Krifka (The origin of topic/comment structure, of predication, and of focusation in asymmetric bimanual coordination, 2006, Interdisciplinary Studies on Information Structure (ISIS): Working Papers of SFB 632 08: 61–96, 2007b) suggests that asymmetric bimanual coordination and ultimately the evolution of lateralization in humans may be the cognitive basis of linguistic topic-comment structure and foreground-background structures in general. As asymmetric bimanual constructions abound in sign languages and are also found in their possible precursors, cospeech gesture and homesign, (...) sign languages may serve as a test ground for the hypothesis. Asymmetric bimanual constructions are indeed used for differentiating foreground and background in sign languages, but some of these constructions are derived from indexical gestures, not manipulation, i.e., they draw on visual attention. Signed topics may be marked by nonmanual features derived from signals of visual attention, and the defining feature of signed topics is eye contact with the addressee, needed to establish a communicative common ground. There, thus, seems to be not one embodied origin of topic-comment structures, but several. Finally, signed topic-comment structure demonstrates how attention shifts in the course of the entire structure, thereby explaining how topics can be described alternately as foreground (e.g., Talmy, Attention phenomena, Oxford University Press, 2007: 265) and background (Jacobs, Linguistics 39: 641–681, 2001). (shrink)

The papers collected in this volume exemplify some of the trends in current approaches to logic, language and computation. Written by authors with varied academic backgrounds, the contributions are intended for an interdisciplinary audience. The first part of this volume addresses issues relevant for multi-agent systems: reasoning with incomplete information, reasoning about knowledge and beliefs, and reasoning about games. Proofs as formal objects form the subject of Part II. Topics covered include: contributions on logical frameworks, linear logic, and different (...) approaches to formalized reasoning. Part III focuses on representations and formal methods in linguistic theory, addressing the areas of comparative and temporal expressions, modal subordination, and compositionality. (shrink)

This book takes readers on a philosophical discovery of a forgotten treasure, one born in the 14th century but which appears to belong to the 21st. It presents a critical, up-to-date analysis of Santob de Carrión, also known as Sem Tob, a writer and thinker whose philosophy arose in the Spain of the three great cultures: Jews, Christians, and Muslims, who then coexisted in peace. The author first presents a historical and cultural introduction that provides biographical detail as well as (...) context for a greater understand of Santob's philosophy. Next, the book offers a dialogue with the work itself, which looks at politics, sociology, anthropology, psychology, ethics, aesthetics, metaphysics, and theodicy. The aim is not to provide an exhaustive analysis, or to comment on each and every verse, but rather to deal only with the most relevant for today’s world. Readers will discover how Santob believed knowledge must be dynamic, and tolerance fundamental, fleeing from dogma, since one cannot avoid a significant dose of moral and aesthetic relativism. Subjectivity, within its own codes, must seek a profound ethics, not puritanical but which serves to escape from general ill will. Santob offers a criticism of wealth and power that does not serve the people which appears to be totally relevant today. In spite of the fame he achieved in his own time, Santob has largely remained a vestige of the past. By the end of this book, readers will come to see why this important figure deserves to be more widely studied. Indeed, not only has this medieval Spanish philosopher searched for truth in an unstable, confused world of contradictions, but he has done so in a way that can still help us today. (shrink)

The terms topic and focus are used by many theoreticians, but they often mean different things. In the most usual informal sense, topic is what an utterance is about (as contrasted to comment), and focus is what is emphasized in the utterance (as contrasted to background). Let us consider how this intuition can be sharpened.

