At the start of the aletheistic tradition, in the Confessions Augustine pioneers a phenomenological approach to fixing the reference to God by means of a novel linguistic act, overheard praise, which mirrors and frames the beautiful forms of created things as themselves overheard linguistic acts; the existential choice of the reader is either to leave the speech as overheard or to enter the speech as addressee. Augustine interprets things as signs of their source, works out the objective order of love, and thematizes the paradox of God’s hidden presence and the creature’s beauty as a sign of the creator.

Reference to the hidden God can be fixed at any time by a deferred ostension: “That which causes the world to be is ‘God’.” This chapter articulates an account of ostension in general and deferred ostension in particular and articulates the merits of the aletheistic tradition for handling the problem of semantic drift that dogs contemporary appeals to ostension for fixing the reference to God.

To which ‘God’ do philosophers refer? In dialogue with Schellenberg and his insightful distinction between “ultimism” and “theism,” this chapter examines the limits of the natural horizon of inquiry into ultimacy. To think adequately about God the creator entails subverting the natural horizon of thought in order to understand the natural whole as a pointer or deferred ostension of its ultimate source.

Continuing the aletheistic tradition, Anselm’s most innovative writing, the Proslogion, adopts the form of Augustine’s Confessions, namely an overheard address to God, but he makes progress on the question of divine reference by deploying, in dialogue with the point of view of the atheist, a linguistic deferred ostension of God as that than which nothing greater can be thought. One and the same formula picks God out, establishes his reality, and guides our continued reflection.

Within the aletheistic tradition, Aquinas thinks creation, as a linguistic act, involves the theme of interpersonal manifestation. He is therefore able to overcome the apparent artificiality of Anselm’s linguistic ostension by setting the deferred ostension back into both the structure of created being and the natural longing for happiness.

This chapter discusses what it means for a word to have meaning. Starting with the classical traditions in the West and the East about the nature of meaning, the connections between the word and the object it refers to (reference), and a set of inherent and defining properties which determines the referent (sense). It then moves on to the modern analysis of types of meaning, and introduces the way linguists characterize word meanings through semantic analysis. Major lexical relations, including hyponymy/hypernymy, antonymy, synonymy, polysemy, homonymy and homophony, are discussed. This chapter also introduces the notion of collocation.

This chapter problematizes the relationship between linguistic competence and communicative competence, as proposed by Chomsky (1965) and disputed by Hymes (1966), respectively. The contention is that these two types of competence are not in competition but should be regarded as a symbiosis. Current research demonstrates that there is much value in analyzing how linguistic and communicative competence work together. Our emphasis in this chapter is on pragmatic universals and the way languages may express them differently, thereby creating difficulty for second language (L2) learners. Within the area of interpersonal rhetoric, speech acts and (scalar) implicature are examined with a view of highlighting the amalgamation of grammar and communication in learning to compute and produce them. In tackling definiteness and specificity in the L2, we discuss the ways adults learn to refer to objects known or unknown to speaker or hearer. Deixis, or calculating reference based on the here and now, is a relatively underresearched area of pragmatic competence. At the syntax-discourse interface, we examine the acquisition of information structure, or topic and focus marking. The chapter finishes with a call for extending the research enquiry to all context-dependent aspects of meaning encoding and decoding.

A singularity condition is elaborated. It is discussed how perception can anchor or ground singular judgments. Without a link to perception, there would not be any knowledge of individual objects, since mere concepts cannot secure reference. This fact is also reflected in language. For ‘This F’ in a singular judgment ‘This F is G’ about the perceived scene cannot be divorced from an intuition of that scene. The use of demonstratives like “This” and “That” for direct reference are supplemented with non-conceptual content that comes from outer intuition, with in-built spatial orientation. By way of intuition and attention, there is mental demonstration of particulars, which may or may not be accompanied by overt demonstrations as well, like pointing gestures. Thus, the perceived scene is contained within a demonstrative space, as outlined by all possible embodied orientations of the perceiver in some fixed location or other. Intuition cuts in a perspectival manner from such a demonstrative space, and attention cuts even more finely.

The study of individuals with hippocampal damage and amnesia provides a compelling opportunity to directly test the role of declarative memory to communication and language. Over the past two decades, we have documented disruptions in discourse and conversation as well as in more basic aspects of language in individuals with hippocampal amnesia including at the word, phrase, and sentence level across offline and online language processing tasks. This work highlights the critical contribution of hippocampal-dependent memory to language and communication and suggests that hippocampal damage or dysfunction is a risk factor for a range of language and communicative disruptions even in the absence of frank disorders of amnesia or aphasia. This work also raises questions about the reality and utility of the historical distinction between communication and language in defining cognitive-communication disorders as individuals with isolated memory impairments show deficits that cut across both communication and language.

This chapter examines William of Ockham’s theory of mental speech, focusing on aspects that have been claimed to give rise to the possibility of pernicious ambiguity. Against these claims, which center on the varieties of reference allowed by supposition theory, we argue that Ockham’s theory remains coherent despite marginal instances of ambiguity. We review two types of suppositional ambiguity: Type 1, in which referring terms can be interpreted as suppositing personally, materially, or simply; and Type 2, in which supposition is personal but can vary in tense or modality. Type 1 ambiguity is ruled out, except in extreme cases, by the fact that “changing” the supposition of a term requires a conscious, reflexive act of the speaker; Type 2 ambiguity, while more of a live possibility, is generally either absent or harmless. In neither case does ambiguity seriously compromise the function of mental speech as a vehicle of human cognition.

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.