In this chapter the focus moves beyond Pāṇini’s grammar to address a topic of major concern within the broader Indian tradition: semantics. While some observations regarding semantics can be drawn from Pāṇini, for the most part semantics was treated as a separate field of inquiry within the Indian tradition until the early modern period. This chapter provides introductions to the traditions of semantic analysis in ancient India and the modern West, and a comparison of their approaches to one issue of central concern in semantic theory: compositionality.

It is relatively well known that Buridan’s nominalist semantics changed “the rules of the game” in practically all fields of philosophy and science. For instance, in his semantics, the traditional distinction between essential and accidental predicates is mapped onto the Ockhamist distinction between absolute and connotative terms and concepts. It is, however, still not quite well understood what impact these “new rules” had in particular philosophical disciplines. This essay offers a case study of the late-medieval paradigm change brought about by nominalist “semantical innovations.” In particular, it contrasts Aquinas’ “semantics-driven mereology” with Buridan’s, set against the background of Buridan’s new, nominalist semantics, arguing that the two authors’ differences in their mereological considerations are rooted in the differences between their diverse semantic intuitions. The conclusion of the essay will provide a brief logical and historical evaluation of the paradigmatic changes brought about by these diverse intuitions.

Carnap’s naturalism evidently differs from Quine’s, but the precise nature of this difference has proven elusive. This chapter focuses on what Quine defends as his “provincial” naturalism against a Carnapian “cosmopolitan” alternative. The problem with this contrast, however, is that Quine does not represent a pure form of what he calls a “provincial” view. This is illustrated by his tergiversations about analyticity; after initially denying that there was even an explicandum worth bothering about, he later offered his own ordinary-language-based account of analyticity, without feeling any need to supply a more exact explication; there would appear to be no way to resolve the resulting stand-off with the cosmopolitan standpoint. This paper suggests a more robust explicandum for analyticity (and cosmopolitanism more generally). We come back, in the end, to the confrontation between Carnap and Quine in Chicago in 1950, where Carnap convinced Quine that their differences did not concern any question about which there could be right or wrong, correct or incorrect; it is regretted that Quine soon lost this lesson from sight.

A few years after his adoption of both a syntactical method and a principle of tolerance in the early thirties, Carnap turned to semantics when he learned about Tarski’s work on the definition of a truth predicate. How significant is this semantical turn? Carnap scholars have so much emphasized that The Logical Syntax anticipates Tarskian semantics that they tended to minimize the importance of Carnap’s adoption of a semantical approach. As a consequence, his semantical turn has not always been given the importance it deserves. Its meaning, scope and consequences have also often been misunderstood. This paper contributes to a re-evaluation of Tarski’s influence on Carnap in view of the fact that Carnap is far from having just followed Tarski’s way. We examine some specificities of Carnap’s approach of semantics. We also discuss what is left of the syntactic method after the adoption of semantics and what the relations between syntax and semantics become from the late thirties on. The following topics are given specific attention: languages, formal systems, and calculi; truth, L-truth, and L-validity; L-states, L-ranges, and state descriptions. We also analyze the impact of semantics on the principle of tolerance.

The prevailing view of Buridan’s theory of cognition and his epistemology is that he is a kind of externalist as well as a reliabilist. This essay argues that this reading is mistaken and that Buridan instead must be seen as a semantic and epistemic internalist. The essay develops the arguments for both these views. The first part of the essay supplements an argument already made by Claude Panaccio, but the second part is a new argument for why Buridan must be seen as an epistemological internalist. The essay also compares Buridan to later empiricists such as David Hume.

Kripke’s writings can be understood as suggesting that Wittgenstein, though a non-reductionist, was not a quietist about meaning, that is, did not maintain that nothing philosophically constructive could be said about it. It is Kripke and the quietist who can in fact be seen to have much in common. For, though they both conceive of the skeptical challenge as a meta-semantical challenge, calling for a foundational account of meaning, they both end up with purely semantic, descriptive remarks about meaning. Failing to share his diagnosis of the paradox with Wittgenstein, Kripke does not recognize that, once the skeptical problem is dissolved, as Wittgenstein recommends, a new meta-semantical challenge arises, which is connected to the essential link Wittgenstein emphasizes between meaning and use. Consequently, Kripke does not see that the positive remarks Wittgenstein makes after dismissing the skeptical paradox, especially those concerning agreement, are meant to do some constructive, not just descriptive, work, in response to the problem newly arisen.