It is not rare to find students of language interested in the many ways in which speakers talk about Fred or about the weather, assert of Fred or of the weather that he is fat or that it is fine. Many philosophers, logicians, and linguists share an interest in what words or phrases designate or describe, and what speakers refer to, mention, and say things about. But it is also notable that the Grammarian and the Philosopher, especially the Metaphysician, (...) have looked at intentionality in different ways. In this lecture I sketch the ways that the Philosophers Nelson Goodman and W.V.O Quine and by contrast the Grammarians have analyzed and used the notion of Aboutness, in Quine’s case in his famous argument against Quantifying Into intensional sentences. Goodman’s and Quine’s analyses are motivated by different intellectual goals from the Linguists’. By contrast Linguists have the notion of Topic Noun Phrase. I shall argue that the Linguists’ notion of Topic Noun Phrase offers clarification and an intellectual advance over Goodman’s and Quine’s notions, especially in the treatment of propositional attitude sentences. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to compare disagreement in two different WhatsApp groups: one for members of the same family, and another for work colleagues. After the analysis, 427 instances of disagreement were identified in the family group, and 161 in the interactions between work colleagues. The most common strategy in both corpora is ‘Giving opposite opinions’. Nevertheless, the rest of the results present very significant dissimilarities, most notably the higher presence of disagreement in the family WhatsApp group. This (...) higher tolerance for disagreement is corroborated by the choice of linguistic strategies made. Whereas the family members tended to give emotional or personal reasons for disagreement, as well as negative comments on the topic, the colleagues preferred to express their disagreement with mitigating expressions and token agreement. Thus, in the corpora studied, the expression of disagreement seems to be less face threatening for family members than for work colleagues. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:130 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY To establish the chronology of the posthumous fragments of 1875-1879 in IV, 4 was of no crucial significance and presented few difficulties. The fragments of 18871888 in VIII, 2 are another matter. When Nietzsche's sister Elizabeth first published them she simply disregarded chronology in favor of a topical arrangement. Karl Schlechta proceeded more methodically. But in eliminating everything he felt Nietzsche had not intended to (...) publish, he also withdrew from scrutiny much of Nietzsche's late thinking. What to do? The editors examined the manuscripts and hit upon a new and eminently sensible arrangement. In The Genealogy of Morals Nietzsche had mentioned that he was planning a philosophical treatise entitled Will to Power. An outline of 1888 bearing the same title organized 372 of the late aphorisms both by number and key-word. Although Nietzsche in a letter to Peter Gast clearly stated that this outline was not intended for publication, the editors determined to let it serve as their guide, in the justifiable assumption that here, nonetheless, was an arrangement that was truly Nietzsche's, one that came as close as one could come to arranging the fragments as Nietzsche himself might ultimately have done. As for the remaining 100-odd fragments in the pertinent notebooks, which Nietzsche had not included in his outline, the editors decided to include them also, since their chronology was easy to establish and they were of interest despite their unpolished and incomplete form. But does not such publication do Nietzsche a real injustice as Schleehta asserted? Are not the earlier selective editions superior? Although the editors obviously don't think so, they have given the reader the opportunity to draw his own conclusions. To this end, they have compiled a concordance relating Nietzsche's outline and their own edition with the other major editions of the late fragments, showing in each case which fragments were published and in what order. The last 140 pages of VIII, 2 present unpublished fragments of the same period containing quotations and excerpts which Nietzsche had taken from his readings. Although again the principle of completeness was no doubt paramount in the decision to include these fragments, the editors feel that the excerpts from Tolstoi and Dostoyevski throw new light on the genesis of the Antichrist. It is difficult in a few paragraphs to do justice to an edition containing thousands of pages. We have said nothing about the content or the attractive and functional format. We trust, however, that our limited comments have made it clear that this edition, whether in the original German or in the Italian, French, or Japanese translations, should be in every major library and in the hands of every Nietzsche scholar. It is to be hoped that the edition will soon be completed and that translations into English and Spanish will be undertaken also. HERBERT W. REICHERT University of North Carolina Russell and Moore: The Analytical Heritage. By A. J. Ayer. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971. Pp. x+254. $8.75) It would be easy to take the view, on reading this book, that philosophical problems are never solved, people just tire of them. Ayer is at great pains to re-capture the sense of what philosophers in the earlier half of this century regarded as important issues, significant arguments and proper method. And indeed, he is so successful that one cannot help thinking from time to time that his book must have been written no later than the 1940's. Perhaps that was his intent--to relive the philosophical atmosphere BOOK REVIEWS 131 of pre-war English philosophy by recounting the views on logic and language, epistemology and metaphysics of the two major figures of that era. This is not mere recounting, nor would it be so successful a reliving if it were. Ayer offers his own counterarguments, and extensions of themes and theses propounded by Russell and Moore, but the curious thing is how of a piece these critical comments are with the expository passages. No doubt this is because Ayer is himself a relic of that age. This is not intended to be superior or sneering; in the spirit of the opening remark... (shrink)

In the last few years a lively discussion on information packaging has arisen, where traditional dichotomies Theme/Rheme, Topic/Comment and Focus/Background have been taken up again and partly reinterpreted. The discussion is mainly being held in syntax, but also in the fields of semantics and pragmatics. Some remarkable progress has been made especially in Focus phonology. Even if the role of information conveying and information packaging in the Indoeuropean languages was hinted at as early as in the classical studies (...) of the Neogrammarians, this field has remained neglected in today's historical linguistics. This volume tries to partly cover this lack with a sample of papers which offer a various range of new empirical data analyzed from the point of view of information structure. The novelty of the papers consists in the modern theoretical perspective from which the data are analyzed and in the various phenomena considered, which range from the rise of clitic elements to word order change and verb movement. (shrink)

While language is presumably unique to humans, there are possible pre-linguistic features that developed in the course of human evolution which predate features of language, and might have even been essential for its evolution. A number of such possible preadaptations for human language have been discussed, like the permanent lowering of the larynx, the ability to control one’s breath, or the inclination of humans to imitate. In this paper I would like to point out another candidate for (...) a preadaptation, namely the functional differentiation of the hands and the way in which they cooperate in manual actions. (shrink)

This is the first work to combine an introduction to Augustine's _Confessions_ with a larger outline of his mature theology. Mallard provides guidance for reading the narrative _Confessions_ and at the same time, by certain extensions and comments, reveals the three major topical divisions within Augustine's thought: creation, salvation, and the City of God. Mallard is able to do this because Augustine's affirmation of the good of Creation, his view of the human will and God's grace, his sense of a (...) religious people's identity and their hope, and his view of faith and reason were all essentially in place at the time of the _Confessions_. Mallard argues that Augustine was not "in search of himself" in a modern sense but in search of a language of prayer, praise, and truth that would locate him within God's grace. That language turned out to be the language of Incarnation, which remains compelling and inviting today. As a classic work, the _Confessions_ is a monument to its own time, but it has striking resonances for our own. Mallard's interpretation will challenge readers to begin working out their own. The _Confessions_ endures because it is a story that illumines the stories of many, even to the present day. To analyze how it is like, and unlike, modern experiences is to exercise both mind and heart. In that respect, _Language and Love_ is a kind of theological meditation on the Confessions testing out a horizon of belief. Mallard views Augustine as a master of the spoken word in an age of broken and abused language and the _Confessions_ as a historic masterpiece of rhetoric. He contends that Augustine is the ancestor of many today who offer social and political hope through fresh rhetorical vitality. (shrink)

This volume includes twelve studies by international specialists on Aristotle and his commentators. Among the topics treated are Aristotle's political philosophy and metaphysics, the ancient and Byzantine commentators' scholia on Aristotle's logic, philosophy of language and psychology as well as studies of broader scope on developmentalism in ancient philosophy and the importance of studying Late Antiquity.

