The Sentence in Language and Cognition is about the significant role of the sentence in linguistic cognition and in the practical domains of human existence. Dr. Tista Bagchi has written a comprehensive assessment of the structure and cognitive function of the sentence and the clause in the context of real-world discourse and activities.The notions of sentencehood and clausehood with special reference to the semantic histories of the terms sentence and clause, including their ethical, legal, and administrative uses, are assessed. (...) This is followed by a concise historical survey of the treatment of the sentence in a few of the ancient linguistic traditions, notably the Greek, Roman(-Alexandrian), Arab, and Sanskrit scholastic traditions. A wide variety of sentence types, from a cross-section of languages spoken in Asia, Europe, and the Americas, are presented by way of factual evidence for sentences and clauses as linguistic units. Formally defined notions of the sentence and the clause as syntactic constituents in major theoretical frameworks are examined and assessed for their essential properties and points of convergence. The Sentence in Language and Cognition is an essential book for advanced students and researchers of linguistics. (shrink)

Language (śabda) occupied a central yet often unacknowledged place in classical Indian philosophical thought. Foundational thinkers considered topics such as the nature of language, its relationship to reality, the nature and existence of linguistic units and their capacity to convey meaning, and the role of language in the interpretation of sacred writings. The first reader on language in--and the language of--classical Indian philosophy, A Śabda Reader offers a comprehensive and pedagogically valuable treatment of this topic (...) and its importance to Indian philosophical thought. A Śabda Reader brings together newly translated passages by authors from a variety of traditions--Brahmin, Buddhist, Jaina--representing a number of schools of thought. It illuminates issues such as how Brahmanical thinkers understood the Veda and conceived of Sanskrit; how Buddhist thinkers came to assign importance to language's link to phenomenal reality; how Jains saw language as strictly material; the possibility of self-contradictory sentences; and how words affect thought. Throughout, the volume shows that linguistic presuppositions and implicit notions about language often play as significant a role as explicit ideas and formal theories. Including an introduction that places the texts and ideas in their historical and cultural context, A Śabda Reader sheds light on a crucial aspect of classical Indian thought and in so doing deepens our understanding of the philosophy of language. (shrink)

Articles on sentence in Sanskrit grammar according to Mimamsa philosophy.

Contributed seminar papers on philosophy of sentence according to Mimamsa philosophy and Bhartrhari' Sanskrit grammar. Special issues of Journal of Foundational reserach.

This introduction brings to life the main themes in Indian philosophy of language by using an accessible translation of an Indian classical text to provide an entry into the world of Indian linguistic theories. -/- Malcolm Keating draws on Mukula's Fundamentals of the Communicative Function to show the ability of language to convey a wide range of meanings and introduce ideas about testimony, pragmatics, and religious implications. Along with a complete translation of this foundational text, Keating also provides: (...) - Clear explanations of themes such as reference, figuration and sentence meaning - Commentary illuminating connections between Mukula and contemporary philosophy - Romanized text of the Sanskrit - A glossary of terms and annotated bibliography - A chronology of important figures and dates -/- By complementing a historically-informed introduction with a focused study of an influential primary text, Keating responds to the need for a reliable guide to better understand theories of language and related issues in Indian philosophy. (shrink)

How is meaning conceptualized within a language in terms of capacities and potentials of words and sentences? Analyzing words within the sentence as event-makers in Sanskrit and as creating new possibilities and of divining events in Chinese, this paper argues that writing commentaries, making translations, reciting texts and transcribing them, belong to a family of activities that we normally do with language. Thus, movement of every element of language from one place to another whether within (...) a word, a character, a sentence, a text or between two languages is not something added from the outside, it is internal to the experience of language. We ask what bearing might such an insight have on dominant theories of translation and the untranslatable in contemporary theorizing that has been framed primarily in terms of the history of Europe’s understanding of itself. (shrink)

