This volume deals with the connection between thinking-and-speaking and our form(s) of life. All contributions engage with Wittgenstein’s approach to this topic. As a whole, the volume takes a stance against both biological and ethnological interpretations of the notion "form of life" and seeks to promote a broadly logico-linguistic understanding instead. The structure of this book is threefold. Part one focuses on lines of thinking that lead from Wittgenstein’s earlier thought to the concept of form of life in his later work. Contributions to part two examine the concrete philosophical function of this notion as well as the ways in which it differs from cognate concepts. Contributions to part three put Wittgenstein’s notion of form of life in perspective by relating it to phenomenology, ordinary language philosophy and problems in contemporary analytic philosophy.

Logical form has always been a prime concern for philosophers belonging to the analytic tradition. For at least one century, the study of logical form has been widely adopted as a method of investigation, relying on its capacity to reveal the structure of thoughts or the constitution of facts. This book focuses on the very idea of logical form, which is directly relevant to any principled reflection on that method. Its central thesis is that there is no such thing as a correct answer to the question of what is logical form: two significantly different notions of logical form are needed to fulfill two major theoretical roles that pertain respectively to logic and to semantics. This thesis has a negative and a positive side. The negative side is that a deeply rooted presumption about logical form turns out to be overly optimistic: there is no unique notion of logical form that can play both roles. The positive side is that the distinction between two notions of logical form, once properly spelled out, sheds light on some fundamental issues concerning the relation between logic and language.

This book takes an idea first explored by medieval logicians 800 years ago and revisits it armed with the tools of contemporary linguistics, logic, and computer science. The idea - the Holy Grail of the medieval logicians - was the thought that all of logic could be reduced to two very simple rules that are sensitive to logical polarity (for example, the presence and absence of negations). Ludlow and Živanović pursue this idea and show how it has profound consequences for our understanding of the nature of human inferential capacities. They also show its consequences for some of the deepest issues in contemporary linguistics, including the nature of quantification, puzzles about discourse anaphora and pragmatics, and even insights into the source of aboutness in natural language. The key to their enterprise is a formal relation they call "p-scope" - a polarity-sensitive relation that controls the operations that can be carried out in their Dynamic Deductive System. They show that with p-scope in play, deductions can be carried out using sublogical operations like those they call COPY and PRUNE - operations that are simple syntactic operations on sentences. They prove that the resulting deductive system is complete and sound. The result is a beautiful formal tapestry in which p-scope unlocks important properties of natural language, including the property of "restrictedness," which they prove to be equivalent to the semantic notion of conservativity. More than that, they show that restrictedness is also a key to understanding quantification and discourse anaphora, and many other linguistic phenomena.

"English is so illogical!" It is generally believed that English is a language of exceptions. For many, learning to spell and read is frustrating. For some, it is impossible... especially for the 29% of Americans who are functionally illiterate. But what if the problem is not the language itself, but the rules we were taught? What if we could see the complexity of English as a powerful tool rather than a hindrance? --Denise Eide Uncovering the Logic of English challenges the notion that English is illogical by systematically explaining English spelling and answering questions like "Why is there a silent final E in have, large, and house?" and "Why is discussion spelled with -sion rather than -tion?" With easy-to-read examples and anecdotes, this book describes: - the phonograms and spelling rules which explain 98% of English words - how English words are formed and how this knowledge can revolutionize vocabulary development - how understanding the reasons behind English spelling prevents students from needing to guess The author's inspiring commentary makes a compelling case that understanding the logic of English could transform literacy education and help solve America's literacy crisis. Thorough and filled with the latest linguistic and reading research, Uncovering the Logic of English demonstrates why this systematic approach should be as foundational to our education as 1+1=2.

Although the two volumes of Logic, Language, and Meaning can be used independently of one another, together they provide a comprehensive overview of modern logic as it is used as a tool in the analysis of natural language. Both volumes provide exercises and their solutions. Volume 1, Introduction to Logic, begins with a historical overview and then offers a thorough introduction to standard propositional and first-order predicate logic. It provides both a syntactic and a semantic approach to inference and validity, and discusses their relationship. Although language and meaning receive special attention, this introduction is also accessible to those with a more general interest in logic. In addition, the volume contains a survey of such topics as definite descriptions, restricted quantification, second-order logic, and many-valued logic. The pragmatic approach to non-truthconditional and conventional implicatures are also discussed. Finally, the relation between logic and formal syntax is treated, and the notions of rewrite rule, automation, grammatical complexity, and language hierarchy are explained.

Logical Forms examines the formal languages of classical first order logic and modal logic, and some alternatives and in each case takes as the central question: how can natural language best be formalized in this formal language? The approach involves close encounters with issues in the philosophy of logic and the philosophy of logic and the philosophy of language.

This is IV volume of eight in a series on Philosophy of the Mind and Language. For nearly a century mathematicians and logicians have been striving hard to make logic an exact science. But a book on logic must contain, in addition to the formulae, an expository context which, with the assistance of the words of ordinary language, explains the formulae and the relations between them; and this context often leaves much to be desired in the matter of clarity and exactitude. Originally published in 1937, the purpose of the present work is to give a systematic exposition of such a method, namely, of the method of " logical syntax".

Taking linguistics students beyond the classical forms often taught in introductory courses, Language and Logics offers a comprehensive introduction to the wide variety of useful non-classical logics that are commonly used in research. Including a brief review of classical logic and its major assumptions, this textbook provides a guided tour of modal, many valued and substructural logics. The textbook starts from simple and intuitive concepts, clearly explaining the logics of language for linguistics students who have little previous knowledge of logic or mathematics. Issues are presented and discussed clearly before going on to introduce symbolic notation.While not avoiding technical detail, the book focuses throughout on helping students develop an intuitive understanding of the field, with particular attention to conceptual questions and to the tailoring of logical systems to thinking about different applications in linguistics and beyond. This is an ideal introductory volume for advanced undergraduates and beginning postgraduate students in linguistics, and for those specializing in semantics.

This monograph grew out of research at Xerox PARC and the Center for the Study of Language and Information (CSLI) during the first year of CSLI's existence. The Center was created as a meeting place for people from many different research traditions and there was much interest in seeing how the various approaches could be joined in a common effort to understand the complexity of language and information. CSLI was thus an ideal environment for our group and our enterprise. Our original goal was to see how a well-developed linguistic the ory, such as lexical-functional grammar, could be joined with the ideas emerging from research in situation semantics in a manner which would measure up to the technical standards set by Montague grammar. The outcome was our notion of situation schemata and the extension of constraint-based grammar formalisms to deal with semantic as well as syntactic information. As our work progressed we widened our approach. We decided to also include a detailed study of the logic of situation theory, and to investigate how this logical theory is related to the relational theory of meaning developed in situation semantics.