Most commentators have underplayed the philosophical importance of Wittgenstein's multifarious remarks on music, which are scattered throughout his Nachlass. In this dissertation I spell out the extent and depth of Wittgenstein's engagement with certain problems that are regarded today as central to the field of the aesthetics of music, such as musical temporality, expression and understanding. By considering musical expression in its relation to aspect-perception, I argue that Wittgenstein understands music in terms of a highly evolved, vertically complex physiognomic (...) class='Hi'>language-game, in which fine shades of behavior are logically (semantically) connected with the musical experiences themselves. A musical passage conjoins the multifarious language games that are presupposed in it and the emerging gesture that ultimately insinuates itself into our life. Wittgenstein conceives music as a mode of expression, a path leading from the world of our thoughts and feelings, which in itself is not yet music, toward a gesture which is no longer music, but which belongs to the world of thoughts and feelings. A melody can be located at this crossroads of music, language and the world, and is understood in reciprocal action with language. Musical gesture insinuates itself into our life, for, like a human face, it speaks of and reflects our "knowledge of mankind," and it is ultimately understood only against the background of "the bustle of life," as Wittgenstein calls it. I also argue that Wittgenstein's discussion of musical understanding suggests an important model, albeit not an exclusive one, for understanding language. The musicality of language points first and foremost at the way we use words in the vertically complex language game of expression, and at the intransitive understanding that goes with it. Throughout the dissertation I address a number of unique topics that have rarely, if ever, been investigated in this context. These include inter alia Wittgenstein's 1912-1913 experiments on the perception of rhythm, Oswald Spengler's influence on Wittgenstein's remarks on music, Wittgenstein's reaction to Heinrich Schenker's view of music, and the complex, elusive relation between Wittgenstein's later philosophical views and Arnold Schoenberg's dodecaphonic music. (shrink)

A construction is found in American Sign Language that we call a Question–Answer Clause. It is made of two parts: the first part looks like an interrogative clause conveying a question, while the second part resembles a declarative clause answering that question. The very same signer has to sign both, the entire construction is interpreted as truth-conditionally equivalent to a declarative sentence, and it can be uttered only under certain discourse conditions. These and other properties of Question–Answer Clauses are (...) discussed, and a detailed syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic account is provided. Question–Answer Clauses are argued to be copular clauses consisting of a silent copula of identity connecting an interrogative clause in the precopular position with a declarative clause in the postcopular position. Pragmatically, they instantiate a topic/comment structure, with the first part expressing a sub-question under discussion and the second part expressing the answer to that sub-question. Broader implications of the analysis are discussed for the Question Under Discussion theory of discourse structuring, for the analysis of pseudoclefts in spoken languages, and for recent proposals about the need for answerhood operators and exhaustivity operators in the grammar and the consequences for the syntax/semantics/pragmatics interface. (shrink)

Over the years, I’ve been asked many times what “logical form” is, as applied to natural language. This is a natural enough question to address to me; after all, I’ve written a book titled Logical Form, and I’ve been asked to write any number of papers on the topic. This question, it seems to me, is certainly a “big” question, and big questions deserve big answers. I must admit, however, to being somewhat baffled as to how to do (...) this satisfactorily, since big answers to big questions unfortunately tend to the trivial. With a nod to Wittgenstein, logical form has always seemed to me to be something that you know it when you see it; it is clear enough when it pops up, but one is hard pressed to say just what it is, to define it. This is so even though the meanings of the words “logical” and “form” seem straightforward enough; what I find puzzling is how the first word is supposed to modify the second. What is it that makes a form logical, as opposed to something else that is not logical? This, it seems to me, is a very hard question to answer indeed, for if we cannot contrast logical form with some other type of form, then every form (or no form) is a logical form, and we have arrived at the triviality previously mentioned. (shrink)

This Handbook documents the main trends in current research between logic and language, including its broader influence in computer science, linguistic theory and cognitive science. The history of the combined study of Logic and Linguistics goes back a long way, at least to the work of the scholastic philosophers in the Middle Ages. At the beginning of this century, the subject was revitalized through the pioneering efforts of Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, and Polish philosophical logicians such as Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz. (...) Around 1970, the landmark achievements of Richard Montague established a junction between state-of-the-art mathematical logic and generative linguistic theory. Over the subsequent decades, this enterprise of Montague Grammar has flourished and diversified into a number of research programs with empirical and theoretical substance. This appears to be the first Handbook to bring logic-language interface to the fore. Both aspects of the interaction between logic and language are demonstrated in the book i.e. firstly, how logical systems are designed and modified in response to linguistic needs and secondly, how mathematical theory arises in this process and how it affects subsequent linguistic theory. The Handbook presents concise, impartial accounts of the topics covered. Where possible, an author and a commentator have cooperated to ensure the proper breadth and technical content of the papers. The Handbook is self-contained, and individual articles are of the highest quality. (shrink)

