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W. V. Quine's first philosophical monograph, Word and Object (1960), is widely recognized as one of the most influential books of twentieth century philosophy. Notes, letters, and draft manuscripts at the Quine Archives, however, reveal that Quine was already working on a philosophical book in the early 1940s; a project entitled Sign and Object. In this paper, I examine these and other unpublished documents and show that Sign and Object sheds new light on the evolution of Quine's ideas. Where \"Two Dogmas of Empiricism\" is usually considered to be a turning point in Quine's development, this paper redefines the place of 'Two Dogmas' in his oeuvre. Not only does Quine's book project reveal that his views were already fairly naturalistic in the early 1940s (Sects. 3-5); Sign and Object also unearths the steps Quine had to take in maturing his perspective; steps that will be traced in the second half of this paper (Sects. 6-9).

B. F. Skinner and W. V. Quine, arguably the two most influential proponents of behaviorism in mid-twentieth century psychology and philosophy, are often considered brothers in arms. They were close friends, they had remarkably parallel careers, and they both identified as behaviorists. Yet, surprisingly little is known about the relation between the two. How did Skinner and Quine develop their varieties of behaviorism? In what ways did they affect each other? And how similar are their behaviorisms to begin with? In this paper, I shed new light on the relation between Skinner and Quine by infusing the debate with a wide range of new and previously unexamined evidence from the personal and academic archives of Skinner and Quine.

This is a major, wide-ranging history of analytic philosophy since 1900, told by one of the tradition's leading contemporary figures. The first volume takes the story from 1900 to mid-century. The second brings the history up to date. As Scott Soames tells it, the story of analytic philosophy is one of great but uneven progress, with leading thinkers making important advances toward solving the tradition's core problems. Though no broad philosophical position ever achieved lasting dominance, Soames argues that two methodological developments have, over time, remade the philosophical landscape. These are (1) analytic philosophers' hard-won success in understanding, and distinguishing the notions of logical truth, a priori truth, and necessary truth, and (2) gradual acceptance of the idea that philosophical speculation must be grounded in sound prephilosophical thought. Though Soames views this history in a positive light, he also illustrates the difficulties, false starts, and disappointments endured along the way. As he engages with the work of his predecessors and contemporaries--from Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein to Donald Davidson and Saul Kripke--he seeks to highlight their accomplishments while also pinpointing their shortcomings, especially where their perspectives were limited by an incomplete grasp of matters that have now become clear. Soames himself has been at the center of some of the tradition's most important debates, and throughout writes with exceptional ease about its often complex ideas. His gift for clear exposition makes the history as accessible to advanced undergraduates as it will be important to scholars. Despite its centrality to philosophy in the English-speaking world, the analytic tradition in philosophy has had very few synthetic histories. This will be the benchmark against which all future accounts will be measured.

This wide-ranging study of language and cultural change in fourteenth-century England argues that the influence of oral tradition is much more important to the advance of literacy than previously supposed. In contrast to the view of orality and literacy as opposing forces, the book maintains that the power of language consists in displacement, the capacity of one channel of language to take the place of the other, to make the source disappear into the copy. Appreciating the interplay between oral and written language makes possible for the first time a way of understanding the high literate achievements of this century in relation to momentous developments in social and political life.

Children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) often have smaller vocabularies in infancy compared to typically-developing children. To understand whether their smaller vocabularies stem from problems in learning, our study compared a prospective risk sample of 18 elevated risk and 11 lower risk 24-month-olds on current vocabulary size and word learning ability using a paradigm in which parents teach their child words. Results revealed that both groups learned novel words, even though parents indicated that infants at elevated risk of ASD knew fewer words. This suggests that these early compromised vocabularies cannot be solely linked to difficulties in word formations.

How does an ethnographer write about violence? How can he make sense of violent acts, for himself and for his readers, without compromising its sheer excess and its meaning-defying core? How can he remain a scholarly observer when the country of his birth is engulfed by terror? These are some of the questions that engage Valentine Daniel in this exploration of life and death in contemporary Sri Lanka. In 1983 Daniel \"walked into the ashes and mortal residue\" of the violence that had occurred in his homeland. His planned project--the study of women's folk songs as ethnohistory--was immediately displaced by the responsibility that he felt had been given to him, by surviving family members and friends of victims, to recount beyond Sri Lanka what he had seen and heard there. Trained to do fieldwork by staying in one place and educated to look for coherence and meaning in human behavior, what does an anthropologist do when he is forced by circumstances to keep moving, searching for reasons he never finds? How does he write an ethnography (or an anthropography, to use the author's term) without transforming it into a pornography of violence? In avoiding fattening the anthropography into prurience, how does he avoid flattening it with theory? The ways in which Daniel grapples with these questions, and their answers, instill this groundbreaking book with a rare sense of passion, purpose, and intellect.