The Tattvabindu of Vacaspatimisra with the commentary called Tattvavibhavand of Paramesvara II of Payyur Bhattamana. This edition of Vacaspatimisra's Tattvabindu and of its commentary Tattvavibhavana by Paramesvara II is based on (1) a transcript of a manuscript Tattvavibhavana preserved in the Madras Government Oriental Manuscripts Library, and (2) the Benares Edition of the Tattvabindu. Since the commentator has made it a rule to quote the full text by parts before commenting on it. Vacaspatimisra's Tattvabindu is a short and highly difficult (...) text. In his characteristically rhythmic and stately diction, Vacaspatimisra reviews in the Tattvabindu, the vaiyakarana doctrine of Sphota, mainly as expounded by Bhartrhari and Mandanamisra, and amplifies and reaffirms Kumarila's criticism of Sphota doctrine. The elaborate and scholarly introduction, giving a historical sketch of the Mimamsa literature, and the thoroughgoing analysis of the Tattvabindu, in English, which the learned editor has prefixed to his edition of the work. (shrink)

The distinct function of ātmanepada in Sanskrit language remains a sort of linguist mystery in Sanskrit studies. In this article, I analyze the larger implications and subliminal meaning of ātmanepada by moving beyond the realm of linguistics, which has been the dominant approach, and entering the territory of philosophy and, more specifically, the purportful approach of traditional Indian philosophy of language represented by Bhartṛhari’s Vākyapadīya. Bhartṛhari’s analytical procedure seeks to unveil the ontological interdependence that binds together (...) the constituent elements of linguistic sentences, understood as modal appearances of the ever present foundational ground of the world/word—Brahman as Vāc. This is our referential guide to the semantic reconstruction of ātmanepada’s teleology. (shrink)

The American Sign Language Sentence Reproduction Test (ASL-SRT) requires the precise reproduction of a series of ASL sentences increasing in complexity and length. Error analyses of such tasks provides insight into working memory and scaffolding processes. Data was collected from three groups expected to differ in fluency: deaf children, deaf adults and hearing adults, all users of ASL. Quantitative (correct/incorrect recall) and qualitative error analyses were performed. Percent correct on the reproduction task supports its sensitivity to fluency as (...) test performance clearly differed across the three groups studied. A linguistic analysis of errors further documented differing strategies and bias across groups. Subjects' recall projected the affordance and constraints of deep linguistic representations to differing degrees, with subjects resorting to alternate processing strategies when they failed to recall the sentence correctly. A qualitative error analysis allows us to capture generalizations about the relationship between error pattern and the cognitive scaffolding, which governs the sentence reproduction process. Highly fluent signers and less-fluent signers share common chokepoints on particular words in sentences. However, they diverge in heuristic strategy. Fluent signers, when they make an error, tend to preserve semantic details while altering morpho-syntactic domains. They produce syntactically correct sentences with equivalent meaning to the to-be-reproduced one, but these are not verbatim reproductions of the original sentence. In contrast, less-fluent signers tend to use a more linear strategy, preserving lexical status and word ordering while omitting local inflections, and occasionally resorting to visuo-motoric imitation. Thus, whereas fluent signers readily use top-down scaffolding in their working memory, less fluent signers fail to do so. Implications for current models of working memory across spoken and signed modalities are considered. (shrink)

Philosophers of language and linguists need to be wary of generalizing from too small a sample of natural languages. They also need to be wary of neglecting possible insights from philosophical traditions that have focused on natural languages other than the most familiar Western ones. Take, for example, classical Indian philosophy, where philosophical concerns with language were very much involved with the early development of Sanskrit linguistics. Indian philosophers and linguists frequently discussed more general issues about semantics, (...) often in ways that are both similar to and interestingly different from Western philosophers.One such issue is the problem of sentential unity: what is the relation of our understanding of the meaning of a sentence to our understanding of the meaning of the words that compose it? If words have meanings, why is the meaning of a sentence not just the meaning of the words that compose it? A challenging Indian response is that of the grammarian and philosopher Bhartṛhari (fifth-century), who advocated for a kind of sentence-holism according to which words are unreal and sentence-meaning is primary. (shrink)

One of the leading figures of Logical Positivism, Moritz Schlick, wrote a well-known article “On the Foundations of Knowledge”, edited in English by Sir Alfred Ayer in 1959, in which he proposes Konstantierungen, also known as affirmations or confirmations in English, to play the part of the much sought-after indubitable and incorrigible foundation of personal belief. In the present article I will oppose this view via the perspective of confirmations in their linguistic nature, a trait that renders Konstatierungen untenable both (...) as sentences in Language of Thought – where it is thought that is linguistic, and natural language is but a means for expressing it-, and as occurring in natural languages due to the obligatory phenomenon of grammatical evidentiality in many world languages. (shrink)