Under what conditions are two utterances utterances of the same word? What are words? That these questions have not received much attention is rather surprising: after all, philosophers and linguists frequently appeal to considerations about word and sentence identity in connection with a variety of puzzles and problems that are foundational to the very subject matter of philosophy of language and linguistics.1 Kaplan’s attention to words is thus to be applauded. And there is no doubt that his discussion contains (...) many useful insights. Nevertheless, we find his picture deeply flawed for a variety of crosscutting reasons. Our aim in this paper is to further advance an understanding of the nature of words, both by remedying the problems with Kaplan’s account, and also by achieving a suitable perspective on what the metaphysical investigation of word identity can hope to achieve. Our discussion divides into four parts. In Part One, we examine and critique Kaplan’s discussion of a contrast integral to his own account: that between the type-token and the stage-continuant conceptions of words. In Part Two, we present three constraints on any account of words and two further themes in Kaplan’s discussion central to his conception of words – the role of repetition and the constitutive authority of intentions. While these ideas have laudable motivations, we argue they are far from the best way of making good on the insights that drive them. The final two sections take a skeptical turn. In Part Three, we express doubt about Kaplan’s presumption of the importance of what he calls ‘common currency names’, thus raising a suspicion that he may be in pursuit of chimera. Finally, in Part Four, we express pessimism about whether interesting answers to question above will be forthcoming, and suggest that the legitimacy of our word ontology need not depend on the availability of such answers. Along the way, we tease apart a number of metaphysical questions in the vicinity of the topic of word individuation – questions that are often not disentangled – and consider how the discussion of the previous parts bears on them.. (shrink)

Since 1952, Spanish has been included as a Degree in the Foreign Language Studies in the higher education system of China. The number of Spanish students has gradually increased and, until March 2020, with 6 Universities recently approved by the Chinese Ministry of Education, there are 102 Chinese universities that teach Spanish as a university degree. In 2017, the MOE of the People's Republic of China published the Curriculum Plan in the Higher Secondary Schools, which incorporated (...) the teaching of Spanish as a teaching option along with other languages, such as English, Japanese, Russian, German, and French. In the following year, during the Chinese President's state visit to Spain, a cooperation agreement was signed between the Royal Spanish Academy and SISU, under which a RAE-SISU Joint Research Centre was established. This study aims to publicize the situation of Spanish teaching in China, showing how a language can become a cultural and language tourism resource for Spain. An empirical study of student profiles was carried out at one of the most prestigious universities with reference to Spanish teaching in China, SISU. The data were obtained through primary sources employing a survey sent to the Chinese students studying their bachelor's degree of Spanish Philology, obtaining a sample of 159 students. The results revealed information on the studies carried out, also reviewing the most popular universities among the Chinese students in Spain, their stay period, and the destination image that the students have. The data will serve to show the opportunities for Spain as a destination for language tourism for the Chinese market. One of the implications of this study would be that it helps to explain how Spain can design a product for a niche market that demands Spain as a destination for language and cultural tourism. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Religious Enthusiasm, the Spanish Inquisition, and the Disenchantment of the WorldAndrew KeittIn 1688 Anglican divine William Wharton published a short tract entitled The Enthusiasm of the Church of Rome demonstrated in some observations upon the life of Ignatius Loyola. Typical of the confessional propaganda of the day, Wharton's work contrasted the "rationality" of Protestantism with what he considered to be the superstition and obscurantism of the Catholic faith:It (...) has been the peculiar happiness of the Church of England to create a right sense of Religion and Piety in all her Communicants, and secure to them the practice of a rational Devotion. She makes no pretensions to private Inspirations, and extraordinary Illuminations of the Holy Ghost; and all her Children are more apt to deride, than admire the follies of the Enthusiasts.... Not so the Church of Rome, which in all her Offices and publick Ceremonies promotes and foments it, hath on many occasions given publick applause and approbation to it, and oweth the greatest part of her peculiar Doctrines, and present prosperity to the Enthusiasm of her Followers.1The "enthusiasm" to which Wharton refers had become the object of intense controversy in late seventeenth-century England. The term enthusiasm in this context meant highly emotional, deeply embodied religious experience in [End Page 231] the form of inspired raptures, miraculous revelations, and prophetic power. It was an epithet used with increasing frequency during this period to condemn not only Catholics but also members of radical Protestant sects such as the Diggers, Levellers, and Fifth Monarchy Men.The efforts of mainstream Protestant denominations to distance themselves from the "ultrasupernaturalism" of religious enthusiasts would seem to fit within a Weberian paradigm in which the Protestant Reformation functions as a catalyst for the "disenchantment of the world," the process by which the boundaries of the supernatural were supposedly rolled back in the modern West.2 Indeed, many historians of early modern Europe have adopted, either implicitly or explicitly, such a model. Lawrence Stone, for example, reflects this school of thought with his assertion that by the end of the seventeenth century, Protestantism's "more rational and coherent view of nature and its relationship to God's providence" created a worldview in which magical or miraculous explanations of events became increasingly untenable.3Catholicism, on the other hand, has often been portrayed as maintaining a more porous boundary between nature and supernature. Summarizing what he calls the "Weberian consensus," sociologist Peter Berger offers the following analysis, which reads remarkably like a translation of Wharton's characterization of Catholicism into the language of the social sciences:The Catholic lives in a world in which the sacred is mediated to him through a variety of channels—the sacraments of the church, the intercession of the saints, the recurring eruption of the "supernatural" in miracles—a vast continuity of being between the seen and the unseen.4In recent years, however, as historians have emphasized the structural parallels between the various confessions in Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, such stark contrasts have become increasingly suspect.5 Consequently, scholars have underscored the need for comparative work on the topic. Michael Heyd, for example, has suggested such a strategy in his work on the reaction to religious enthusiasm in seventeenth-century Europe.6 [End Page 232] Although Heyd focuses primarily on the English case, he recommends an integrative, comparative approach. He describes how religious enthusiasm became "the subject of detailed analysis—theological, social, psychological and even medical" in the closing decades of the seventeenth century in England, and he details the efforts of both religious and secular authorities "to distinguish carefully between true inspiration and a false one, between the natural realm and the truly supernatural."7 Heyd links this reaction against religious enthusiasm to the disenchantment of the world and asks to what extent these trends were unique to the Anglican tradition in England.8Lorraine Daston has emphasized the need for comparative study as well. Religious enthusiasm plays an important role in Daston's "historical epistemology," which traces the development of modern notions of "fact" and "evidence," and their relationship to changing attitudes toward the miraculous in early modern Europe. The... (shrink)

