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This book considers the relationship between language and thought from a philosophical perspective, drawing both on the philosophical study of language and the purely formal study of grammar, and arguing that the two should align. Evidence is considered from biology, the evolution of language, language disorders, and linguistic phenomena.
About the author
Wolfram Hinzen Wolfram Hinzen is a Research Professor at the Catalan Institute for Advanced Studies and Research (ICREA) and is affiliated with the Linguistics department of the University of Barcelona and the Philosophy Department of the University of Durham (2006-2014). He writes on issues in the interface of language and mind. He is the author of Mind Design and Minimal Syntax (OUP, 2006) and An Essay on Names and Truth (OUP, 2007) and co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Compositionality (OUP, 2012).
Michelle Sheehan is a Research Associate at the University of Cambridge specialising in comparative syntax with a particular interest in the Romance languages. She has worked on null arguments, Control, word order variation, extraposition, clausal-nominal parallels, and case/alignment. She is co-author of Parametric Variation: Null Subjects in Minimalist Theory (CUP, 2009) and co-editor of Theoretical Approaches to Disharmonic Word Orders (OUP, 2014).
Summary
This book considers the relationship between language and thought from a philosophical perspective, drawing both on the philosophical study of language and the purely formal study of grammar, and arguing that the two should align. Evidence is considered from biology, the evolution of language, language disorders, and linguistic phenomena.
Additional text
This book asks some of the most fundamental questions that there can be about language and mind, and answers them in ways which are provocative, challenging, and surprising, in the context of current theorizing within philosophy and linguistics. The theory is supported by a wealth of conceptual and empirical arguments with detailed discussion of consequences for central grammatical notions such as case, person, word order, phases, and semantic notions such as reference, predication, and truth. This must be one of the most important books about language and thought in a very long time.
