained by Altmann’s (1978) assumption about self-originating and self-regulatory nature of language. (shrink)

The Minimalist Program in generative linguistics is predicated on the idea that simplicity is a defining property of the human language faculty, on the one hand; on the other, a central aim of linguistic theorising. Worryingly, however, justifications for either claim are hard to come by in the literature. We sketch a proposal that would allow for both shortcomings to be addressed, and that furthermore honours the program’s declared commitment to naturalism. We begin by teasing apart and clarifying the different (...) conceptions of simplicity underlying generative inquiry, in both ontological and theoretical capacities. We then trace a path towards a more robust justification for each type of simplicity principle, drawing on recent work in cognitive science and in philosophy of science, respectively. The resulting proposal hinges on the idea that simplicity is an evolved, virtuous cognitive bias—one that is a condition of our scientific understanding and, ultimately, of successful scientific practice. Finally, we make a case for why minimalists should take this proposal seriously, on the one hand; and for why generative linguistics would make for an interesting case study for philosophy of science, on the other. (shrink)

In response to our recent claim that ‘Readers are parallel processors’, our peers have voiced several ideas that will undoubtedly help illuminate the road to scientific consensus about the reading brain. Schotter and Payne echo our plea for bridging traditionally isolated literatures. In terms of theory, our model OB1-reader is one attempt to do just that: specifically, it bridges the domains of single word recognition and eye movements in text reading. Equally important is the integration of methodologies, of which Schotter (...) and Payne highlight an excellent instance – the combination of eye-tracking and electroencephalography, which arguably provides a more direct window onto the cognitive processes driving reading while ecologically approximating a natural setting. We trust that such set ups will help verify whether the cognitive architecture as inferred with artificial paradigms indeed pertains to natural reading. (shrink)

Mitte der fünfziger Jahre entsteht mit den Arbeiten der amerikanischen Linguisten Zellig S. Harris und Noam Chomsky die Theorie der generativen (Transformations-)Grammatiken a) Chomskys Grammatikmodell in den "Aspects" ... b) Entwicklung der Theorie ... nach 1965 ...

This paper discusses how the association learning principle works for supporting acquisition of basic spelling and reading skills using digital game-based learning environment with the Finland-based GraphoLearn technology. This program has been designed and validated to work with early readers of different alphabetic writing systems using repetition and reinforcing connections between spoken and written units. Initially GL was developed and found effective in training children at risk of reading disorders in Finland. Today GL training has been shown to support learning (...) decoding skills among children independent of whether they face difficulties resulting from educational, social, or biological reasons. (shrink)

For a long time, the accepted explanatory model of language acquisition was the so-called Principles and Parameters framework (P&P). P&P seemingly provides an elegant answer to the central puzzle of generative linguistics: How do children acquire their native language given the limited time and input resources available to them? Yet P&P tells a story that is evolutionarily implausible, and for this reason it has since been abandoned. I argue that this is an unwarranted move, and that it could and should (...) be avoided by reassessing the epistemic status of P&P. In particular, I argue that contrary to extant accounts, P&P ought to be retrospectively construed as a highly idealized (toy) model of language acquisition. The proposed reinterpretation is vindicated, I argue, insofar as it paves the way for a reconciliation of the two central explanatory challenges of modern generative linguistics. (shrink)

