John Hawthorne and David Manley wrote an excellent book on the many issues surrounding the twin notions of reference and singular thought. The book is divided into two parts corresponding to two main objectives. In Part I, which is titled " Against Acquaintance " and includes Chapters 1-3, they present a first case in favour of what they call liberalism — the view according to which neither ref...

Bilingual speakers often engage in code-switching, that is the use of lexical items and grammatical features from two languages one sentence. Malaysia a particularly interesting context for study code-switching because Malay-English widely practiced across formal informal situations, available literature reveals there great diversity switch patterns this language pair. One most remarkable chara...

Abstract One of the great unknowns in language evolution is transition from unstructured sign combination to grammatical structure. This paper investigates central — while hitherto overlooked role functor–argument metaphor. type metaphor pervades modern language, but absent animal communication. It arises semantic clash between default meanings terms. Functor–argument became logically possible ...

The paper presents a tentative overview of pronouns in Ginyanga, an understudied Kwa language spoken Togo and Ghana; particular, personal pronouns, reflexive demonstratives, quantifiers. There are no subject Ginyanga. We define two pronoun series with designated for each noun class: basic (emphatic possessive) object. set is used independent possessive contexts, as well constructions. Guang sys...

A fundamental property of language is that it can be used to refer to entities in the extra-linguistic physical context of a conversation in order to establish a joint focus of attention on a referent. Typological and psycholinguistic work across a wide range of languages has put forward at least two different theoretical views on demonstrative reference. Here we contrasted and tested these two...

It is often supposed that demonstratives and indexicals are devices of direct reference that they are, as David Kaplan puts it, terms which “refer directly without the mediation of a Fregean Sinn [or individual concept, set of properties, etc.] as meaning.“’ Most of the resistance to this view, I think, arises from the suspicion that it is not possible to give an acceptable treatment of the sem...

ing from details, what is crucial to note in (42) is the presence of the event variable e, which ranges over acts of demonstration or reference by the speaker. Under B?rge 's account, the semantic value of a demonstrative NP like that dog involves not only an object x but also an event e; that is, such expressions are relational, taking pairs (x, e) as their semantic values.16 Given this reanal...

What is the relation between first-person thought and self-consciousness? On one view, grasp of the first person is based on acquaintance with the self. Self-consciousness makes first-person reference possible, in much the same way in which perceptual acquaintance with objects of ‘outer sense’ makes perceptual demonstratives such as ‘this lemon’ available to us. The ‘perceptual demonstrative mo...