The aim of this article is to analyse the acquisition of object–verb/verb–object word order in Spanish and Basque by monolinguals (L1), early simultaneous bilinguals (2L1) and successive bilinguals, exposed to their second language before ages 5–6 (child L2). In this study, the second language (child L2) is acquired naturalistically, in a preschool setting with no formal instruction for the Basque L2 speakers and by environmental contact for the Spanish L2 speakers. Spanish and Basque are differentiated by their canonical word order as subject–verb–object and subject–object–verb, respectively. In Spanish, the subject–verb–object order is predominant (almost exclusive) in narrative contexts, whereas in Basque, both object–verb and verb–object word orders are possible in these contexts for pragmatic reasons, with a similar use in everyday language. The productions of a few L1 and 2L1 subjects are analysed longitudinally within the 1;06–3;00 age span. Cross-sectional data from 49 subjects who developed a child L2 are analysed at ages 5 and 8. The results reveal that the bilingual children apply the same syntactic patterns as the monolinguals in their respective languages independently of 2L1 or child L2 acquisition.

This chapter contains sections titled: Pre‐Socratics and Sophists Socrates Socrates and Plato Aristotle Hellenistic Philosophy Conclusion Bibliography

In Swedish, grammatical functions are primarily encoded by word order. In prototypical transitive sentences, the subject precedes the direct object. However, Swedish also allows for fronting of the direct object, although such sentences are potentially ambiguous with respect to grammatical functions. This study therefore investigates direct object fronting in written Swedish with respect to 1) which functions this construction serves and 2) whether the use of direct object fronting is dispreferred when the grammatical functions cannot be determined on other information types. These questions are investigated on the basis of quantitative differences in the distribution of NP prominence properties (e.g., givenness and animacy) and formal, morphosyntactic cues to grammatical functions (e.g., case marking and verb particles) between OVS and SVO sentences, and between OVS sentences and passives. The results indicate that direct object fronting is used when the object either is topical and highly discourse prominent, or when it is contrastive. I also argue that direct object fronting is used to introduce new topics into the discourse. Subjects are more frequently high in discourse prominence in object-initial sentences than in subject-initial sentences. I suggest that this stems from a motivation to keep the information in object-initial sentences following the sentence-initial object “informationally light” and predictable. Unambiguous formal markers of grammatical functions are used more frequently in OVS sentences than in SVO sentences, but less frequently in passives than in SVO sentences. OVS sentences also more frequently contain an animate subject and an inanimate object than SVO sentences, and in passives, animate subjects and inanimate objects are even less frequent. Writers therefore seem to prefer the structurally unambiguous passive construction over the potentially ambiguous object-initial construction, when grammatical functions cannot be determined on the basis of other formal markers or an NP argument animacy difference. Further, sentences with two animate arguments more frequently contain formal markers than sentences with at most one animate argument. These findings indicate that writers actively avoid direct object fronting when it potentially results in an ambiguity, and provide evidence for the hypothesis that writers are inclined to actively avoid ambiguities more generally.  

The methodological demands of neurolinguistics and variation linguistics clash to a certain degree. This contribution will explore the worth of overcoming this effort. The question will be discussed using as an example neuro-dialectological studies that apply the most important neuro-dialectological method to-date: the measurement of event-related potentials (ERPs) with electroencephalography (EEG). First, the course of linguistic change will be examined. Studies on Upper and Central German have demonstrated that phonological stability and change involve completely different process signatures in the brain physiology when speakers and hearers of neighboring dialects are in contact. Second, co-present varieties, i. e. that are used next to one another in everyday life (dialect vs. regiolect or standard), will be discussed. The co-presence alters the phonological processing of dialect whereby an integrated phonological system for both varieties begins to develop. The third point concerns the object-subject word order in various German and closely related varieties. Can it be shown that there are processing differences between varieties that maintain a distinction between nominative and accusative on the one hand, and varieties that have case syncretism (Zurich German, Frisian) on the other hand?