Pragmatic theories and computational models of reference must account for people’s frequent use of redundant color adjectives (e.g., referring to a single triangle as “the blue triangle”). The standard pragmatic view holds that the informativity of a referential expression depends on pragmatic contrast: Color adjectives should be used to contrast competitors of the same kind to preempt an ambiguity (e.g., between several triangles of different colors), otherwise they are redundant. Here we propose an alternative to the standard view, the incremental (...) efficiency hypothesis, according to which the efficiency of a referential expression must be calculated incrementally over the entire visual context. This is the first theoretical account of referential efficiency that is sensitive to the incrementality of language processing, making different cross-linguistic predictions depending on word order. Experiment 1 confirmed that English speakers produced more redundant color adjectives (e.g., “the blue triangle”) than Spanish speakers (e.g., “el triángulo azul”), but both language groups used more redundant color adjectives in denser displays where it would be more efficient. In Experiments 2A and 2B, we used eye tracking to show that pragmatic contrast is not a processing constraint. Instead, incrementality and efficiency determine that English listeners establish color contrast across categories (BLUE SHAPES > TRIANGULAR ONE), whereas Spanish listeners establish color contrast within a category (TRIANGLES > BLUE ONE). Spanish listeners, however, reversed their visual search strategy when tested in English immediately after. Our results show that speakers and listeners of different languages exploit word order to increase communicative efficiency. (shrink)

Among theories of human language comprehension, cue‐based memory retrieval has proven to be a useful framework for understanding when and how processing difficulty arises in the resolution of long‐distance dependencies. Most previous work in this area has assumed that very general retrieval cues like [+subject] or [+singular] do the work of identifying (and sometimes misidentifying) a retrieval target in order to establish a dependency between words. However, recent work suggests that general, handpicked retrieval cues like these may not be enough (...) to explain illusions of plausibility (Cunnings & Sturt, 2018), which can arise in sentences like The letter next to the porcelain plate shattered. Capturing such retrieval interference effects requires lexically specific features and retrieval cues, but handpicking the features is hard to do in a principled way and greatly increases modeler degrees of freedom. To remedy this, we use well‐established word embedding methods for creating distributed lexical feature representations that encode information relevant for retrieval using distributed retrieval cue vectors. We show that the similarity between the feature and cue vectors (a measure of plausibility) predicts total reading times in Cunnings and Sturt’s eye‐tracking data. The features can easily be plugged into existing parsing models (including cue‐based retrieval and self‐organized parsing), putting very different models on more equal footing and facilitating future quantitative comparisons. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to present a model of journalistic or advertising writing analysis, taking into account four linguistic areas: syntax, semantics, orthography and morphology, within an ethical perspective. The foundation is based on what I call the "ethics of the word", which does not apply exclusively to journalism or linguistics; it is transversal. Journalists ought to pay special attention to language so that in the pretense of information they do not fall into the vice of misinformation. Through (...) critical hermeneutics, the linguistic analysis methodology is taken to clothe it with an ethical orientation, either because of the pursuit of excellence in the work instrument by journalists, because of their responsibility with the language or with the creation of public opinion. (shrink)

The manuscript presents a summary of the results of the linguistic semantics study of Covid-19 related quarantine. Research conducted on a sample of Russian speaking Ukrainians. Found content and structure of the respective discursive field. Described features of inter-discourse connections. Established that the actualization of some discourses is accompanied by the deactivation of others, what makes quarantine semantics biased. Also, it was suggested that some of the discourses are indirectly positively associated and form the semantic core of the quarantine concept.

This is a teaching guide companion to the main article published in Philosophy Compass. It offers insights into how one might go about designing a course in the philosophy of linguistics at advanced undergrad/graduate level. Readings and possible core questions are included.

Resumo: O objetivo deste trabalho é compreender o funcionamento das dificuldades e dos obstáculos decorrentes dos procedimentos automáticos no desenvolvimento da teoria discursiva. Para esta tarefa, o material de análise é composto pelos textos analíticos resultados do projeto da Análise Automática do Discurso (AAD). A pesquisa toma o prisma de investigação da História das Ideias Linguísticas na relação com os princípios da Análise de Discurso, buscando o funcionamento discursivo do material em sua relação com os processos político-ideológicos nas suas formas (...) institucionais, disciplinares e textuais. Na releitura do arquivo disciplinar, cotejando com algumas notas, relatos e contextualizações, são descritos aspectos menos conhecidos sobre a história da AAD, mostrando a força do que é designado neste artigo como um “materialismo discursivo” desenvolvido também pelo seu encontro com a automatização/informatização. Abstract: The objective of this paper is to understand the functioning of difficulties and obstacles from automatic procedures in the development of the discursive theory. For this task, the analysis material is composed by the analytical texts of the Automatic Analysis of Discourse (AAD) project. The research takes the investigative prism of the History of Linguistic Ideas in relation with the principles of Discourse Analysis, seeking the discursive functioning of the material in its relationship with the political-ideological processes in their institutional, disciplinary and textual forms. In the rereading of the disciplinary archive, collating with some notes, reports and contextualizations slight known aspects of the history of AAD are described, showing the strength of what is designated in this paper as a “discursive materialism” developed also by its encounter with automation / informatization. (shrink)