The contents of Brahmajnaana, the Buddhism, the Jainism, the Sabdabrahma Siddhanta and Shaddarsanas will be discussed to present the true meaning of individual’s identity and I. The influence of spirituality contained in Upanishadic insight in the development of Sanskrit language structure, Indian culture, and individual identity formation will be developed. The cultural and psychological aspects of a civilization on the formation of its language structure and prominence given to various parts of speech and vice versa will be (...) touched upon. These aspects will be also compared and contrasted with German, French, Telugu and Hindi and their respective influence on cultural and identity formation and vice versa. A cognitive science interpretation of advaita and dvaita phases of mind and bhakti and vibhakti modes of language acquisition and communication in terms of physics and electronics will be given and be clubbed to present an inclusive and comprehensive modern scientific and social scientific understanding and interpretation of Brahmajnaana, the Buddhism, the Jainism and rest of current theistic and atheistic awareness of I and its spiritual, linguistic, cognitive scientific and rationalistic ideas and opinions. The use of this study for national integration and oneness of Indians will be highlighted. (shrink)

The study provides an insight into the structural features of the famous VIII century Buddhist treatise Tattvasaṅgrāha by Śāntarakṣita with regard to the text’s main purpose ( prayojana ) as it is treated in Kamalaśīla’s commentary Pañjikā. Any text along with its referential (representational) function of conveying message - meaning to the addressee, or its expressive function, reflecting the author's attitude to what is communicated, also performs the ‘appellative’ function, encouraging the recipient of the message to act. This function which (...) could also be called praxiological was always significant in Indian text culture, since from the times of Veda-s it was embedded in its very core. This function is of paramount importance in the case of Indian religious and philosophical texts, whose main aim is to convince and transform the consciousness of their percipients. Along with linear models of message transfer, Sanskrit texts could demonstrate non-linear semantic structures, transmitting the main idea of the text indirectly. It is exactly how one should perceive the message of Śāntarakṣita’s Tattvasaṅgrāha according to the suggested by Śāntarakṣita’s prominent student Kamalaśīla in his Pañjikā -commentary to the treatise. He proposes to consider Tattvasaṅgrāha not as a thematically heterogeneous encyclopaedic or doxographic work, whose main objective is to refute different non-Buddhist views (as it is often treated by scholars now), but as a text, which by its very design exposes one of the most important Buddhist principles - the law of the dependent origination ( pratītyasamutpāda ). The themes, discussed in a number of the chapters of Tattvasaṅgrāha, indeed, appear to have direct correlation with the characteristics of pratītyasamutpāda given to it in Śālistamba-sūtra - an early Mahāyāna text, which explains this universal law. Kamalaśīla suggests looking at Tattvasaṅgrāha as at one big unit-sentence - mahāvākya, with the exposition of pratītyasamutpāda as its unitary purpose-meaning ( abhidheya ). In this context, the treatise functions as a praxiological tool for the ‘installing’ into the consciousness of the text’s addressee the knowledge of ‘true principles’ (tattva-s) of pratītyasamutpāda. This interpretation of the main message of the text raises also a question of the adequate translation of the name of the treatise into other languages, because, according to Kamalaśīla, ‘ Tattvasaṅgrāha’ means the ‘Assembly of Principles-(tattva’-s)’ which specify precisely pratītyasamutpāda (pratītyasamutpāda-viśeṣaṇāni tattvāni). (shrink)

