This Handbook introduces key issues in the philosophy of language as currently practised. Topics include: the nature of language; the nature and role of semantic content; the dynamics of communication and speech acts; tense and modality; discourse dynamics; and the expressive, evaluative, subjective, and social aspects of language.

Ernie Lepore is Board of Governors Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University. He has authored numerous books and papers in the philosophy of language, philosophical logic, metaphysics, and philosophy of mind, including recently Imagination and Convention (with Matthew Stone, OUP, 2015), and Liberating Content (OUP, 2016) with Herman Cappelen. He is the co-editor (with David Sosa) of Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Language.
Una Stojni¿ is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the Department of Philosophy, Princeton University. Prior to joining Princeton, she was Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Columbia University, a Bersoff assistant professor and faculty fellow in Philosophy at NYU, and a research fellow in Philosophy at ANU. She earned her PhD in Philosophy and a Certificate in Cognitive Science from Rutgers University in 2016.

• Preface


• Part I: Languages and Language


• 1: Robert J. Stainton and Christopher Viger: Do Languages Really Exist?


• 2: Zoltán Gendler Szabó: Possible Human Languages


• 3: Guillermo Del Pinal: The Logicality of Language, Meaning-Driven Unacceptability, and Modulated Logic forms


• Part II: Semantic Content and Propositional Attitudes


• 4: Samuel Cumming: Report and Content


• 5: David Sosa: A Plea for Innocence


• 6: Eleni Manolakaki: Contemporary Foundational Accounts of Propositions


• 7: Kathrin Glüer and Peter Pagin: Multiple Intensions Semantics


• Part III: Communication and Speech Acts


• 8: Seth Yalcin: States of Conversation


• 9: Peter Hanks: The Distinction Between Content and Force


• 10: Cameron Domenico Kirk-Giannini: Do Not Diagonalize


• Part IV: Meta-semantics and Foundations of Meaning Theory


• 11: Herman Cappelen and Max Deutsch: Reference without Deference


• 12: Paul M. Pietroski: One Word, Many Concepts: Endorsing Polysemous Meanings


• 13: Emma Borg: The Problem of Polysemy


• 14: Henry Jackman: Truth, Normativity, and Interpretational Theories of Meaning


• 15: Claudine Verheggen: Semantic Non-Reductionism


• 16: Wayne A. Davis: Foundations of Semantics


• 17: Jeffrey C. King: Quantifier Domain Restriction and the Problem of Incomplete Quantifiers


• Part V: Tense and Modality


• 18: Fabrizio Cariani: Future Displacement and Modality


• 19: Paolo Santorio: The Semantics and Logic of Counterfactuals


• 20: J. L. Dowell: Deontic Modal Expressions


• Part VI: Semantics and Linguistic Theory


• 21: John Collins: Indefinites: Scope and Context


• 22: Michael Glanzberg: Information Structure for Philosophers


• Part VII: Expressive, Evaluative, Subjective, and Social Aspects of Language


• 23: Isidora Stojanovic: Evaluativity


• 24: Robin Jeshion: How Vocatives Illuminate Slurs


• 25: Christopher Hom and Robert May: The Metatheoretic Foundation for Racial Epithets


• 26: Malte Willer: Subjectivity


• 27: Elisabeth Camp and Ethan Nowak: Linguistic Variation, Agency, and Style