This article concerns sound aesthetic preferences for European foreign languages. We investigated the phonetic-acoustic dimension of the linguistic aesthetic pleasure to describe the “music” found in European languages. The Romance languages, French, Italian, and Spanish, take a lead when people talk about melodious language – the music-like effects in the language (a.k.a., phonetic chill). On the other end of the melodiousness spectrum are German and Arabic that are often considered sounding harsh and un-attractive. Despite the public interest, (...) limited research has been conducted on the topic of phonaesthetics, i.e., the subfield of phonetics that is concerned with the aesthetic properties of speech sounds (Crystal, 2008). Our goal is to fill the existing research gap by identifying the acoustic features that drive the auditory perception of language sound beauty. What is so music-like in the language that makes people say “it is music in my ears”? We had 45 central European participants listening to 16 auditorily presented European languages and rating each language in terms of 22 binary characteristics (e.g., beautiful – ugly and funny – boring) plus indicating their language familiarities, L2 backgrounds, speaker voice liking, demographics, and musicality levels. Findings revealed that all factors in complex interplay explain a certain percentage of variance: familiarity and expertise in foreign languages, speaker voice characteristics, phonetic complexity, musical acoustic properties, and finally musical expertise of the listener. The most important discovery was the trade-off between speech tempo and so-called linguistic melody (pitch variance): the faster the language, the flatter/more atonal it is in terms of the pitch (speech melody), making it highly appealing acoustically (sounding beautiful and sexy), but not so melodious in a “musical” sense. (shrink)

Respondents from Austria (N = 146) and the Czech Republic (N = 165) noted down their experiences with people from their neighbouring country and their attitudes to their own country and the neighbouring nation on feeling thermometers. The quantitative content analysis and qualitative critical discourse-inspired analysis of the open statements focused on the role of language in the construction of Czech-Austrian relations. Using qualitative analysis we enquired as to which themes were intertwined with the topic of language, (...) and as to the ways in which the participants perceived themselves, the Others, behind the border, and the relations between the two sides. We looked not only into what participants said but also how they said it. Using statistical analysis we tested the link between language-related topics in the descriptions of intergroup contact and the evaluation of the neighbouring nation as a whole. Throughout the article we compare the findings obtained by the two kinds of analysis and comment on (dis)agreement as well as on the (dis)advantages of both approaches. (shrink)

This collection of John Mackie's papers on personal identity and topics in moral and political philosophy, some of which have not previously been published, deal with such issues as: multiple personality; the transcendental "I"; responsibility and language; aesthetic judgements; Sidgwick's pessimism; act-utiliarianism; right-based moral theories; cooperation, competition, and moral philosophy; universalization; rights, utility, and external costs; norms and dilemmas; Parfit's population paradox; and the combination of partially-ordered preferences.

This paper describes some aspects of the mutual impact of languages in a bilingual situation where one language is dominant and the other subordinate. The influence of the two languages on each other is effected through the user, namely, the bilingual. When the bilingual is in the process of learning the second language, his mother tongue influences his mastery of the former, resulting in the process that has been variously referred to as mother tongue interference, approximation, or interlanguage. (...) However, the influence does not take place in one direction only; in other words, it is not only a case of the mother tongue influencing the second language. If the second language is a dominant language its impact on the bilingual's first language can have far reaching implications. (shrink)

Several commentators have argued that Husserl's phenomenological project is compromised or even destroyed by Wittgenstein's critical inquiries into our use of psychological concepts. In contrast to oppositional interpretations, this paper explicates certain crucial connections between Husserl's phenomenology and Wittgenstein's late thinking—shared views that concern the embodied nature of selfhood and our relations to other selves. In line with certain recent contributions, I argue that there are important similarities between Husserl's analysis of these phenomena and Wittgenstein's remarks on our use of (...) language and that these connections, when noticed and explicated, can help us avoid simplified, barren contrasts and get clear about our actual philosophical alternatives. (shrink)

Warren and Dresang comment on the contributions from a psycholinguistic perspective, highlighting close relations between the respective research on events and proposing that, for example, verbs may indeed directly pre‐activate templates of the typically involved event participants.

