Semantics (the study of the relation between linguistic and real entities), pragmatics (the study of the purpose and conditions of sentences), and syntax (the study of the properties of verbal signs and their relations) have been a dominant triad in language studies since 1938 when the American philosopher Charles Morris introduced this division, derived from Peirce. It has recently been challenged by Chomsky, who subsumes into syntax the core of his cognitive approach, i.e. the analytical aspects of meaning, leaving all other aspects to pragmatics, dismissed as an irredeemably non-scientific practice. Cognitive semantics has recently brought out the semantic import of grammatical categories and claimed scientific respectability for the study of semantic functions involved in conceptualization. This has made the boundaries between these three traditional areas even more permeable. Finally, the encounter with cognitive science has tempered the anti-psychologist tendency that had long been a distinctive trait of analytic philoso¬phy. It would seem that language needs to be explained more and more in the context of a general theory of the mind, and is less and less a universal pass-partout that will open the doors of every philosophical closet. This change has expanded the epistemic potential of philosophy to an extent it is still difficult to assess. For language theories, too, the `rediscovery of the mind' seems destined to become a new frontier.

Time and Modality is a unique work of reference; not only does it unite studies which explore the syntax and semantics of tense or modality but it is the first book of its kind to embrace the interaction of tense and modality within a coherent generative model. Various topics are covered in this volume: among them are the counterfactual uses of conditionals, modals, and past tense; the irrealis use of perfective aspect; a special English subjunctive; the interaction of tense assignment and the definition of an event; the modal verb as a causative verb; the interaction of modality, tense, and aktionsart; the contrast between deontic and epistemic modal with respect to tense interpretation; the syntax of epistemic modals; the long-awaited definition of generic and habitual sentence; and the introduction of intensionality in copular clauses.

Although every article deals with English to some degree, two chapters compare the syntax and semantics of tense and modality in Spanish vs English. The authors also investigate Slavic, Germanic, Afro-Asiatic, Oriental, Amerindian Languages and Hungarian.

This book collects the contributions presented at the international congress held at the University of Bologna in January 2007, where leading scholars of different persuasions and interests offered an up-to-date overview of the current status of the research on linguistic universals. The papers that make up the volume deal with both theoretical and empirical issues, and range over various domains, covering not only morphology and syntax, which were the major focus of Greenberg’s seminal work, but also phonology and semantics, as well as diachrony and second language acquisition.

 

One of the most important discoveries of modern linguistic theory is that abstract structural properties of utterances place subtle restrictions on how we can use a given form or description. For the past thirty years, these restrictions have been explored for possible clues to the exact nature of the structural properties in question. In The Syntax of (In)Dependence Ken Safir explores these structural properties and develops a theory of dependent identity interpretations that also leads to new empirical generalizations.

The following chapters deal with one of the central concerns of syntactic theory since Ross (1967): How local is syntax and what are the measures of syntactic locality? These questions lie at the core, for example, of both the theory of movement and the theory of binding. A constant theme has been the issue of whether or not movement and anaphoric relations are governed by a unified concept of locality. I argue here that they are.