Recursion: A Computational Investigation into the Representation and Processing of Language. By Lobina David.

Against Davidson's criticism of the usual notion of a natural language, Dummett and most philosophers of language have argued that such a notion is necessary to account for the normativity of meaning and to avoid declaring meaningless much of our everyday talk on languages. This paper tries to show that both worries are unjustified by arguing that: 1) It is possible to talk of linguistic mistakes without commitment to natural languages in the usual sense; 2) The rejection of natural languages (...) in the usual sense does not entail the possibility of non-trivially private languages; 3) The rejection of natural languages in the usual sense does not entail that conventionalized languages do not exist, but only that their existence is not necessary for linguistic communication. /// Frente a la crítica de Davidson a la noción usual de lenguaje natural, Dummett y, con él, la mayoría de los filósofos del lenguaje sostienen que dicha noción es imprescindible para dar cuenta de la normatividad del significado y para evitar declarar carente de sentido buena parte de nuestro discurso ordinario sobre los lenguajes. El trabajo trata de mostrar que ambas objeciones son injustificadas argumentando que: 1) Puede hablarse de errores lingüísticos sin necesidad de aceptar la existencia de lenguajes en el sentido usual; 2) La crítica de los lenguajes naturales en el sentido usual no implica la posibilidad de lenguajes no trivialmente privados; 3) La crítica de los lenguajes naturales en el sentido usual no implica que no haya lenguajes convencionalizados, sólo que la existencia de éstos no es una conditíon de posibilidad de la comunicación lingüística. (shrink)

The question asked by the title of this book is certainly one which haunts much philosophical inquiry in this century. It is a question worth asking, and Hacking warns us not to expect to find some one, general answer to it. Instead of embarking on an abstract consideration of this issue, the author undertakes a series of case studies dealing with particular philosophers to see how they have approached language and its relation to philosophy. His inquiry falls into three main (...) parts: part A, entitled "The Heyday of Ideas," which deals with philosophical work done in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; part B, "The Heyday of Meaning," which deals with early twentieth century atomist/positivistic approaches to philosophy and language; and part C, "The Heyday of Sentences," which considers contemporary philosophers who study theory construction and sentential systems. There are many philosophers whom Hacking examines: part A includes a discussion of Hobbes, Locke, and Berkeley, as well as the logic of the Port Royal school; part B discusses Chomsky, Russell, Wittgenstein, and Ayer; and part C discusses Feyerabend and Davidson, as well as introducing some of the ideas of Quine and Popper. (shrink)

This volume is concerned with issues in experimental philosophy and experimental linguistics. Examining experiments in language from a variety of perspectives, it asks what form they should take and what should count as evidence. There is particular focus on the status of linguistic intuitions and the use of language corpora. A number of papers address issues of methodology in experimental work, while other contributions examine the use of thought experiments and what the hypothetical can tell us about the actual. The (...) aim of this collection is to bring together the work of linguists and philosophers in order that they may learn from one another, and to help both groups understand how the use of experimental methods can affect the arguments they employ and the claims they make. (shrink)

