This book offers a fresh perspective on how natural languages encode grammatical relations, by delving into the interplay between oblique cases, adpositions, serial verbs, and applicatives. This book reveals, through a series of case studies, the pervasive role of the 'inclusion' relator across diverse linguistic contexts. Departing from traditional views that obliques lack interpretive content, this work presents a unified conceptual framework of relations in grammar. Drawing on minimalist principles, the book posits a preeminence of the lexicon in syntactic projection, shedding light on the underlying ontology of language. By exploring cross-categorial variation and syncretism, it outlines an inventory of primitives shaping morpho-syntactic derivations.
The verb has often been considered the 'center' of the sentence and has hence always attracted the special attention of the linguist. The present volume collects novel approaches to two classical topics within verbal semantics, namely argument structure and the treatment of time and aspect. The linguistic material covered comes from a broad spectrum of languages including English, German, Danish, Ukrainian, and Australian aboriginal languages; and methods from both cognitive and formal semantics are applied in the analyses presented here. Some of the authors use a variety of event semantics in order to analyze argument structure and aspect whereas others employ ideas coming from object-oriented programming in order to achieve new insights into the way how verbs select their arguments and how events are classified into different types. Both kinds of methods are also used to give accounts of dynamical aspects of semantic interpretation such as coercion and type shifting.
General concepts and methods that occur throughout mathematics – and now also in theoretical computer science – are the subject of this book. It is a thorough introduction to Categories, emphasizing the geometric nature of the subject and explaining its connections to mathematical logic. The book should appeal to the inquisitive reader who has seen some basic topology and algebra and would like to learn and explore further.The first part contains a detailed treatment of the fundamentals of Geometric Logic, which combines four central ideas: natural transformations, sheaves, adjoint functors, and topoi. A special feature of the work is a general calculus of relations presented in the second part. This calculus offers another, often more amenable framework for concepts and methods discussed in part one. Some aspects of this approach find their origin in the relational calculi of Peirce and Schroeder from the last century, and in the 1940's in the work of Tarski and others on relational algebras. The representation theorems discussed are an original feature of this approach.
Immanuel Kant is widely considered to be the most important and influential thinker of modern Europe and the late Enlightenment. His philosophy is extraordinarily wide-ranging and his influence has been pervasive throughout eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth-century thought, in particular in the work of the German Idealists, and also in both Analytic and Continental philosophy today. Now available as a new and expanded edition in paperback, this accessible companion to Kant features more than 100 specially commissioned entries, written by a team of experts in the field, covering every aspect of his philosophy. The Bloomsbury Companion to Kant presents a comprehensive overview of the historical and philosophical context in which Kant wrote and the various features, themes and topics apparent in his thought. It also includes extensive synopses of all his major published works and a survey of the key lines of reception and influence including a new addition on Schopenhauer's reception of Kant. It concludes with a thorough bibliography of English language secondary literature, now expanded for this edition to include all cutting-edge publications in the area. This is an essential and practical research tool for those working in the field of eighteenth-century German philosophy and Kant.
In this two-volume work, the first full-scale treatment of its kind in English, Harm Pinkster applies contemporary linguistic theories and the findings of traditional grammar to the study of Latin syntax. He takes a non-technical and principally descriptive approach, based on literary and non-literary texts dating from c.250 BC to c.450 AD. The volumes contain a wealth of examples to illustrate the grammatical phenomena under discussion, many of them from the works of Plautus and Cicero, alongside extensive references to other sources of examples such as the Oxford Latin Dictionary and the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae. While the first volume explored the simple clause, this second volume focuses on the complex sentence and discourse. The first three chapters examine different types of subordinate clause; the following four then explore relative clauses, coordination, comparison, and secondary predicates. Later chapters investigate information structure and extraclausal expressions, word order, and discourse and related features. The Oxford Latin Syntax will be a valuable and up-to-date resource both for professional Latinists and all linguists with an interest in Classics.
Beginning with a general theory of function applied to body organs, behaviors, customs, and both inner and outer representations, Ruth Millikan argues that the intentionality of language can be described without reference to speaker intentions and that an understanding of the intentionality of thought can and should be divorced from the problem of understanding consciousness. The results support a realist theory of truth and of universals, and open the way for a nonfoundationalist and nonholistic approach to epistemology. A Bradford Book
Predicates and their Subjects is an in-depth study of the syntax-semantics interface focusing on the structure of the subject-predicate relation. Starting from where the author's 1983 dissertation left off, the book argues that there is syntactic constraint that clauses (small and tensed) are constructed out of a one-place unsaturated expression, the predicate, which must be applied to a syntactic argument, its subject. The author shows that this predication relation cannot be reduced to a thematic relation or a projection of argument structure, but must be a purely syntactic constraint. Chapters in the book show how the syntactic predication relation is semantically interpreted, and how the predication relation explains constraints on DP-raising and on the distribution of pleonastics in English. The second half of the book extends the theory of predication to cover copular constructions; it includes an account of the structure of small clauses in Hebrew, of the use of `be' in predicative and identity sentences in English, and concludes with a study of the meaning of the verb `be'.
E. J. Lowe sets out and defends his theory of what there is. His four-category ontology is a metaphysical system that recognizes two fundamental categorial distinctions which cut across each other to generate four fundamental ontological categories. The distinctions are between the particular and the universal and between the substantial and the non-substantial. The four categories thus generated are substantial particulars, non-substantial particulars, substantial universals andnon-substantial universals. Non-substantial universals include properties and relations, conceived as universals. Non-substantial particulars include property-instances and relation-instances, otherwise known as non-relational and relational tropes or modes. Substantial particulars include propertiedindividuals, the paradigm examples of which are persisting, concrete objects. Substantial universals are otherwise known as substantial kinds and include as paradigm examples natural kinds of persisting objects.This ontology has a lengthy pedigree, many commentators attributing it to Aristotle on the basis of certain passages in his apparently early work, the Categories. At various times during the history of Western philosophy, it has been revived or rediscovered, but it has never found universal favour, perhaps on account of its apparent lack of parsimony as well as its commitment to universals. In pursuit of ontological economy, metaphysicians have generally preferred to recognize fewerthan four fundamental ontological categories. However, Occam's razor stipulates only that we should not multiply entities beyond necessity; Lowe argues that the four-category ontology has an explanatory power unrivalled by more parsimonious systems, and that this counts decisively in its favour. He shows thatit provides a powerful explanatory framework for a unified account of causation, dispositions, natural laws, natural necessity and many other related matters, such as the semantics of counterfactual conditionals and the character of the truthmaking relation. As such, it constitutes a thoroughgoing metaphysical foundation for natural science.
Including over 500 specially commissioned entries from a team of leading international scholars, this is an essential reference to Kant's thought, writings and continuing influence.
This important book presents seminal contributions to the emerging synthesis of logic and cognitive psychology. In collaboration with several colleagues the editors have developed a landmark semantic theory for natural languages.
