The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Philosophy of Language

Abstract This book is intended as a definitive guide to contemporary philosophy of language but with a twist: although some of the articles focus on technical issues more narrowly construed in the recent tradition of linguistically oriented philosophy of language, the majority focus on foundational questions in traditional philosophy of language. The aim is to reconsider these foundational issues in a new light, while still bearing in mind the formal developments in recent literature, as well as to present foundational issues that have emerged on account of such developments. Virtually all our contributors are philosophers of language. So, the aim of the volume is to urge a return to, and a reconsideration of, the basic, foundational issues in the philosophy of language. The book divides into seven general parts: I, Languages and Language; II, Semantic Content and Propositional Attitudes; III, Communication and Speech Acts; IV, Meta-Semantics and Foundations of Meaning Theory; V, Tense and Modality; VI, Semantics and Linguistic Theory; and VII, Expressive, Evaluative, Subjective, and Social Aspects of Language. The contributions provide a lay-of-the-land of current research trends, presenting cutting-edge developments on the most fundamental issues in the philosophy of language, from the nature of language; to the nature of semantic and attitudinal content; to the dynamics of communication; to speech acts; to meta-semantics and reference grounding; to tense and modality; to discourse dynamics, and information structure; to the expressive, evaluative, subjective, and social aspects of language. The book will thus be of interest to active researchers in the field and novices alike.