This volume offers novel views on the precise relation between reference to an object by means of a linguistic expression and our mental representation of that object, long a source of debate in the philosophy of language, linguistics, and cognitive science. Chapters in this volume deal with our devices for singular reference and singular representation, with most focusing on linguistic expressions that are used to refer to particular objects, persons, or places. These expressions include proper names such as Mary and John; indexicals such as I and tomorrow; demonstrative pronouns such as this and that; and some definite and indefinite descriptions such as The Queen of England or a medical doctor. Other chapters examine the ways we represent objects in thought, particularly the first-person perspective and the self, and one explores a notion common to reference and representation: salience. The volume includes the latest views on these complex topics from some of the most prominent authors in the field and will be of interest to anyone working on issues of reference and representation in thought and language.

One: Nuts and Bolts.- 1. Mental Representation.- Symbolism: The Classical Paradigm.- Cracks in the Symbolic Paradigm.- Connectionism: The Other Paradigm.- Methods of Models.- Assessing Theories of Mental Representation.- 2. Partitioned Representations.- General Overview.- The Contents of Spaces.- Parochial Reasoning.- Primary Contexts.- Partitioned Semantics.- Coherence.- Consolidation.- Secondary Contexts.- A Typology of Spaces.- Where Partitioned Representations Get Their Power.- Summary and Conclusions.- 3. Language: Process and Structure.- A Simple Philosophy of Language.- Linguistic Explanation.- The Process of Language Understanding.- Linguistic Evidence for Mental Representations.- 4. Three Levels of Language Processing.- Parochial Processing.- Distribution.- Contextualization.- An Example Discourse.- Conclusions.- Two: Studies in Language.- 5. Pedro's Donkey and Oedipus's Mother.- Some Common Parochial Linguistic Processes.- Some Common Cases of Distribution.- Interaction of Distribution and Parochial Processes.- Summary and Conclusions.- 6. Satisfying Presuppositions in Discourse.- The Problem of Presupposition.- Presupposition and Parochial Processing.- What Happens in Complex Sentences?.- Conclusions.- 7. Space Frogs and Henry Ford.- Linguistic Evidence for Contextualization.- The Semantic Contributions of Space Cues.- Summary.- 8. Temporal Aspect.- Reference Time: Temporal Perspective.- Semantics and Construction.- Reference Time: Contextualization.- The Case of the Present Perfect.- Conclusion.- 9. General Conclusions.- An Assessment of Partitioned Representations.- Prospectus.- The Importance of Partitioned Representations.- Appendices: Formal Models.- 10. A Logic of Partitioned Representations.- The Syntax of PR.- Rules of Inference for PR.- The Semantics of PR.- Soundness.- Conclusions.- 11. Generalized Natural Deduction.- Generalized Natural Deduction.- Time and Action.- Frames.- Summary and Conclusions.- 12. A Computational Model.- The Design of Spaceprobe.- Customizing Digestion.- Restructuring Rules for Distribution.- Handling Queries.- Language Understanding in Spaceprobe.- Summary.- References.- Author Index.

Presents an historical overview of the way that ideas about language and thinking have developed from the early days of cognitive psychology to the present. Emphasizes psychological theories and findings, but also considers related work in artificial intelligence, linguistics and philosophy. Develops an integrated model by exploring specific themes: the relationship between language and thinking, inductive vs. deductive inferences, conscious vs. unconscious processes, and general purpose vs. domain specific processes.

Originally published in 1990, this book centres on a certain way of surveying a variety of theories of language, and on outlining a new proposal of meaning within the framework set by the survey. One of the key features of both survey and proposal is the insistence on the need to locate theories of language within a large framework that includes questions about the nature of thought and about general ontological questions as well. The book deals in an interconnected way with both very general and specific issues. At one end of this spectrum there are discussions of the contrast between realist and nominalist ontologies, while at the other are analyses of specific lexical items of English.