This chapter explores the intersections between work by literary scholars with that done in synchronic and diachronic Latin linguistics. As an example of the different approaches and different toolkits employed by the linguist and the literary scholar, I discuss the way linguists have explained the phrase Veneres Cupidinesque in Catullus 3.1, contrasted with interpretations given in commentaries on Catullus and in Latin dictionaries. In the linguists’ account, the phrase is an archaism which continues an earlier Indo-European pattern used to refer to pairs, finding its closest parallels in Sanskrit texts. I then compare literary Latin to other registers and dialects, and discuss the difficulties involved in the term ‘Vulgar Latin’. The chapter also examines other areas in which linguistic scholarship might be usefully consulted by readers of Latin literature: word accent, vowel-length and metre; etymology, semantics and the lexicography; grammars and monographs on morphology, syntax and discourse analysis, including in particular recent approaches using sociolinguistics. Passages from Catullus are discussed throughout.

This chapter presents a view on context as understood within functional models of language, specifically the theoretical framework of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL). Amongst the functional approaches to language, SFL is recognized as a framework which has maintained an account of context that has prioritized its relationship with lexicogrammar, allowing it to make a causal connection between culture and language. The aim of this chapter is to highlight and explain the principal ways in which context works within the SFL framework and explore the main themes and parameters which situate context within an integrated theory of language as a semiotic resource. As no theory emerges in a vacuum, the first part of the chapter will consider the historical development of context as a concept within SFL theory with reference to how context is situated in other related functional grammars. Following this, we examine two areas of challenge related to the approach to context outlined in the chapter. Finally, the chapter concludes with closing remarks and key directions for future research in this area.

Language is paradigmatically a human activity, largely consisting of speakers saying things in order to inform, warn, misinform, threat, sell, and so on. Language is important because it is a system for doing things. This suggests that the philosophy of action should be a part – a very important part – of the philosophy of language. To a certain extent it is. And, in consequence, the focus has moved from sentences to utterances. It has moved, but not entirely. Not because philosophers and logicians are unaware of utterances, but because the working assumption is that semantics should focus on what all utterances of an expression or sentence have in common, due to meaning, and not on how they differ, due to the particular facts of the utterance. In this chapter we first consider how this assumption has been challenged and express some reservations about alternatives. Then we turn to our own theory, the reflexive-referential theory, which takes utterances as basic to the semantics and pragmatics of natural language.

The main debates about nationalism during the past two decades have concentrated on the effects of changing means of communication and processes of de- and reterritorialization. The entangled web of relations which traversed national boundaries did not produce “the utopia of a post-national history,” but the “stabilization and territorialization of the nation-state,” in Sebastian Conrad’s view.1 Whereas the dynamics of nationalism have generally been located within nation-states, as “imagined communities,” “invented traditions,” or reactions to modernization, Conrad’s own case studies show that “the shifts and changes in the discourse of nationalism … appear not only as effects of internal trajectories, as the familiar picture would suggest, but just as much of the larger process we retrospectively call globalization.”

Some years ago, the intellectual historian Bronisław Baczko noted that a crucial feature of eighteenth-century thought was its all-pervasive desire for a “return to origins,” a fixation emerging through a quasi-obsessive quest for the beginning of all sorts of social, political, and religious institutions as well as moral principles.1 Indeed, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Discours sur l’origine de l’inégalité (1754), Edmund Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), Johann Gottfried Herder’s Abhandlung über den Ursprung der Sprache (1772), and the Essai sur l’origine des connaissance humaines (1778), by the abbé de Condillac, are just a few works that testify, by their titles alone, to the eighteenth-century preoccupation with “origins.” But many more could be added. From the late seventeenth century onwards, innumerable scholars across Europe produced a plethora of tracts, pamphlets, articles, and books to investigate and dissect the origins of languages, knowledge, feelings, prejudice, and, importantly for us, nations.

What does it mean to view grammar as a fluid, flexible social resource? For linguists, it requires attending to the pragmatic consequences of syntactic items being structured in particular ways whilst accounting for any indexical links that grammatical variants have to social types. For those interested in educational issues, it means conceptualising grammar, not as rigid and inflexible, but as a semiotic resource for meaning-making. This book has demonstrated that the intertwined nature of language and persona is perhaps the most powerful constraint on language use in the school years. Consequently, by focusing on the social meaning of grammar we would work with children’s experiences, rather than against them. What might happen if children are encouraged to view their syntactic variability as a linguistic skill, rather than as something to be overcome in favour of linguistically uniform ‘standards’? Whilst it is well established that misconceptions about social class groups and their language varieties perpetuate social inequalities, this chapter also argues that misconceptions about how grammar functions also serve to disadvantage children by underestimating their linguistic skills.