Language & human understanding: the roots of creativity in speech and thought

Acknowledgments

Introduction and Overview

The Plan of This Book

The Inspiration and Background of This Study

Section 1. Words and Their Dynamism: How We Are Able to Make an "Infinite Use of Finite Means"

Section 2. Seeking a Perspective Appropriate to the Phenomena

Section 3. The Role of Pragmatics in Semantics at Every Layer of Meaning within Discourse

Section 4. Grammatical Structures as a Projection of Semantic Structures

Section 5. The Novelty of Chomsky's Conception of Formal Grammar

Section 6. The Verbal or "Saying" Character of Speech as the Key to Grammar

Prospect

Part 1. Words and Their Dynamism in the Expression of Meaning

Chapter I. Two Levels of Meaning: The Level of Language-Possession and the Level of Language-Use

The Notion of Linguistic Understanding: Preliminary Remarks

Section 1. The Two Levels of Linguistic Understanding

Section 2. Words and Sentences: The Relation of the Two Levels

Section 3. How "Expressing a Sense" Differs from Other Forms of "Expressing"

Section 4. Distinguishing Langue-Meaning and Parole-Meaning as the Key to Escaping Compositionalism

Section 5. How We Achieve an "Infinite Use of Finite Means"

Chapter II. The Salience of Words and Our Adventurousness in Using Them

Section 1. Words and Basic Lexical Factors

Section 2. Types of Relationship between Different Uses of the Same Word

Section 3. The Roots of Creative Analogy in Extending the Concept of Number

Summary: The Power of Examples in Demonstration

Appendix: Morphology and Its Bearing on Semantics

Chapter III. Sentences, Sense, and the Objects of Linguistic Science

The Concepts of Sentence and Sense Belong at the Speech-Act Level

Section 1. The Notions of Sentence and Sense-Sense Not Tied to Truth-Conditions

Section 2. The Speech-Act: Convergence of Philosophy and Psychology with an Older Linguistics

Section 3. The "Sense" of Subordinate Sentence-Constituents

Section 4. Two Opposite Conceptions of Linguistic Science: The Radical Novelty of Chomsky's Approach

Summary

Chapter IV. The Indivisibility of the Human Capacity for Language

The Interdpendence of the Various Semantic Structures within Language

Section 1. The Unity and Integratedness of Linguistic Capacity: Structure and Self-Reflexivity

Section 2. The Importance of This Holism in Semantics: Scrutinizing "Ordinary Language"

Section 3. The Role of Language in the Theory of Human Nature

Section 4. This Semantic Structure as the Feature Specific to Language of the Human Type

Chapter V. Scientific Method and the Significance of Mathematics for Linguistics

Section 1. Mistaken Presumptions about What "Scientific Method" Requires

Section 2. The Informality of the Concept of Rule

Section 3. The Unformalizability of Natural Language and the Informality of Its Concepts

Section 4. The Concept of Effectiveness and the Place of Mechanical Procedures in Mathematics

Section 5. The Relevance of This Consideration of Mathematical Method to Linguistics

Part 2. The Shape of the Psychology Required for Explaining the Learning and Use of Language

Chapter VI. Human and Animal Organisms as Systems Dynamically Geared to the Environment

Mechanisms in a Holistic and Teleological Framework

Section 1. Human Beings as Integrated Unities: Gibsons Work as a Key to Escaping Physicalism

Section 2. Mechanical Processes in Living Organisms: "Mechanical" an Ambiguous Word

Section 3. Gibsons Treatment of Perception as a Model for the Treatment of Language

Appendix: Being Misled by Anomalies in Our Experience of Time and of Sensory Qualia

Chapter VII. Extending the Dynamic and Environment-Geared Model of Human Functioning to the Psychology of Language

Section 1. Difficulties in Applying the Idea of Modularity to Language

Section 2. The Human Learning of Language Relies on Multi-Modal Perception

Section 3. The Shape of an Integrated View of the Language Faculty and Its "Tuning"

Chapter VIII. Understanding as Essential to Explaining Speech: Resisting the Drag towards Physicalism

Section 1. The Incoherence in Dividing the Inner from the Outer in Language

Section 2. Conceiving of Sentences or Thoughts as Representing Reality: A Mistake Revived

Section 3. Sentence-Meanings Cannot Be Isomorphic with Either External or Internal States

Conclusion

Part 3. Rewriting the Philosophy of Grammar and Restoring Unity to the Theory of Language

Chapter IX. Explaining the Semantic Unity of the Sentence: The Shared Roots of the Topic/Comment, Subject/Predicate, and Noun/Verb Distinctions

Section 1. The Basis for a Theory of How Linguistic Utterances Are Integrated

Section 2. Asymmetry between Names and Other Sentence-Factors-"Sense" and "Reference"

Section 3. Verbs as Giving Predicates Their "Verbal" Character-The Way Verbs Are Learned

Section 4. Negation and Its Special Character

Chapter X. The Gulf between Saying and Naming, the Verbal and the Nominal: "Force'-Potential as Integral to "Sense"

Section 1. Full Sentences Distinguished from Clauses in General: Relation of Force to Sense

Section 2. Disagreements about Force: Wittgensteins Opposition to Frege

Section 3. Geach's Arguments

Section 4. Dummetts Interpretation of Freges Notion of Sinn and Its Difficulties

Section 5. Recovering the Tradition: Saying Is Not Naming

Chapter XI. The Notion of Subject and the Functional Organization of the Clause

Section 1. Disentangling Linguistics from Its Historical Background

Section 2. The Notion of Grammatical Subject

Section 3. The Notion of Grammatical Object: Different Options in Structuring Speech

Chapter XII. Marrying Philosophy and Grammar in Distinguishing Types of Noun Expression

Section 1. The Varied Types of Meaning of Abstract Nouns

Section 2. Unraveling Plato's Problems as the Key to Resolving Problems in Semantics

Section 3. The Value of the Notions of Cognate and Cognitional Cognate

Section 4. The Notion of Cognitional Cognate and the Incoherence of Representationalism

Concluding Remark: Confirmation That to Describe Cannot Be to Represent or Denote

Chapter XIII. Varied Systems of Grammaticalization-Reviewing the Phenomena

Section 1. Thematic Roles and How They Arise

Section 2. Making the Way Thematic Elements Are Integrated into the Sentence Explicit

Section 3. Parameters and Bracketing

Section 4. Comparing Languages and Language Development Instructive for Grammar

Section 5. The Treatment of Reference and the Problems of Wh-questions

Section 6. The Parasentential Level: The Interplay of Logic and Grammar in Modality and Reasoning

Section 7. Some Comparisons between Different Types of Grammar: Formal and Functional

Section 8. Optimization in Analyzing Sentences Understood in Context

Chapter XIV. The Verb Gives Sentences Their Dynamic Character and Shapes Their Syntactic Structure

Section 1. The Verb at the Heart of a Clause Gives Structure to the Whole

Section 2. Auxiliaries, Semi-auxiliaries, and Adverbial Modifiers

Section 3. Complements and Adjuncts, and the Character of Adpositions

Section 4. Types of Functional Complement to Verbs

Section 5. Clause-Markers and Types of Subordinate Clause

Chapter XV. The Distorted Treatment of Phrase Theory in Modern Formal Grammar

Section 1. A Preliminary: Kinds of "of"-Phrases

Section 2. Three Levels of Isomorphism When a Noun or Adjective Phrase Is Verbally Rooted

Section 3. The Misconceptions Embodied in the X-Bar Presentation of Phrase Theory

General Conclusion

Bibliography

Index of Names

Subject Index