Machery et al. claim that analytic philosophers of language are committed to a method of cases according to which theories of reference are assessed by consulting semantic intuitions about actual and possible cases. Since empirical evidence suggests that such intuitions vary both within and across cultures, these experimental semanticists conclude that the traditional attempt at pursuing such theories is misguided. Against the backdrop of Kripke’s anti-descriptivist arguments, this paper offers a novel response to the challenge posed by Machery et al., (...) arguing that they either misplace or exaggerate the role played by. The lesson is that while semantic intuitions carry evidential weight in evaluating certain subjunctive conditionals reflecting counterfactual possibilities, they neither play an epistemic role in determining the actual reference of proper names, nor in evaluating certain indicative conditionals reflecting so-called counteractual possibilities. Moreover, once an asymmetry is acknowledged in Machery et al’s vignette between the narrator and the subject’s suppositions about the actual world, a corresponding ambiguity can account for the alleged culturally determined variation in semantic intuitions. (shrink)

To view language as a cultural tool challenges much of what claims to be linguistic science while opening up a new people-centred linguistics. On this view, how we speak, think and act depends on, not just brains, but also cultural traditions. Yet, Everett is conservative: like others trained in distributional analysis, he reifies ‘words’. Though rejecting inner languages and grammatical universals, he ascribes mental reality to a lexicon. Reliant as he is on transcriptions, he takes the cognitivist view that brains (...) represent word-forms. By contrast, in radical embodied cognitive theory, bodily dynamics themselves act as cues to meaning. Linguistic exostructures resemble tools that constrain how people concert acting-perceiving bodies. The result is unending renewal of verbal structures: like artefacts and institutions, they function to sustain a species-specific cultural ecology. As Ross argues, ecological extensions make human cognition hypersocial. When we link verbal patterns with lived experience, we communicate and cognise by fitting action/perception to cultural practices that anchor human meaning making. (shrink)

Michael Devitt is a distinguished philosopher of language. In this book he takes up one of the most important difficulties that must be faced by philosophical semantics: namely, the threat posed by holism. Three important questions lie at the core of this book: what are the main objectives of semantics; why are they worthwhile; how should we accomplish them? Devitt answers these 'methodological' questions naturalistically and explores what semantic programme arises from the answers. The approach is anti-Cartesian, rejecting the idea (...) that linguistic or conceptual competence yields any privileged access to meanings. This new methodology is used first against holism. Devitt argues for a truth-referential localism, and in the process rejects direct-reference, two-factor, and verificationist theories. The book concludes by arguing against revisionism, eliminativism, and the idea that we should ascribe narrow meanings to explain behaviour. (shrink)

Dire que la linguistique est la science du langage est un truisme. Pourtant, tout ici est obscur et facteur de confusions, à commencer par la multiplicité des écoles de linguistique. Mais on peut et doit supposer que, par-delà les différences qui les séparent les unes des autres, il existe un programme général : construire une science du langage. Reste à exposer ce programme dans son détail et à mettre au jour les propositions qui le rendent légitime. -/- La première tâche (...) est de reprendre la question à son fondement : si l'on entend la science au sens strict que lui donnait Galilée, la linguistique peut-elle s'en réclamer et se distinguer ainsi des pratiques fort anciennes qu'on regroupe sous le nom de grammaire ? Quel type d'objet est désigné quand on parle de langage ? -/- Sur la science, sur le langage, sur la linguistique, sur la grammaire, l'auteur s'est donc proposé de prendre au sérieux toutes les interrogations légitimes, et de montrer comment elles s'articulent. (shrink)

This paper argues against Zoltán Szabó’s claim in “Compositionality as Supervenience” that we ought to understand the principle of compositionality as the idea that in natural language, the meanings of complex expressions strongly supervene on the meanings of their constituents and how the constituents are combined. The argument is that if we understand compositionality Szabó’s way, then compositionality can play no role in explanations of the acquirability of natural languages, because it makes these explanations circular. This, in turn, would undermine (...) the primary motivation for thinking that natural language is compositional, and would thus undermine the importance of the principle in natural language semantics. Thus, even if Szabó’s reading of the principle best accords with theorists’ intuitions about what sorts of languages are compositional—as he claims it does—there is good reason to reject that reading. Finally, the paper defends the claim that we ought to think of the principle as the idea that in natural language, the meanings of complexes weakly supervene on the meanings of their constituents and how they are combined. (shrink)