The Linguistic Account of Thought holds that thought is the meaning of declarative sentences. According to Linguistic Internalism, two languages can share sentential meanings and hence express the same thought. According to Linguistic Particularism, thought content is relative to languages and is not shared. We can contrast these two accounts of thought with a third: the intension of a thought is a common disciplinary use of differing meaningful claims, and the extension of a thought is the collection of (...) class='Hi'>sentences or symbols that share a disciplinary use---a view inspired by Patanjali's Yoga, Linguistic Externalism. Having noted that the Linguistic Account of Thought is the defining feature of the Western tradition, underwriting the European philosophical tradition and work in Indology, I consider whether the competing accounts of thought can be tested. I note that the Moral Twin Earth thought experiment by Horgan and Timmons, assumes Linguistic Internalism and attempts to test competing accounts of moral semantics for their capacity to facilitate cross cultural communication on morals across different languages. I propose testing competing accounts of thought to the same end on Planet Ethics: here the moral semantics of a language simply is its national moral theory. So the literal meaning of “good” for Nation Kant would be “a will determined by the categorical imperative,” but for Nation Expressivism Kant it would an internalist semantics that allows speakers to express their minds. Nation Plato is ruled by a philosopher king, and "good" there means "the form of the forms," and for Nation Positive Utilitarians it means "maximal happiness" while for the Negative Utilitarians it means "minimal suffering." The scenario also contains with in it the Thems: they have their own Them language tied to their own moral tradition, but they also participate in the linguistic culture of their adopted homes. Can the citizens of Planet Ethics have a conversation about morals, and can they avoid Anti Thematism? I note that the two Linguistic Accounts of Thought cannot explain how moral conversations occur across languages on Planet Ethics. Each culture will try to use its own language as a frame to understand others, who will be incomprehensible in so far as they depart from the assumed linguistic frame: each culture will view itself as having the moral frame work. Worse, the linguistic accounts of thought render right answers to moral questions analytically true, and criticisms of the dominant moral theory a contradiction in terms. A community who cannot get along with each other can separate and make separate moral communities, each with its own national ethos and corresponding moral semantics, but then they will not be able to conceptualize their prior disagreement especially if both new languages are departures from the earlier shared moral semantics. Also, the Thems will be viewed with suspicion for not wholly and univocally supporting the national ethos of their adopted homes. Linguistic externalism has no problem accounting for moral discourse here or in allowing for intra cultural moral criticism: the common philosophical use of the diverse philosophical sentences is the common proposition on which speakers of the various languages can agree or disagree to. On Planet Ethics it becomes clear there is "right" moral semantics: all will do as well as each other. Whereas the Linguistic Account of Thought leads to an inflationary approach to linguistic meaning, the linguistic externalist option is deflationary with respect to linguistic meaning. Finally I note that the linguistic approach to thought underwrites Indological investigations into Indian ethics and I consider two Davidson inspired tweaks to save the linguistic approach. The upshot is that Orthodox Indologists, in practice, adopt the procedure that Davidson recommends for understanding malopropers, such as Archie Bunker. In short, Orthodox Indologists, in being wedded to the linguistic approach to thought, treat Indian philosophers like malapropers who can't speak Sanskrit, like Bunker cannot speak English without erring. All can be avoided by Linguistic Externalism. This means that the conceptual content of moral vocabulary is not their linguistic meaning, but their philosophical purpose. (shrink)

I. By Ictus we mean in this paper the sounds emphasized in the pattern of an utterance in the given language under discussion. So in languages like Chinese which depend on variation of tone we mean that the high notes in the intonation tune of a sentence or the rhythmic scheme of a verse carry an ictus; while in a language based, like English, on speech stress, we mean that the syllables uttered most loudly and clearly bear the (...) ictus. Again, some languages, such as Italian, emphasize a syllable by a combination of stress and raised pitch, so in these languages we say that the syllables so emphasized receive the ictus. Lastly, in a language like ancient Greek or Vedic Sanskrit where quantity is decisive in utterance, the syllables which receive emphasis are the long ones, and thus it is these which have an ictus. (shrink)

I. By Ictus we mean in this paper the sounds emphasized in the pattern of an utterance in the given language under discussion. So in languages like Chinese which depend on variation of tone we mean that the high notes in the intonation tune of a sentence or the rhythmic scheme of a verse carry an ictus; while in a language based, like English, on speech stress, we mean that the syllables uttered most loudly and clearly bear the (...) ictus. Again, some languages, such as Italian, emphasize a syllable by a combination of stress and raised pitch, so in these languages we say that the syllables so emphasized receive the ictus. Lastly, in a language like ancient Greek or Vedic Sanskrit where quantity is decisive in utterance, the syllables which receive emphasis are the long ones, and thus it is these which have an ictus. (shrink)