This study critically explores the representation of ideologies across the verbal and visual modes in 15 articles and photographs from local Spanish-language print media with the goal of determining the potential for minoritized semiotic texts to challenge the negative semiotic treatment of Latin@ immigrants in the United States. Following a critical social semiotic approach, the analysis of intersemiotic relationships demonstrates that approximately half of the semiotic texts analyzed communicate an overall transformative message by challenging the negative representations of (...) Latin@s in the mainstream media. The strong presence of transformative ideologies in the verbal and visual modes underscores the potential for Spanish-language media to represent Latin@s as powerful social actors who stand up to negative treatment through activism. Moreover, the contrast of ideologies across the verbal and visual modes may incite the audience to participate in activism that supports Latin@ immigrants in the United States. (shrink)

Bryan Norton’s 2005 book Sustainability describes a pragmatic approach to environmental philosophy that stresses philosophy’s role as one of mediating between scientific and ordinary language. But on two topics, Norton’s approach is not pragmatic enough. In the case of his discussion of risk, he accedes to a scientific notion that fails to acknowledge the way that ordinary usage of the word risk involves pragmatic links to human action and moral responsibility. With respect to the word sustainability, his analysis fails (...) to acknowledge important scientific work that characterizes the functional integrity of system cycling, opting instead for usage grounded either in economic accounting or in an even less substantive sense of a broad social movement for environmental improvement. On each of these topics, adherence to the pragmatic orientation of Norton’s philosophy results in a different analysis of the concepts in question. (shrink)

Linguistic communication is an important part of the cross-cultural perspective, and linguistic textual emotion recognition is a key massage in interpersonal communication. Spanish is the second largest language system in the world. The purpose of this paper is to identify the emotional features in Spanish texts. The improved BiLSTM framework is proposed. We select three widely used Spanish dictionaries as the datasets for our experiments, and then we finally obtain text sentiment classification results through text preprocessing, (...) text emotion feature extraction, text topic detection, and emotion classification. We inserted the attention mechanism in the improved BiLSTM framework. It enables the shared feature encoder to obtain weighted representation results in the extraction of emotion features, which enhances the generalization ability of the model for text emotion feature recognition. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach performs better for specialized Spanish dictionary datasets. In terms of emotion recognition accuracy, the average value is as high as 76.21%. The overall performance outperforms current comparable machine learning methods and convolutional neural network methods. (shrink)

War is father of all, and king of all. He renders some gods, others men;he makes some slaves, others free.—HeraclitusLanguages in the Crossfire is an impressive and well-documented book written by...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Borges on Language and TranslationJon StewartAlthough Jorge Luis Borges had years of philosophical training and expressed a number of philosophical theories in his literary works, he never published a philosophy treatise. The result is that his oeuvre has often been viewed as purely literary and been largely neglected by trained philosophers. However, by ignoring the philosophical aspects of Borges’s thought, criticism has neglected a vast dimension of his (...) work and has thus frequently misunderstood and misinterpreted many aspects of it. As I have tried to demonstrate in an earlier article, 1 there are important philosophical themes in the short stories of Borges, which have yet to be considered. In the present essay, I take up one of these heretofore neglected themes.We can find perhaps no better example of the literary exposition of Borges’s philosophical ideas than in his short story or cuento, “Averroes’ Search.” 2 There Borges reconstructs for us a culture and an age radically different and temporally distant from our own. He recounts the story of Averroes, the Arab philosopher living in Spain in the second half of the twelfth century. The history of philosophy knows Averroes as one of the great medieval commentators on the works of Aristotle. Borges recreates the historical moment and the passion of Averroes in his task of translating and providing a commentary for the texts of the great Greek philosopher who remains forever distant from him. The story takes as its point of departure Renan’s observation about a curious misinterpretation of Aristotle found in Averroes: “S’imaginant que la tragédie n’est autre chose que l’art de louer...”(p. 180). Borges poses [End Page 320] the question of why Averroes, who had dedicated his life to understanding the work of Aristotle, had so badly misunderstood the concept of tragedy treated by the Greek philosopher. To answer this question, Borges brilliantly employs the faculty of historical imagination in order to think himself back into Averroes’s particular time period and cultural context. The short story presents us with a thesis about the intimate connection between culture and language and the ultimate futility of translation and crosscultural knowledge and comprehension. In the present essay, I wish to argue that the point of Borges’s story about the fate of Averroes is (1) to refute the common view which sees language as an entity neutral with respect to culture and history, and (2) to bring to light the comprehensive nature and scope of particular culturally and historically determined ways of thinking and perceiving the world. These philosophical elements have been neglected by the various literary scholars who have treated the works of Borges. 3 Moreover, Borges anticipates many of the most celebrated epistemological and hermeneutical theories of our day from philosophers such as Gadamer, Davidson and Quine, and presents them in literary form.IThere is a common view according to which the manifold languages of the various peoples and cultures of the world are more or less interchangeable. According to this linguistics of common sense, language is something secondary and accidental which is only an inessential corollary to our basic understanding and perception of the world. Human perception and cognition are thought of as constants for all humans everywhere. A dog will be perceived as a dog regardless of time period, place or culture, and the words we create to represent “dog” in the medium of language are secondary and even arbitrary. As a result, individual words in one language correspond to individual words in another. Dog in English corresponds straightforwardly to Hund in German or perro in Spanish, and nothing could be more simple. The gifted translator is merely someone with a great capacity to memorize words and to effect rapid replacement changes, and translation is regarded as a more or less mechanical process with little room for creativity. The diversity of languages is neither epistemologically necessary nor important, but rather explained as an historical accident as in the etiological tale of the Tower of Babel. Language has no necessary connection to the time period in which it is spoken or to the culture of [End Page 321] the people who speak it. That we... (shrink)

