How do children process language as they get older? Is there continuity in the functions assigned to specific structures? And what changes in their processing and their representations as they acquire more language? They appear to use bracketing (finding boundaries), reference (linking to meanings), and clustering (grouping units that belong together) as they analyze the speech stream and extract recurring units, word classes, and larger constructions. Comprehension precedes production. This allows children to monitor and repair production that doesn’t match the adult forms they have represented in memory. Children also track the frequency of types and tokens; they use types in setting up paradigms and identifying regular versus irregular forms. Amount of experience with language, (the diversity of settings) plus feedback and practice, also accounts for individual differences in the paths followed during acquisition. Ultimately, models of the process of acquisition need to incorporate all this to account for how acquisition takes place.

Chapter 5 carries out a methodological experiment starting from perspectivism as a theory of reality, used as a heuristic device, producing a dialogue mediated by translating this native theory into our archaeological terms. The focus is on the relations between humans and things where materiality has all the qualities seen previously, non-human entities can be persons, and the capacity for agency relates to the possibility that objects will become persons. The focus is on anthropomorphic vessels from Ambato and their contexts, considered as objects that can be subjects with a point of view. Three relational situations are analysed: the manufacturing process, the contexts of use and abandonment. Manufacture, as the genesis of these vessels as subjects, is analysed through three procedures: as a copy of a model, as mimesis of a mythical object with human properties and as a form of quotation or reference to socially inscribed ways of making. It is argued that such object subjects could be de-subjectivized to turn them into pure objects. Finally, the chapter details how the relationships people established with such vessels responded to the principles of predation and commensality, just as other forms of relationship between humans and non-humans.

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.

Informal borrowings are used for several reasons. They are used to name things, providing alternative synonyms for things already named in English but also names for things yet to be named. More often, however, they are used instead of standard English to communicate additional information that is social, psychological, rhetorical, or cultural in nature. The social function involves group solidarity and social distancing. The psychological function includes expression of emotions via a repertoire of expressions for a variety of emotional states and emotive labels. The rhetorical function includes informality, conciseness, forcefulness, wordplay, and small talk. The cultural function involves expressing cultural identity and stylization; while expressing cultural identity is often the reason for using such expressions, stylization is another phenomenon accounting for their common use among larger segments of American society.

Generations of Christians, Janet Soskice demonstrates, once knew God and Christ by hundreds of remarkable names. These included the appellations ‘Messiah’, ‘Emmanuel’, ‘Alpha’, ‘Omega’, ‘Eternal’, ‘All-Powerful’, ‘Lamb’, ‘Lion’, ‘Goat’, ‘One’, ‘Word’, ‘Serpent’ and ‘Bridegroom’. In her much-anticipated new book, Soskice argues that contemporary understandings of divinity could be transformed by a return to a venerable analogical tradition of divine naming. These ancient titles – drawn from scripture – were chanted and sung, crafted and invoked (in polyphony and plainsong) as they were woven into the worship of the faithful. However, during the sixteenth century Descartes moved from ‘naming’ to ‘defining’ God via a series of metaphysical attributes. This made God a thing among things: a being amongst beings. For the author, reclaiming divine naming is not only overdue. It can also re-energise the relationship between philosophy and religious tradition. This path-breaking book shows just how rich and revolutionary such reclamation might be.

This chapter examines reference in a non-collaborative context. Despite the collaborative nature of referring, there are times when referring become problematic. Focussing specifically on problems in referring, we explore some of the reasons for problematic reference, including how the problems get resolved. The main focus of the chapter is on uses of reference in contexts which are discursively non-collaborative, despite shared common ground. This chapter makes a significant contribution by detailing how referring works when the speaker and addressee do not share goals and have no invested interest in a shared conceptualisation of the referent. We look at various examples from primarily legal contexts to extend our understanding of reference in these contexts. We show that collaboration is indeed needed even when the social relationship is adversarial but that the strategies for ratifying an expression differ depending on whether or not speaker and addressee share the same discourse goals.

This chapter examines typical uses of referring expressions in spontaneous discourse by building on the concept of context of situation and considering how parameters of register establish a framework for reference variation. We formulate a way to capture distinctions between what we can claim about typical referring expressions which approximate spontaneous production as compared to typical referring expressions when more planning and revising are involved. Focussing specifically on mode of production, our account of spontaneous reference is first situated by contextual parameters, and then described using evidence from examples attested in spontaneous discourse. This spontaneous vs planned distinction is useful for the study of reference, but we argue against a strict division. Typical reference in spontaneous discourse is shown to rely on highly accessible and in focus referents, which makes it easier for acts of reference to be successful and which reduces the cognitive load of the speaker and addressee.

