Herbert Paul Grice, usually publishing under the name H. P. Grice, H. Paul Grice, or Paul Grice, was a British philosopher of language who created the theory of implicature and the cooperative principle, which became foundational concepts in the linguistic field of pragmatics. His work on meaning has also influenced the philosophical study of semantics.
Robin Tolmach Lakoff is a professor emerita of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley. Her 1975 book Language and Woman's Place is often credited for making language and gender a major debate in linguistics and other disciplines.
The linguistic turn was a major development in Western philosophy during the early 20th century, the most important characteristic of which is the focusing of philosophy primarily on the relations between language, language users, and the world.
In linguistics and philosophy, a presupposition is an implicit assumption about the world or background belief relating to an utterance whose truth is taken for granted in discourse. Examples of presuppositions include:
John Robert "Haj" Ross is an American poet and linguist. He played a part in the development of generative semantics along with George Lakoff, James D. McCawley, and Paul Postal. He was a professor of linguistics at MIT from 1966 to 1985 and has worked in Brazil, Singapore and British Columbia, and until spring 2021, he taught at the University of North Texas.
Stephen Roy Albert Neale is a British philosopher and specialist in the philosophy of language who has written extensively about meaning, information, interpretation, and communication, and more generally about issues at the intersection of philosophy and linguistics. Neale is a Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Linguistics and holder of the John H. Kornblith Family Chair in the Philosophy of Science and Values at the Graduate Center, City University of New York (CUNY).
Carlo Penco, August 1948 –, is an Italian analytic philosopher and full professor in philosophy of language at the University of Genoa in Italy.
Andrea Bonomi is an Italian philosopher and logician, who studied with Enzo Paci.
Philosophy of language is the area of philosophy which investigates the nature of language and the relations between language, language users, and the world. Investigations may include inquiry into the nature of meaning, intentionality, reference, the constitution of sentences, concepts, learning, and thought.
1974 in philosophy
1977 in philosophy
In semantics, a donkey sentence is a sentence containing a pronoun which is semantically bound but syntactically free. They are a classic puzzle in formal semantics and philosophy of language because they are fully grammatical and yet defy straightforward attempts to generate their formal language equivalents. In order to explain how speakers are able to understand them, semanticists have proposed a variety of formalisms including systems of dynamic semantics such as Discourse representation theory. Their name comes from the example sentence "Every farmer who owns a donkey beats it", in which "it" acts as a donkey pronoun because it is semantically but not syntactically bound by the indefinite noun phrase "a donkey". The phenomenon is known as donkey anaphora.
Formal semantics is the study of grammatical meaning in natural languages using formal concepts from logic, mathematics and theoretical computer science. It is an interdisciplinary field, sometimes regarded as a subfield of both linguistics and philosophy of language. It provides accounts of what linguistic expressions mean and how their meanings are composed from the meanings of their parts. The enterprise of formal semantics can be thought of as that of reverse-engineering the semantic components of natural languages' grammars.
Lauri Juhani Karttunen was an adjunct professor in linguistics at Stanford and an ACL Fellow.
Barbara Kenyon Abbott is an American linguist. She earned her PhD in linguistics in 1976 at the University of California at Berkeley under the supervision of George Lakoff. From 1976 to 2006, she was a professor in the department of linguistics and Germanic, Slavic, Asian, and African languages at Michigan State University, with a joint appointment in philosophy. She is now a Professor Emerita.
Georgia M. Green is an American linguist and academic. She is an emeritus professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her research has focused on pragmatics, speaker intention, word order and meaning. She has been an advisory editor for several linguistics journals or publishers and she serves on the usage committee for the American Heritage Dictionary.
Craige Roberts is an American linguist, known for her work on pragmatics and formal semantics.
In formal semantics, the scope of a semantic operator is the semantic object to which it applies. For instance, in the sentence "Paulina doesn't drink beer but she does drink wine," the proposition that Paulina drinks beer occurs within the scope of negation, but the proposition that Paulina drinks wine does not. Scope can be thought of as the semantic order of operations.
Free choice is a phenomenon in natural language where a linguistic disjunction appears to receive a logical conjunctive interpretation when it interacts with a modal operator. For example, the following English sentences can be interpreted to mean that the addressee can watch a movie and that they can also play video games, depending on their preference:
- You can watch a movie or play video games.
- You can watch a movie or you can play video games.
In linguistics, exhaustivity is the phenomenon where a proposition can be strengthened with the negation of certain alternatives. For example, in response to the question "Which students got an A?", the utterance "Ava got an A" has an exhaustive interpretation when it conveys that no other students got an A. It has a non-exhaustive interpretation when it merely conveys that Ava was among the students who got an A.