This tenth volume of Collected Papers includes 86 papers in English and Spanish languages comprising 972 pages, written between 2014-2022 by the author alone or in collaboration with the following 105 co-authors (alphabetically ordered) from 26 countries: Abu Sufian, Ali Hassan, Ali Safaa Sadiq, Anirudha Ghosh, Assia Bakali, Atiqe Ur Rahman, Laura Bogdan, Willem K.M. Brauers, Erick González Caballero, Fausto Cavallaro, Gavrilă Calefariu, T. Chalapathi, Victor Christianto, Mihaela Colhon, Sergiu Boris Cononovici, Mamoni Dhar, Irfan Deli, Rebeca Escobar-Jara, Alexandru Gal, (...) N. Gandotra, Sudipta Gayen, Vassilis C. Gerogiannis, Noel Batista Hernández, Hongnian Yu, Hongbo Wang, Mihaiela Iliescu, F. Nirmala Irudayam, Sripati Jha, Darjan Karabašević, T. Katican, Bakhtawar Ali Khan, Hina Khan, Volodymyr Krasnoholovets, R. Kiran Kumar, Manoranjan Kumar Singh, Ranjan Kumar, M. Lathamaheswari, Yasar Mahmood, Nivetha Martin, Adrian Mărgean, Octavian Melinte, Mingcong Deng, Marcel Migdalovici, Monika Moga, Sana Moin, Mohamed Abdel-Basset, Mohamed Elhoseny, Rehab Mohamed, Mohamed Talea, Kalyan Mondal, Muhammad Aslam, Muhammad Aslam Malik, Muhammad Ihsan, Muhammad Naveed Jafar, Muhammad Rayees Ahmad, Muhammad Saeed, Muhammad Saqlain, Muhammad Shabir, Mujahid Abbas, Mumtaz Ali, Radu I. Munteanu, Ghulam Murtaza, Munazza Naz, Tahsin Oner, ‪Gabrijela Popović‬‬‬‬‬, Surapati Pramanik, R. Priya, S.P. Priyadharshini, Midha Qayyum, Quang-Thinh Bui, Shazia Rana, Akbara Rezaei, Jesús Estupiñán Ricardo, Rıdvan Sahin, Saeeda Mirvakili, Said Broumi, A. A. Salama, Flavius Aurelian Sârbu, Ganeshsree Selvachandran, Javid Shabbir, Shio Gai Quek, Son Hoang Le, Florentin Smarandache, Dragiša Stanujkić, S. Sudha, Taha Yasin Ozturk, Zaigham Tahir, The Houw Iong, Ayse Topal, Alptekin Ulutaș, Maikel Yelandi Leyva Vázquez, Rizha Vitania, Luige Vlădăreanu, Victor Vlădăreanu, Ștefan Vlăduțescu, J. Vimala, Dan Valeriu Voinea, Adem Yolcu, Yongfei Feng, Abd El-Nasser H. Zaied, Edmundas Kazimieras Zavadskas.‬‬. (shrink)

This paper is concerned with the issue of how predication is possible, as a significant common concern in the philosophy of language, metaphysics and semantics. A ‘subject-comment’ account is suggested in view of its constructive engagement with two relevant competing approaches, i.e., the traditional ‘subject-categorization’ account and the ‘topic-comment’ account. The suggested account views predication as a unifying two-level predication: the primary level of predication is made through recognizing and commenting on some particular attribute(s) of the (...) subject’s semantic referent as a thick object (resulting in a weaker version of Russellian proposition) and the secondary level of predication through categorizing the subject’s semantic referent into a certain group via the Fregean conceptual content of the predicate. (shrink)

The BPR assumes that we already know how sentences are partitioned into focused and backgrounded material, and this is quite legitimate, given the literature on the topic , von Stechow ). If the BPR was true, no more would have to be said about the meaning of focus. The behavior of whatever inferences are generated by backgrounding could be taken care of by theories dealing with the projection of presuppositions of the familiar kind, the presuppositions of definite descriptions, clefts, (...) or factives, for example. This is a non-trivial and interesting claim. (shrink)

In Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language, Saul Kripke presents a controversial skeptical argument, which he attributes to Wittgenstein’s interlocutor in the Philosophical Investigations [PI]. The argument purports to show that there are no facts that correspond to what we mean by our words. Kripke maintains, moreover, that the conclusion of Wittgenstein’s so-called private language argument is a corollary of results Wittgenstein establishes in §§137-202 of PI concerning the topic of following-a-rule, and not the conclusion of an (...) independently developed argument in §§243ff of PI, as most commentators take it to be. In this work, I assess Kripke’s skeptical argument both in its own right, and as an interpretation of the rule-following sections of PI. In its own right, I try to show that it is critically flawed. However, as an interpretation of the rule-following sections of PI, I try to show that it is essentially correct. I do this by showing that Kripke’s interpretation squares with and supports the meta-philosophical framework developed by Wittgenstein in §§107-136 of PI, which immediately precedes his remarks on following-a-rule. (Oct 16, 2008. Committee: Paul Horwich, Galen Strawson, Stephen Neale, Michael Levin) -/- . (shrink)

Slurs have become a big topic of discussion both in philosophy and in linguistics. Slurs are usually characterised as pejorative terms, co-extensional with other, neutral, terms referring to ethnic or social groups. However, slurs are not the only ethnic/social words with pejorative senses. Our aim in this paper is to introduce a different kind of pejoratives, which we will call “ethnic/social terms used as insults”, as exemplified in Spanish, though present in many other languages and mostly absent in (...) English. These are ethnic terms like gitano, ‘Romani’, which can have an extensional and neutral use, but also a pejorative meaning building on a negative stereotypical representation of the Romani community. (shrink)