This chapter introduces the broad and multidisciplinary field of referring and reference, including perspectives from philosophy, psychology, linguistics, and computer science. In this chapter we review some of the key contributions from these disciplines to explain the main background of influences that are still relevant to our understanding of reference and acts of referring. We then discuss traditional approaches to reference from the perspectives of text and discourse, focussing on the concepts of coreference and anaphor, and how these accounts have helped shape but also, to some extent, have limited text-based reference. Contributions from cognitive perspectives, including the role of shared information and the concept of givenness is shown to enrich our understanding of reference. The chapter establishes the reasons why reference must be viewed as addressee orientated, collaborative, and context-dependent. In doing so, we set out the reasons why an integrated approach to reference is needed.

This chapter explores and develops the concept of typicality and atypicality both generally and specifically in terms of reference. Existing literature on reference established our core understanding of referring, forming the basis for how we view reference. However, evidence has largely been experimental, computational, philosophical, and/or based on small excerpts. This chapter then sets out the distinction we would like to make on the division between typical and atypical uses. We argue for a view of typicality as conventionalised language use, which can be said to fall within the norms of a given register. Atypicality, conversely includes instances of language which can be said to be infrequent and unconventionalised for a given register. The chapter focusses on existing models of reference which provide an excellent grounding in typical uses of reference through which we can explore the (in)stability of identifiability and view atypical reference as an exploitation of conventionalised norms.

This chapter explores referential metonymy as an atypical use of reference. After reviewing relevant literature on referential metonymy, we consider the extent to which it is inherently atypical. Using examples of metonymy from medical discourse contexts, including nurse handover discourse and medical students self-reflections, we situate metonymy as a type of reference, that is, metonymic reference, and examine features which establish its use as atypical reference. We show that typical or atypical uses of metonymic reference depend on a variety of factors. While metonymic reference is essential in some contexts for safe and efficient reference, we also show that in some cases its use can signal stigmatisation of patients and/or difficulties of medical professions in maintaining moral. In these cases, referential choice becomes especially significant.

This stage of the journey focuses on concepts as candidates for word meaning. It contains a discussion of several versions of the mentalistic/representational approach to word meaning, also assessing them for candidacy for a general theory of meaning in language that covers words, sentences, utterances, and discourses, pursued in the upcoming stages. It foregrounds the role of context in determining lexical content and the associated ‘food for thought’ questions.

The main question scholars have asked about the coutumiers is the extent of ‘penetration‘ or ‘influence‘ of Roman law on customary law. That there was influence is an undeniable fact. While the history of the coutumiers is undoubtedly connected to and overlaps with Roman law, this chapter challenges current historiography, which places Roman law at the centre of the development of written custom. Instead of asking how well an author knew his Roman law or how much of it was used in each text, this chapter looks more widely at citation practices, to establish what authorities were used and with what reverence they were treated. The citation practices in the coutumiers betray their authors’ confidence vis-à-vis the more august Roman law. These authors used learned law in service of their own projects but did not feel bound by its authority – unlike university thinking that famously placed Roman law in the middle of the page and medieval commentary in the marginalia. Roman law was certainly an important source for some coutumiers, but rather than treat it reverentially as an authority their authors used Roman law to build something new, lay, customary, and vernacular.

Before developing my ideas further I must explain why I object to the common metaphysical picture behind standard scientific realism, which I call ‘correspondence realism’: the assumption that there is well-defined reality ‘out there’ with all its constituents existing mind-independently. This picture can be put under effective critical scrutiny if we disambiguate the notion of mind-independence. All entities that we can even think about are ‘mind-framed’ (characterized in terms of some concepts supplied by the mind), but real entities are not ‘mind-controlled (they do not do as we wish). The ‘fallacy of pre-figuration’ is to mistake the lack of mind-control as the lack of mind-framing. This fallacy is at the heart of the notion of correspondence between our theories and the mind-unframed ‘world’, and the purely extensional notion of reference according to which our words simply point to pre-figured realities. Such notions are produced through a metaphorical projection of the representation relation in real practices, in which correspondence holds among mind-framed entities. In standard realist discourse in the philosophy of science the fallacy of pre-figuration is reinforced by the faith that science does give us something resembling the ultimate true picture of reality, which must be free of mind-framing.