Semantics and Pragmatics

The book contains new editions of a selection of author’s works on modals and conditionals: What “Must” and “Can” Must and Can Mean, The Notional Category of Modality, Partition and Revision, Conditionals, An Investigation of the Lumps of Thought, and Facts: Particulars or Information Units? All chapters have been given new introductions and were revised and updated. Some sections were completely rewritten. The result is a new book that tells a single story about the semantics of modals and conditionals, and is responsive to recent developments and controversies in the field.

This book considers how people talk about the location of objects and places. Spatial language has occupied many researchers across diverse fields, such as linguistics, psychology, GIScience, architecture, and neuroscience. However, the vast majority of work in this area has examined spatial language in monologue situations, and often in highly artificial and restricted settings. Yet there is a growing recognition in the language research community that dialogue rather than monologue should be a starting point for language understanding. Hence, the current zeitgeist in both language research and robotics/AI demands an integrated examination of spatial language in dialogue settings. This book provides such integration and reports on the latest developments in this important field.

James Higginbotham's work on tense, aspect, and indexicality discusses the principles governing demonstrative, temporal, and indexical expressions in natural language, and presents new ideas in the semantics of sentence structure. The book brings together his key contributions to the fields, including his recent intervention in the debate on the roles of context and anaphora in reference. The book's chapters are presented in the form in which they were first published, with afterwords where needed, to cover points where the author's thought has developed.