By reconciling the linguistic device and the linguistic person, his book argues for a Vygotskyan cognitive science.

This volume is a comprehensive, up-to-date, and readable introduction to linguistic meaning. While partial to conceptual and typological approaches, the book also presents results from formal approaches. Throughout, the focus is on grammatical meaning -- the way languages delineate universal semantic space and encode it in grammatical form. Subjects covered by the author include: the domain of linguistic semantics and the basic tools, assumptions, and issues of semantic analysis; semantic properties of entities, events, and thematic roles; language and space; tense, (...) aspect, and the internal structure and temporal ordering of events; modality, negation, and the epistemology of the speaker; and modification and attribution. In contrast to most current treatments of semantics, this book is accessible to the beginning student of semantics and linguistics and also useful to the advanced practitioner. A textbook and reference work in a single volume, it can be used in a number of disciplines: psychology, computer science, and anthropology as well as linguistics. (shrink)

Four extensions of Carruthers’ arguments are given. (1) Specifics of the Vygotskyan tradition can enhance his claims. (2) Linguistic relativity might be seen as variation in how logical form (LF) and phonetic form (PF)serve working memory. (3) Language aids intermodular thinking because it makes representations maximally visible. (4) Language for intermodular thinking is not hardwired but opportunistic.

Autism and psychosis manifest private speech disruptions analogous to their diametrical opposition along the autism-psychosis continuum. Autism has naturally suppressed private speech with predictable structural deficits when it does surface; psychosis has overt but ineffectual private speech with similar structural deficits. These private speech oppositions are best understood in the context of the control processes of cognitive-computational architectures.