A variety of theoretical frameworks predict the resemblance of behaviors between two people engaged in communication, in the form of coordination, mimicry, or alignment. However, little is known about the time course of the behavior matching, even though there is evidence that dyads synchronize oscillatory motions (e.g., postural sway). This study examined the temporal structure of nonoscillatory actions—language, facial, and gestural behaviors—produced during a route communication task. The focus was the temporal relationship between matching behaviors in the interlocutors (e.g., facial (...) behavior in one interlocutor vs. the same facial behavior in the other interlocutor). Cross-recurrence analysis revealed that within each category tested (language, facial, gestural), interlocutors synchronized matching behaviors, at temporal lags short enough to provide imitation of one interlocutor by the other, from one conversational turn to the next. Both social and cognitive variables predicted the degree of temporal organization. These findings suggest that the temporal structure of matching behaviors provides low-level and low-cost resources for human interaction. (shrink)

Classical cognitive science has been characterized by an association with the computational theory of mind. Although this association has produced highly significant results, it has also limited the scope of scientific psychology. In this paper, we analyse the limits of the specific kind of computational model represented by the Chomskian-Fodorian tradition in the study of mind and language. In our opinion, the adhesion to the principle of formality imposed by this specific computational model has motivated the exclusion of consciousness in (...) the reflection on language and, consequently, has led to the inability to account for some aspects of language functioning at the processing level of discourse. The aim of this article is to restore the role of consciousness in discourse comprehension and production processes. Specifically, we argue that the ability to produce and understand discourses is based on individuals’ capacity for navigation in space and time. We will show that the space–time orientation is guaranteed by the projection of the self, which involves a special kind of consciousness. (shrink)

Andy Clark once remarked that we make the world smart so we don�t have to be. What he meant was that human beings alter and transform their environments in order to accomplish certain tasks that would prove difficult without such transformations. This remarkable insight goes a long way towards explaining many aspects of human culture, ranging from linguistic notational systems to how we structure our cities. It also provides the basis for Mark Rowlands� thought-provoking and insightful book, The New Science (...) of the Mind. (shrink)

The goal of this paper is to argue for the fruitfulness for linguistic theory of an approach to semantics that has been developed primarily by logicians and philosophers. That the theory of possible worlds semantics has been extremely fruitful for logic and philosophy is widely if not universally accepted, and I will not try to convince remaining skeptics on that score. But the goals of linguistics are sufficiently different from those of philosophy and logic that there are independent and highly (...) reasonable grounds for skepticism about the appropriateness of such a theory for linguistics, and I will address what seem to me the most important of these in addition to offering positive evidence in favor of such an approach to semantics. (shrink)

Michael Dummett has claimed that analytic philosophy is distinguished from other schools in its belief that a comprehensive philosophical account of thought can only be attained by developing a philosophical account of language. Dummett himself argues persuasively for the priority-of-Ianguage thesis. This, in effect, metaphilosophical position is of special importance for his more straightforwardly philosophical views, for he holds that philosophical investigations of the concepts of objectivity and reality grow directly out of the philosophy of thought. But I argue that (...) some of what Dummett says about the priority of language over thought is problematic, that there may yet be a serious role for concepts within the theory of meaning, and that Dummett’s failure to acknowledge this role both hobbles his account of linguistic understanding and has deleterious consequences for his discussions of metaphysical realism-robbing him of the resources with which he might have avoided some of his anti-realist conclusions. (shrink)

Though Mr. Lin purports to attack "Chomsky's view of language" and to defend the "common sense view of language", he in fact attacks "views" that are basic and common to linguists, psycholinguists, and developmental psychologists. Indeed, though he cites W. V. O. Quine, L. Wittgenstein, and J. L. Austin in his support, they all sharply part company from his views, Austin particularly. Lin's views are not common sense but a set of scholarly and philological prejudices that linguistics disparaged from its (...) inception as an organized science a hundred years ago. (shrink)

According to grice, Semantic concepts like meaning and reference should be explicated in terms of the propositional attitudes. In this paper, I argue that grice's program is mistaken in principle. I first motivate a gricean strategy for defining denotation, Or semantic reference, In terms of rules that govern what speakers may refer to with the terms they use. I then express three paradigm gricean theories of denotation and introduce considerations which show that these theories are false.

