Event Semantics (ES) says that clauses in natural languages are descriptions of events. Why believe this? The answer cannot be that we use clauses to talk about events, or that events are important in ontology or psychology. Other sorts of things have the same properties, but no special role in semantics. The answer must be that this view helps to explain the semantics of natural languages. But then, what is it to explain the semantics of natural languages? Here there are many approaches, differing on, among other issues, whether natural languages are social and objective or individual and mental; whether the semantics delivers truth-values at contexts or just constraints on truth-evaluable thoughts; which inferences it should explain as formally provable, if any; and which if any grammatical patterns it should explain directly. The argument for ES will differ accordingly, as will the consequences, for ontology, psychology, or linguistics, of its endorsement.

Relevance Theory (RT) takes a cognitive-scientific approach to the study of human communication and utterance comprehension, but its roots lie in Grice’s philosophical analysis of speaker’s meaning and his account of “the logic of conversation.” The debt of RT (and of other current pragmatic theories) to Grice’s groundbreaking ideas cannot be overestimated. Work within RT pragmatics has also interacted with, influenced and been influenced by, much other work within the philosophy of language, in particular the multiple issues and concerns that have arisen in debates between advocates of minimalist and of contextualist accounts of truth-conditional semantics. Among the many issues that could be discussed here, I will focus on three in particular: (a) the proper domain of a pragmatic theory; (b) the role of pragmatics in grasping what a speaker explicitly communicates; (c) the priority of word sense conventions or of pragmatics in explaining linguistic communication.

Linguistic relativity is often defined by its detractors in ways that make it seem a radical and implausible idea. Here, it is taken simply as the claim that linguistic diversity (the different forms of human language) has a nontrivial impact on cognitive diversity (the various ways or styles of thinking in humans). Although I believe that some versions of it are plausible, the aim is not to defend or attack the hypothesis, but to clarify it and to present some philosophical consequences of its acceptance.

A surprising fact about irony is that, despite vast amounts of research from many disciplinary perspectives, the phenomenon is still considered somewhat elusive. It is often remarked that, although it comes naturally and intuitively as part and parcel of typical communicative competence, there is little consensus regarding its exact definitional properties. Muecke (1970:14) poetically compares the recognition and use of irony by language users to the recognition and creation of beauty by an artist: a property they are fully aware of without being able to define it.

At the most general level, discourse studies can be characterized as ways of exploring the meanings produced by language use and communication, the contexts and processes of these meanings, and practices caused by these meanings (Jørgensen and Phillips, 2002; Unger, 2016; Fetzer, 2018). Discourse studies as research practices are essentially transdisciplinary and include different theoretical starting points and discipline-specific applications. Some of these approaches stress, for example, coherent and strict analysis of language, conversation, and interaction (Golato and Golato, 2018).

In Section 3.2, I focus on the development of semantics, which began as a collection of methodological tools for applying formal languages to philosophical problems. In Section 3.3, I trace the origins of contemporary debates about the nature of propositional content. In Section 3.4, I give a brief history of philosophical work on speech acts and pragmatics, emphasizing the origins of current debates in conflicting threads of Wittgenstein’s writing.

The terminology in which we have cashed out this undertaking is recent, but the concern itself has a long history, as long as the philosophy of language.

The division between internalist and externalist perspectives has dominated many areas of philosophy over the last few decades. In broadest terms, the issue is how best to individuate or otherwise categorize properties of agents that bear upon them being rational, perceiving, acting creatures. Are the properties internal to the agent, to the exclusion of external factors, or are they essentially involving of properties and things external to the agents? In the philosophy of language, the relevant properties pertain to general linguistic competence, and so we may ask if language itself (appropriately understood) is an internal property of speaker-hearers, or, say, if a word’s meaning is essentially world involving. Only a cursory survey of internalism in the philosophy of language would be possible in the space available; the chapter’s ambition, instead, is to offer something of a rapprochement.

This chapter surveys the contemporary debate in philosophy of language and linguistics about value judgments. Under this label we find different kinds of judgments such as Torture is unethical, Roller coasters are fun, or “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” is a marvelous film.

In a semi-technical sense which has developed recently in philosophical literature, the term slurs denotes ‘lexical items’, which are ‘conventionally pejorative’, refer to ‘social groups’ and convey ‘derogation’ and ‘negative attitudes’ toward those groups and their members. The paradigmatic examples of slurs include racist epithets such as nigger, chink, anti-Semitic ones like kike, or homophobic ones like faggot.

One of the central functions of language is to enable speakers to communicate about the world. For this to be possible, it seems that at some level language should be able to “hook on to” reality. Such level (if any) is often described as the referential level (cf. Martí, Chapter 12, this volume), and linguistic terms operating at that level are called referring terms. Among the latter, philosophers typically distinguish (as to so-called kind terms, which refer to kinds rather than to particulars, cf. Fernández Moreno, on natural kind terms, Chapter 15, this volume) those which not only hook on to reality, but in addition accomplish that by referring to basic elements of reality, namely objects/individuals (in contrast with, e.g., the substance referred to by the natural kind term water). This is the class of singular terms, whose paradigmatic exemplars are often taken to be proper names.

Much contemporary theorizing about linguistic and mental representation takes place against a background conception of propositional content that is due to Gottlob Frege. This is not to say philosophers of language generally accept Frege’s view that propositions contain senses, as opposed to objects and properties. Most philosophers of language probably do not accept this Fregean view. The point is that there are broad Fregean commitments about propositions that are widely and implicitly shared across philosophy of language and mind.

In a theory of meaning based on the distinction between semantics and pragmatics, it is crucial to distinguish between what a sentence means and what a speaker intends to convey by uttering it. Since Paul Grice’s seminal work, the distinction between sentence or literal meaning and speaker meaning is quite uncontroversial among both linguists and philosophers of language. With sentence meaning, one refers to the content encoded in the words a speaker uses to utter a grammatically correct sentence, while speaker meaning is the content the speaker intends to convey by uttering a sentence in order to achieve a certain goal. Sentence meaning and speaker meaning coincide whenever the speaker intends to convey exactly the content encoded in the words used to utter a sentence. However, language users often intend to convey contents that differ from what the sentences they utter literally mean.

The study of speech acts began with Austin and was prefigured by Wittgenstein.1 While Frege and Russell focused primarily on the semantics of the expressions of the artificial, formal languages used in logic and mathematics (to articulate truth-apt statements and theories),2 Wittgenstein (in his later work) drew our attention to the variety of uses to which the expressions of ordinary, naturally occurring languages are put. One technique that he employed for doing so was to describe a number of different “language games” – i.e. “ways of using signs simpler than those in which we use the signs of our highly complicated everyday language” (1969: 17).