How are we able to understand and anticipate each other in everyday life, in our daily interactions? Through the use of such "folk" concepts as belief, desire, intention, and expectation, asserts Daniel Dennett in this first full-scale presentation of a theory of intentionality that he has been developing for almost twenty years. We adopt a stance, he argues, a predictive strategy of interpretation that presupposes the rationality of the people - or other entities - we are hoping to understand and predict.These principles of radical interpretation have far-reaching implications for the metaphysical and scientific status of the processes referred to by the everday terms of folk psychology and their corresponding terms in cognitive science.While Dennett's philosophical stance has been steadfast over the years, his views have undergone successive enrichments, refinements, and extensions. "The Intentional Stance" brings together both previously published and original material: four of the book's ten chapters - its first and the final three - appear here for the first time and push the theory into surprising new territory. The remaining six were published earlier in the 1980s but were not easily accessible; each is followed by a reflection - an essay reconsidering and extending the claims of the earlier work. These reflections and the new chapters represent the vanguard of Dennett's thought. They reveal fresh lines of inquiry into fundamental issues in psychology, artificial intelligence, and evolutionary theory as well as traditional issues in the philosophy of mind.Daniel C. Dennett is Distinguished Arts and Sciences Professor at Tufts University and the author of "Brainstorms" and "Elbow Room." "The Intentional Stance," along with these works, is a Bradford Book.

The Intentional Stance

Joan Bybee and her colleagues present a new theory of the evolution of grammar that links structure and meaning in a way that directly challenges most contemporary versions of generative grammar. This study focuses on the use and meaning of grammatical markers of tense, aspect and modality and identifies a universal set of grammatical categories. The authors demonstrate that the semantic content of these categories evolves gradually and that this process of evolution is strikingly similar across unrelated languages. Through a survey of 76 languages in 25 different phyla, the authors show that the same paths of change occur universally and that movement along these paths is in one direction only. This analysis reveals that lexical substance evolves into grammatical substance through various mechanisms of change, such as metaphorical extension and the conventionalization of implicature. Grammaticization is always accompanied by an increase in frequency of the grammatical marker, providing clear evidence that language use is a major factor in the evolution of synchronic language states.

The Evolution of Grammar: Tense, Aspect, and Modality in the Languages of the World

Language in relation to a unified theory of the structure of human behavior, 2nd rev. ed.

Preface 1. The size and structure of phonological inventories 2. Stops and affricates 3. Fricatives 4. Nasals 5. Liquids 6. Vocoid approximants 7. Glottalic and laryngealized consonants 8. Vowels 9. Insights on vowel spacing 10. The design of the UCLA Phonological Segment Inventory Database' Indices.

Patterns of Sounds

Extensively revised and updated, this second edition provides, in an A-Z format, an analysis of the most important generalizations that have been made on the unidirectional change of grammatical forms and constructions. Based on the analysis of more than 1,000 languages, it reconstructs over 500 processes of grammatical change in the languages of the world, including East Asian languages such as Chinese, Korean and Japanese. Readers are provided with the tools to discover how lexical and grammatical meanings can be related to one another in a principled way, how such issues as polysemy, heterosemy, and transcategoriality are dealt with, and why certain linguistic forms have simultaneous lexical and grammatical functions. Definitions of lexical concepts are provided with examples from a broad variety of languages, and references to key relevant research literature. Linguists and other scholars will gain a better understanding of languages on a worldwide scale.

/pdf/world-lexicon-of-grammaticalization-20jp10wyuv.pdf

Robert A. Hall

Papers

Mind and Meaning

Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word

Pidgin and Creole languages

Diccionario critico etimologico de la lengua castellana@@@Breve diccionario etimologico de la lengua castellana

The life cycle of pidgin languages