In Devitt’s view, linguistic intuitions are opinions about linguistic production of products, most often one’s own. They result frorn ordinary empirical investigation, so “they are immediate and fairly unreflectiveernpirical central-processor responses to linguistic phenomena”, which reactions are, moreover, theory-laden, where the ‘theory’ encompasses all sorts of speaker’s beliefs. The paper reconstructs his arguments, places his view on a map of alternative approaches to intuitions, and offers a defense of a minimalistic “voice-of-competence” view. First, intuitions are to be identified with the (...) data, the minimal “products” of tentative linguistic production of naïve speaker-listeners, and not with their opinions about the data. Second, the data involve no theory and very little prototheory. Third, although there might be admixtures of guesswork in the conscious production of data, these are routinely weaned out by linguists. Finally, mere acceptance of the “voice of competence” does not land us in any objectionable Cartesianism: it is cornpatible with naturalism and with distrust of a priori philosophy. (shrink)

A common assumption in metaphysics and the philosophy of language is that the general structure of language displays the general metaphysical structure of the things we talk about. But expressions can easily be imperfect representations of what they are about. After clarifying this general point, I make a case study of a recent attempt to semantically analyze the nature of knowledge-how. This attempt fails because there appears to be no plausible bridge from the linguistic structure of knowledge-how reports to knowledge-how (...) itself. I then gesture at some other places where the connection between linguistics and metaphysics is commonly, but illegitimately, assumed. (shrink)

Gavagai! or the Future History of the Animal Language Controversy. By DAVID PREMACK.

This issue brings together papers by Australasian philosophers on language, thought, and their relationship. Contributors were given complete freedom to treat these topics in any way they saw fit. The results reflect the diverse interests of Australasian philosophers, and, perhaps even more strikingly, the diversity of philosophical methods they employ to pursue these interests.

Paul Grice warned that ‘the nature of conventional implicature needs to be examined before any free use of it, for explanatory purposes, can be indulged in’ (1978/1989: 46). Christopher Potts heeds this warning, brilliantly and boldly. Starting with a definition drawn from Grice’s few brief remarks on the subject, he distinguishes conventional implicature from other phenomena with which it might be confused, identifies a variety of common but little-studied kinds of expressions that give rise to it, and develops a formal, (...) multidimensional semantic framework for systematically capturing its distinctive character. The book is a virtuosic blend of astute descriptive observations and technically sophisticated formulations. Fortunately for the technically unsophisticated reader, the descriptive observations can be appreciated on their own. (shrink)

The Montagovian hypothesis of direct model-theoretic interpretation of syntactic surface structures is supported by an account of the semantics of binding that makes no use of variables, syntactic indices, or assignment functions & shows that the interpretation of a large portion of so-called variable-binding phenomena can dispense with the level of logical form without incurring equivalent complexity elsewhere in the system. Variable-free semantics hypothesizes local interpretation of each surface constituent; binding is formalized as a type-shifting operation on expressions that denote (...) functions, & sentences containing a free pronoun are analyzed as a function from individuals to propositions having a meaning of type (e,t). Standard weak crossover effects & binding patterns in sentences with multiple pronouns are shown to submit to straightforward type-theoretic treatments that do not rely on indexation. The variable-free semantics smoothly implements full surface compositionality & requires less machinery than standard accounts to handle functional questions, their answers, sloppy inferences, & across-the-board binding. 73 References. J. Hitchcock. (shrink)