This book develops the general theory of language implicitly contained in the writings of G.W.F. Hegel. It offers novel readings of Hegel's central works in order to explain his views on some long neglected topics and as such demonstrates that his accounts of representation, the concept and the speculative sentence can be used to create sophisticated theories of language acquisition, universal grammar and linguistic practice. Hegel's defence of a scientific philosophy that is necessary and universal seems to eliminate (...) the need for a philosophical linguistics. Since thought is demonstrably objective in itself, questions about the language through which it is expressed appear to be external to philosophy. This has caused many commentators to neglect the real problems that the historical and cultural associations of language pose for the adequate expression of universal thought. Others, exploiting this apparent inadequacy, have argued that the lack of rigorous linguistic analysis in Hegel's philosophy is its greatest, and perhaps fatal, flaw. Although the very idea of a Hegelian linguistics is controversial, this book argues that there are resources within the texts of Hegel for developing a general theory of language as the reciprocal grounding of a universal grammatical form and a particular lexical content. Moreover, it uses this theory to resolve the apparent tension between the necessity of Hegelian philosophy and the contingency of its linguistic expression. In the light of Hegel's critical relation to contemporary debates in Continental and Anglo-American philosophy, coupled with the central role that philosophy of language plays in both streams, this important new study offers the first comprehensive, integrated and fully developed analysis of Hegel's theory of language. (shrink)

There are many different views on what role language plays in ethnic identification. This article is focused on the given issue based on the sample of the Cuban minority living in Slovakia. The topic is analyzed on a sample of Cubans living in the territory of Slovakia in a time frame ranging from 1 to 37 years as well as their descendants who come from mixed Slovak-Cuban families. In this article I am dealing with the impact of the (...) Spanish, Slovak, Hungarian, and English language. (shrink)

_Language, Names, and Information_ is an important contribution to philosophy of language by one of its foremost scholars, challenging the pervasive view that the description theory of proper names is dead in the water, and defending a version of the description theory from a perspective on language that sees words as a wonderful source of information about the nature of the world we live in. Challenges current pervasive view that the description theory of reference for proper names has (...) been refuted Discusses several topics at the center of current debates, including representation and information, two-dimensionalism, possible worlds, and broad vs. narrow content Maintains the conversational and somewhat informal tone of the original lectures upon which the book is based. (shrink)

Objective Semiotica is published in six annual issues, in two languages (English and French). From time to time, Special Issues, devoted to topics of particular interest, are assembled by Guest Editors. The publishers of Semiotica offer an annual prize, the Mouton d'Or, to the author of the best article each year. The article is selected by an independent international jury. Topics We welcome papers reporting results of research in all branches of semiotic studies. Article formats Research articles, in-depth reviews, guest (...) editorials, reports Mouton D’Or Winner 2022 "Semiotricité et corps en jeu", Parlebas, Pierre, 248, 9-35. The judges commented: "The Committee members made this decision based on many appreciations. First, the article contains a concise theory on semiotics of movement, synthesizing decades of research of the author. It opens an exciting framework for the contribution of many other authors. The theoretical grounds of semiotircity are built on the most classical semiotic approaches and represent a genuine development. Second, the article refreshes semiotics methodology in very original way, by engaging the applied semiotics for furtive and instantaneous activities analysis. Third, the article is pretty clear and well structured, written in very comprehensible French. The theoretical frame it opens is thorough and far reaching. Fourth, the semiotic theory of movement comes in a very special moment when the whole world is football, but it covers also many other areas of applicability which reflect major trends such as the general gamification of life thanks to new media and digital technologies. It is crucial for semiotic theory to open its theoretic scope towards significant cultural trends and become more attractive for young researchers." Les membres du comité ont pris leur décision en fondant leur appréciation sur quatre éléments principaux. Premier élément : l'article, en peu de mots, en prenant appui sur des décennies de recherche de la part de l'auteur, déploie de manière précise les termes d'une sémiotique du mouvement. Les fondements théoriques de la sémiotricité sont construits sur des approches sémiotiques bien établies et représentent un véritable développement dans le domaine. En cela, le texte ouvre un cadre passionnant pour les contributions de nombreux autres chercheurs. Deuxièmement, l'article renouvelle la sémiotique appliquée de manière très originale, l'engageant dans une approche efficace des actions instantanées et furtives; la méthodologie sémiotique en général en tire donc aussi profit. Troisième point, en plus d'être profond, avec un cadre théorique d'ampleur et de grande portée, l'article est particulièrement bien structuré et écrit dans un français très compréhensible, ce qui est un véritable gain pour sa diffusion. Enfin, quatrièmement, s'il est indéniable que le texte pourrait bénéficier d'une visibilité complémentaire due à la ferveur liée au contexte récent de la coupe du monde de football au Qatar, il couvre surtout de nombreux autres domaines d'applicabilité qui reflètent des tendances majeures telles que la gamification générale de la vie, portée par les nouveaux médias et les technologies numériques. L'on y voit une belle opportunité pour la théorie sémiotique d'ouvrir son champ à la faveur de tendances culturelles significatives; ceci est une garantie pour continuer à attirer de nouvelles générations de chercheurs. (shrink)