Philosophy of Linguistics (Handbook of the Philosophy of Science, Band 14) - Hardcover

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Dov M. Gabbay is Augustus De Morgan Professor Emeritus of Logic at the Group of Logic, Language and Computation, Department of Computer Science, King's College London. He has authored over four hundred and fifty research papers and over thirty research monographs. He is editor of several international Journals, and many reference works and Handbooks of Logic.

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At the centre of cognitive science, linguistics abuts a number of disciplines -- philosophy, logic, psychology, artificial intelligence, and anthropology. Enormous strides were made in the development of linguistics as a formal discipline over the last half century, starting with Chomsky's work on the modelling of human language applying ideas from formal language theory, to be followed shortly thereafter by alternative linguistic models of syntax, meaning, language acquisition and processing. Work on developing computational implementations of these models duly followed. New insights into the nature of language and linguistic knowledge emerged, with increasingly robust tools for language modelling. As these developed, it became clear that aspects of language in use which earlier had been set aside as intransigent, could now be formally modelled. So in the last twenty years, theorists turned to modelling how the language system interacts with functional and context-dependent aspects of language use.

This handbook lays out this narrative through its successive chapters. Early chapters set out the overall philosophical perspective, assumptions of alternative formal systems, and horizons that open up by setting linguistic models against philosophical and computational backgrounds. With assumptions about semantics having been introduced, later chapters address the tensions and new resolutions that are now being explored in giving due recognition to the endemic context-sensitivity of natural language. The volume is essential reading for those interested in theoretical study of language, and in the development of linguistic theorising.