Philosophical interest in language, while ancient and enduring (see Language, ancient philosophy of; Language, medieval theories of; Language, Renaissance philosophy of; Language, early modern philosophy of), has blossomed ...
Adverbs are so named from their role in modifying verbs and other non-nominal expressions. For example, in ‘John ran slowly’, the adverb ‘slowly’ modifies ‘ran’ by characterizing the ...
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A word, phrase or sentence is ambiguous if it has more than one meaning. The word ‘light’, for example, can mean not very heavy or not very dark. ...
In Critique of Pure ReasonKant introduced the term ‘analytic’ for judgments whose truth is guaranteed by a certain relation of ‘containment’ between the constituent concepts, and ‘synthetic’ for ...
Anaphora describes a dependence of the interpretation of one natural language expression on the interpretation of another natural language expression. For example, the pronoun ‘her’ in (1) below ...
Apoha, a Sanskrit term meaning exclusion, was used by the late fifth- to early sixth-century Buddhist philosopher Dignāga as a keystone in his theory of denotation. According to ...
The classic attempt to understand communication in terms of the intentions of a person making an utterance was put forward by Paul Grice in 1957. Grice was concerned ...
The concept of ‘communicative rationality’ is primarily associated with the work of the philosopher and social theorist Jürgen Habermas. According to Habermas, communication through language necessarily involves the ...
A language is compositional if the meaning of each of its complex expressions (for example, ‘black dog’) is determined entirely by the meanings its parts (‘black’, ‘dog’) and ...
‘If bats were deaf, they would hunt during the day.’ What you have just read is called a ‘counterfactual’ conditional; it is an ‘If…then…’ statement the components of ...
The concept of criteria has been interpreted as the central notion in the later Wittgenstein’s account of how language functions, in contrast to the realist semantics of the ...
Although the term is often used interchangeably (and loosely) alongside others like ‘post-structuralism’ and ‘postmodernism’, deconstruction differs from these other movements. Unlike post-structuralism, its sources lie squarely within ...
Demonstratives and indexicals are words and phrases whose interpretations are dependent on features of the context in which they are used. For example, the reference of ‘I’ depends ...
‘Definite descriptions’ are noun phrases of the form ‘the’ + noun complex (for example, ‘the finest Greek poet’, ‘the cube of five’) or of the form possessive + ...
Discourse and its interpretation have interested philosophers since ancient times, and have been studied in different areas of philosophy such as rhetoric, the philosophy of language and the ...
Emotive meaning contrasts with descriptive meaning. Terms have descriptive meaning if they do the job of stating facts: they have emotive meaning if they do the job of ...
Taken at face value, ‘Anna Karenina is a woman’ seems true. By using Tolstoi’s name ‘Anna Karenina’ and the predicate ‘is a woman’ we appear to refer to ...
Focus is the name of the phenomenon we typically see marked in English by putting stress on a word or phrase, as in: ...
Generics are statements such as ‘dogs are mammals’, ‘a tiger is striped’, ‘the dodo is extinct’, ‘ducks lay eggs’ and ‘mosquitoes carry the West Nile virus’. Generic statements ...
Mental (or semantic) holism is the doctrine that the identity of a belief content (or the meaning of a sentence that expresses it) is determined by its place ...
A term used in philosophy, logic and linguistics (especially pragmatics) to denote the act of meaning or implying something by saying something else. A girl who says ‘I ...
Examples of indicative conditionals are ‘If it rained, then the match was cancelled’ and ‘If Alex plays, Carlton will win’. The contrast is with subjunctive or counterfactual conditionals, ...
Indirect discourse is a mode of speech-reporting whereby a speaker conveys the content of someone’s utterance without quoting the actual words. Thus, if Pierre says, ‘Paris est belle’, ...
The truth or falsity of many sentences depends only on which things are being talked about. Within intensional contexts, however, truth values also depend on how those ...