The article discusses some logical, semantic and metaphysical consequences or correla­tions with the introduced typology of word order in verbal and nominal sentences, which in the European tradition represent speech patterns used in judgments. The combinatorics of word order gives four variants, of which three are actually represented by native lan­guages of distinctive philosophical traditions. It is shown that the Western word order predisposes the semantic intuition in favor of substantialism, the Arabic variety (in verbal sentences) is in (...) conformity with the process logic of sense discovered and described by A.V. Smirnov. The Sanskrit word order in predication predisposes to the understanding of thinking as a natural transition from one object to another, whereas the ontological type of the object is not predetermined. (shrink)

The article traces the genesis of soku, a particle elevated to the status of an operator of dialectical logic by Japanese philosophers of the Kyto school, to a translation problem that occurred when Buddhist thought spread from India to China. On the basis of the analysis of its most famous locus of occurrence, a passage in the Heart Sutra, it is shown how eva, a Sanskrit particle with the function of distinguishing between logical types of sentences, was transformed (...) into a modifier of identity statements and an indicator of the inability of language to express deep-level Buddhist insights exhaustively. (shrink)

Pāṇini's fourth century BC Sanskrit grammar uses rewrite rules utilizing an explicit formal language defined through a semi-formal metalanguage. The grammar is generative, meaning that it is capable of expressing a potential infinity of well-formed Sanskrit sentences starting from a finite symbolic inventory. The grammar's operational rules involve extensive use of auxiliary markers, in the form of Sanskrit phonemes, to control grammatical derivations. Pāṇini's rules often utilize a generic context-sensitive format to identify terms used in (...) replacement, modification or deletion operations. The context-sensitive rule format is itself defined using Pāṇini's more general method of auxiliary markers, the latter used to define many dozens of linguistic categories and rules controlling derivations of Sanskrit sentences through the manipulation of ‘non-terminal’ and ‘terminal’ symbols. This technique for controlling formal derivations was rediscovered by Emil Post in the 1920s and later shown by him to be ca... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Some Ideas Concerning Stephen Phillips' Jewel of Reflection on the Truth about Epistemology:A Complete and Annotated Translation of the Tattva-cintā-maṇiEberhard Guhe (bio)Stephen Phillips' Jewel of Reflection on the Truth about Epistemology (see Phillips 2020) is surely a landmark achievement in the realm of research on Navya-Nyāya. It is a work of reference not only for specialists but also for a broader audience of philosophically interested readers. Phillips has demonstrated (...) his expertise on Nyāya in general in many previous publications. At present, there is probably hardly anybody else who would have been better qualified to accomplish the mammoth task of translating and elucidating such a complex and voluminous Sanskrit work as the Tattvacintāmaṇi. It should however be noted that there is another edition and annotated translation of the Tattvacintāmaṇi (excluding the Upamānakhaṇḍa) by V.P. Bhatta (see Bhatta 2005, 2012, 2021), which is rather addressed to specialists, who are proficient in Sanskrit. The two volumes on the Anumānakhaṇḍa were published in 2021 (one year after the publication of Phillips' three volumes). Considering the enormous size of such a book project, the result cannot be expected to be completely flawless. The present review focuses on the introduction in volume 1 and on volume 2. I will address some minor issues, primarily methodological ones, but I will also address a few more serious (albeit surely accidental) translation errors (especially in the Siddhāntalakṣaṇa-section of the Vyāptivāda), which can lead to a misunderstanding of Gaṅgeśa's stance on a pivotal topic of the Navya-Naiyāyikas, namely the correct definition of the concept of pervasion (vyāpti).IThe introduction is very insightful. However, logicians will probably stumble over Phillips' methods of formalization. Some examples are given below. [End Page 498](1) The language of Phillips' formalizations looks a bit like a first-order language. Thus, for example, he uses "Ha" as a formal equivalent of the sentence "The mountain is smoky" (see vol. 1, p. 18). An obvious deviation from first-order conventions consists in the fact that Phillips uses at least two types of negation. Propositional negation is expressed by means of the symbol "~" (see vol. 2, p. 668; unfortunately, this symbol is not mentioned in vol. 1, pp. 18–19, where Phillips introduces his formalization techniques). Moreover, Phillips uses the negation symbol "¬," which he applies to capital Roman letters, in order to express a kind of term negation. Thus, for example, "¬H" may serve as a term referring to "the absence of the probans" (vol. 2, p. 623). To be precise, the type of absence which "¬H" refers to is a so-called "relational absence" (saṃsargâbhāva). Phillips formalizes the so-called "mutual absences" (anyonyâbhāva) differently (see below).Although "¬Hc" (see vol. 1, p. 18) looks like an ordinary first-order wff, it should more accurately be read as "The absence of H is located at c." Properly speaking, we should then also read atomic wffs like "Hc" as "H is located at c," where "H" should not be regarded as an expression of a predicate like "… is smoky," but rather as a general term, that is, as a formal counterpart of expressions like, for example, "smoke."Unfortunately, Phillips renders the meaning of wffs of the form "¬ϕx" not as "the absence of H is located at x," but in a somewhat simplified manner, which obscures the fact that he treats the negation symbol "¬" as a means to express a term negation: "And negation is term negation, not propositional negation [author's note: as we have just seen, this is not true of all kinds of negation which Phillips refers to in his formalizations, since he uses the "~" in a different sense]; thus, the negative sign '¬' in '¬ϕx' is defined as 'ϕ is absent at x'" (vol. 1, p. 19).Moreover, the use of different kinds of letters for the variables in "¬ϕx" (Greek and Roman) seems to suggest that the absentee should always be the referent of a general term. However, expressions of the form "the absence of a is... (shrink)