This dynamic collection provides an overview of the relationship between linguistic form and interpretation as exemplified by the most influential of these paradigms - the current Chomskian Government and Binding paradigm, the conflicting Situation Semantics paradigm, the Davidsonian programme and, finally, the new relevance theory of cognition and pragmatics.

Event Representation in Language and Cognition examines new research into how the mind deals with the experience of events. Empirical research into the cognitive processes involved when people view events and talk about them is still a young field. The chapters by leading experts draw on data from the description of events in spoken and signed languages, first and second language acquisition, co-speech gesture and eye movements during language production, and from non-linguistic categorization and other tasks. The book highlights newly found evidence for how perception, thought, and language constrain each other in the experience of events. It will be of particular interest to linguists, psychologists, and philosophers, as well as to anyone interested in the representation and processing of events.

Karl Bühler (1879–1963) was one of the leading theoreticians of language of the twentieth century. Although primarily a psychologist, Bühler devoted much of his attention to the study of language and language theory. His masterwork Sprachtheorie (1934) quickly gained recognition in the fields of linguistics, semiotics, the philosophy of language and the psychology of language. This new edition of the English translation of Bühler’s theory begins with a survey on ‘Bühler’s legacy’ for modern linguistics (Werner Abraham), followed by the Theory of Language, and finally with a special ‘Postscript: Twenty-five Years Later ...’ (Achim Eschbach). Bühler’s theory is divided into four parts. Part I discusses the four axioms or principles of language research, the most famous of which is the first, the organon model, the base of Bühler's instrumental view of language. Part II treats the role of indexicality in language and discusses deixis as one determinant of speech. Part III examines the symbolic field, dealing with context, onomatopoeia and the function of case. Part IV deals with the elements of language and their organization (syllabification, the definition of the word, metaphor, anaphora, etc).The text is accompanied by an Introduction (Achim Eschbach); Translator's preface (Donald Fraser Goodwin); Glossary of terms; and a Bibliography of cited works.

This book addresses some issues of theorization in linguistics having to do with the systems of representation used in linguistics and the relation between linguistics and cognition. The essays gathered in the first part question the very concept of metalanguage, comparing the metalanguage used in formalised languages and that of natural languages, or examining Chomsky’s theory of mental representations in relation to semantic description and analysis. In the same line of thought, another contribution endeavours to show how the notational system of a linguistic theory is part and parcel of both conceptualisation and theorisation, in an analysis based on the early development of phonetics and phonology. The second part of the volume studies the relations between linguistics and cognition seen under different angles. The first study examines how the relation between cognitive linguistics and other disciplines is conducive to confusion and divergences in the interpretation of the terminology, and is followed by a discussion of the origins and development of prototype theory in psychology and its transfer in linguistics by cognitive semanticists. The last two chapters study how mental operations are expressed in language, analysing the cognitive processes of deductive vs. abductive inference on the one hand, and the metarepresentation of utterance acts by assertive shell-nouns on the other hand.

This book considers linguistic and mental representations of time. Prominent linguists and philosophers from all over the world examine and report on recent work on the representation of temporal reference; the interaction of the temporal information from tense, aspect, modality, temporal adverbials, and context; and the representation of the temporal relations between events and states, as well as between facts, propositions, sentences, and utterances. They link this to current research on the cognitive processing of temporal reference, linguistic and philosophical semantics, psychology, and anthropology. The book is divided into three parts: Time, Tense, and Temporal Reference in Discourse; Time and Modality; and Cognition and Metaphysics of Time. It will interest scholars and advanced students of time and temporal reference in linguistics, philosophy, anthropology, psychology, and cognitive science.

Main description: The author argues for a new, linguistically grounded typology of speech and thought representation in English from a cognitive-linguistic perspective. Apart from direct and indirect speech/thought, the types described include the character-oriented free indirect and the narrator-oriented distancing indirect type, and two subjectified types in which reporting clauses such as I think function as hedges.