Previous studies show that reading sentences about actions leads to specific motor activity associated with actually performing those actions. We investigate how sign language input may modulate motor activation, using British Sign Language sentences, some of which explicitly encode direction of motion, versus written English, where motion is only implied. We find no evidence of action simulation in BSL comprehension, but we find effects of action simulation in comprehension of written English sentences by deaf native (...) BSL signers. These results provide constraints on the nature of mental simulations involved in comprehending action sentences referring to transfer events, suggesting that the richer contextual information provided by BSL sentences versus written or spoken English may reduce the need for action simulation in comprehension, at least when the event described does not map completely onto the signer's own body. (shrink)

The present paper is an attempt at the investigation of the nature of polarity contrast in natural languages. Truth conditions for natural language sentences are incomplete unless they include a proper definition of the conditions under which they are false. It is argued that the tertium non datur principle of classical bivalent logical systems is empirically invalid for natural languages: falsity cannot be equated with non-truth. Lacking a direct intuition about the conditions under which a sentence is false, (...) we need an independent foundation of the concept of falsity. The solution I offer is a definition of falsity in terms of the truth of a syntactic negation of the sentence. A definition of syntactic negation is proposed for English. (shrink)

First language attrition in adulthood offers new insight on neuroplasticity and the role of language experience in shaping neurocognitive responses to language. Attriters are multilinguals for whom advancing L2 proficiency comes at the cost of the L1, as they experience a shift in exposure and dominance. To date, the neurocognitive mechanisms underlying L1 attrition are largely unexplored. Using event-related potentials, we examined L1-Italian grammatical processing in 24 attriters and 30 Italian native-controls. We assessed whether attriters differed from (...) non-attriting native speakers in their online detection and re-analysis/repair of number agreement violations, and whether differences in processing were modulated by L1-proficiency. To test both local and non-local agreement violations, we manipulated agreement between three inflected constituents and examined ERP responses on two of these. Our findings revealed group differences in amplitude, scalp distribution, and duration of LAN/N400 + P600 effects. We discuss these differences as reflecting influence of attriters’ L2-English, as well as shallower online sentence repair processes than in non-attriting native speakers. ERP responses were also predicted by L1-Italian proficiency scores, with smaller N400/P600 amplitudes in lower proficiency individuals. Proficiency only modulated P600 amplitude between 650 and 900 ms, whereas the late P600 depended on group membership and amount of L1 exposure within attriters. Our study is the first to show qualitative and quantitative differences in ERP responses in attriters compared to non-attriting native speakers. Our results also emphasize that proficiency predicts language processing profiles, even in native-speakers, and that the P600 should not be considered a monolithic component. (shrink)

Interference effects from semantically similar items are well-known in studies of single word production, where the presence of semantically similar distractor words slows picture naming. This article examines the consequences of this interference in sentence production and tests the hypothesis that in situations of high similarity-based interference, producers are more likely to omit one of the interfering elements than when there is low semantic similarity and thus low interference. This work investigated language production in Mandarin, which allows subject noun (...) phrases to be omitted in discourse contexts in which the subject entity has been previously mentioned in the discourse. We hypothesize that Mandarin speakers omit the subject more often when the subject and the object entities are conceptually similar. A corpus analysis of simple transitive sentences found higher rates of subject omission when both the subject and object were animate (potentially yielding similarity-based interference) than when the subject was animate and object was inanimate. A second study manipulated subject-object animacy in a picture description task and replicated this result: participants omitted the animate subject more often when the object was also animate than when it was inanimate. These results suggest that similarity-based interference affects sentence forms, particularly when the agent of the action is mentioned in the sentence. Alternatives and mechanisms for this effect are discussed. (shrink)

Considerations from an interaction-based approach to the evolution of language and the role of word-sentences therein show that the object-attribute ontology is arrived at a much later stage. Therefore, Hurford's arguments, by focusing on the predicate-argument structure, seem to miss out on most of the interesting aspects of the early stages in language evolution.

Many pragmaticians have distinguished three levels of meaning involved in the comprehension of utterances, and there is an ongoing debate about how to characterize the intermediate level. Recanati has called it the level of 'what is said' and has opposed the idea that it can be determined semantically - a position that he labels 'pragmatic minimalism lo this end he has offered two chief arguments: semantic underdeterminacy and the Availability Principle. This paper exposes a tension between both arguments, relating this (...) discussion with Carruthers's cognitive view of language, according to which some thoughts are, literally, sentences of our natural language. First we explain how this view entails minimalism, and we construct an argument based on semantic underdeterminacy that shows that natural language sentences do not have the compositional properties required to constitute thoughts. Then we analyze the example of a subject's overhearing a sentence without an interpretive context, arguing that in the light of the Availability Principle the corresponding thought can be regarded as a natural language sentence. Thus, semantic underdeterminacy and availability pull in different directions, and we claim that there is no characterization of the latter that can relieve this tension. We contend that Recanati's availability shares with Carruthers's introspectivism an overreliance on intuitions about what appears consciously in one's mmd. We conclude, therefore, that the Availability Principle ought to be abandoned. (shrink)

There is controversy as to whether children with developmental language disorder (DLD) and those with high-functioning autism plus language impairment (HFA-LI) share similar language profiles. This study investigated the similarities and differences in the production of Chinese negative sentences by children with DLD and children with HFA-LI to provide evidence relevant to this controversy. The results reflect a general resemblance between the two groups in their lower-than-TDA (typically developing age-matched) performance. Both groups encountered difficulties in using (...) negative markers, which suggests that they might be impaired in feature agreement. Slight differences were detected between the two groups. Specifically, children with DLD experienced difficulties with the agreement on the feature [+telic] and that on the feature [+dynamic], while children with HFA-LI had difficulties with the agreement on the feature [+dynamic] and that on the feature [−dynamic]. This study supports the idea of a common symptomatology for the two disorders. More importantly, it suggests that these two disorders, DLD and HFA-LI, are not altogether the same in terms of language impairment. This paper concludes that general labels should not be simply attached to any children with language disorders. Instead, atypical language is very worthy of further analysis in the categorization of language disorders. (shrink)

Many pragmaticians have distinguished three levels of meaning involved in the comprehension of utterances, and there is an ongoing debate about how to characterize the intermediate level. Recanati has called it the level of `what is said' and has opposed the idea that it can be determined semantically — a position that he labels `pragmatic minimalism'. To this end he has offered two chief arguments: semantic underdeterminacy and the Availability Principle. This paper exposes a tension between both arguments, relating this (...) discussion with Carruthers's cognitive view of language, according to which some thoughts are, literally, sentences of our natural language. First we explain how this view entails minimalism, and we construct an argument based on semantic underdeterminacy that shows that natural language sentences do not have the compositional properties required to constitute thoughts. Then we analyze the example of a subject's overhearing a sentence without an interpretive context, arguing that in the light of the Availability Principle the corresponding thought can be regarded as a natural language sentence. Thus, semantic underdeterminacy and availability pull in different directions, and we claim that there is no characterization of the latter that can relieve this tension. We contend that Recanati's availability shares with Carruthers's introspectivism an overreliance on intuitions about what appears consciously in one's mind. We conclude, therefore, that the Availability Principle ought to be abandoned. (shrink)

EDITORS' INTRODUCTION B he Vedas tell of a conversation between a young man, Shvetaketu, and his father concerning what the son had learned in his education ...