Philosophy Of Language Research Articles

This study explores the development of the Gothic novel in English literature from a stylistic and cognitive-linguistic perspective. It examines the structure of Gothic narrative discourse and its expressive strategies, highlighting the pivotal role of cognitive metaphor in shaping themes of horror, mystery, and existential anxiety. Drawing on the philosophy of language, the study reveals how Gothic language encodes and reproduces cultural and psychological constructs that reflect the self's confrontation with the irrational and the unknown. Through critical readings of seminal Gothic texts, the study traces the dynamic interplay between language and aesthetic experience, demonstrating how Gothic fiction reflects evolving artistic, social, and intellectual paradigms. It discusses how early Gothic narratives, characterized by medieval settings and dark, enclosed spaces, responded to their social and political environments, particularly the tensions of modernity and class transformation. In later developments, the Gothic style deepened its philosophical and psychological concerns, engaging with notions of creation, morality, madness, and the limits of humanity. The study concludes that the Gothic novel constantly reinvents itself, maintaining its literary vitality and cultural significance through continuous adaptation to new contexts. This capacity for transformation has allowed the Gothic style to remain a resonant form of artistic expression, transcending the boundaries between reason and chaos, reality and imagination, thus ensuring its enduring presence and importance in contemporary literary discourse.

Common ground is the information that the participants in a conversation treat as background information for the purposes of their interaction. We review two traditions of research on common ground. The formal tradition, consisting mainly of theoretical linguists and philosophers of language, has developed increasingly sophisticated formal models of common ground to generate predictions about an expanding range of empirical phenomena. Meanwhile, the psycholinguistic tradition has focused on a narrower range of phenomena while developing more realistic theories of the psychological mechanisms that allow us to select and represent common ground. After summarizing these two traditions, we consider several reasons why they should be reintegrated, and we argue that the best way to bring them back together would be to adopt a cognitive-pluralist approach, whereby language users have access to a variety of mechanisms for managing background information, which are more or less available and efficient depending on the communicative situation and the kind of information mentally represented as well as the cognitive demands of each mechanism.

This article explores the clinical encounter not merely as a site for technical intervention or diagnostic reasoning, but as a complex event where epistemology and ethics converge. Challenging the reduction of medicine to scientific protocols, it argues for a conceptual reorientation grounded in language and human relationality. The encounter between clinician and patient is framed as both an epistemic inquiry and a moral covenant, where understanding a patient's condition requires access not only to biological data but to their social, cultural, and linguistic lifeworld. While the sciences offer truth about the body, they do not suffice to grasp the full existential dimension of illness. Language thus becomes central-not only as a medium of communication, but as the very space where knowledge and care are shaped and shared. It is in and through language that ethical responsibility toward the patient is enacted. This article synthesizes a philosophical investigation into the ethical and linguistic foundations of medical practice. Drawing on the work of Wilhelm von Humboldt, Émile Benveniste, Emmanuel Levinas, and decolonial thinkers such as Frantz Fanon and Édouard Glissant, it develops a theoretical framework that helps to clarify how subjectivity, vulnerability, and responsibility emerge in and through language during the clinical encounter. The approach is conceptual and interpretive, grounded in close textual analysis and oriented toward the ethical implications of these philosophical insights within the medical practice. From this analysis emerges a critique of dominant ontological assumptions within Western medicine, particularly its tendency to assimilate the Other into pre-existing categories, thereby enacting a form of epistemic violence. Levinas's distinction between the Said (le Dit) and the Saying (le Dire) becomes central to this critique. The Said corresponds to propositional knowledge and thematic discourse-typical of clinical reasoning-while the Saying signals a more primordial ethical relation: an act of exposure, vulnerability, and responsibility toward the Other. Proximity, as defined by Levinas, is not a spatial or cognitive closeness but an ethical immediacy-a face-to-face relation where the Other appears as irreducibly singular. Humboldt's and Benveniste's linguistic theories reinforce this view by emphasizing that subjectivity is dialogical and relational rather than autonomous and pregiven. In contrast to Habermas's emphasis on validity claims and rational consensus, Levinas privileges the irreducible alterity of the Other as the foundation of ethical life, a move that reframes the conditions under which medical knowledge and care become possible. These philosophical insights have profound implications for the medical practice. When in a clinical encounter, the patients do not merely present symptoms to be categorized-they bring a world that demands ethical attention. Medical language, far from being neutral, reconfigures how illness is understood and treated. The difference between saying a patient "has diabetes," "suffers from diabetes," or "is diabetic" reflects deeper assumptions about identity and embodiment. The ethical quality of care hinges on such linguistic choices. Through the lens of Levinas's Saying, the patient's voice is heard not simply as information but as a call to responsibility. Moreover, when placed in conversation with decolonial thinkers, this analysis reveals the extent to which colonial and racialized logics continue to shape medical practice. Fanon's critique of the objectification of Black bodies, and Glissant's defense of "opacity" against totalizing knowledge systems, highlight how patients are often forced into identities that obscure their singularity. The ethical demand of the clinical encounter thus resists any framework-biological, social, or racial-that seeks to fully determine the patient in advance of relation. The article concludes that ethical responsibility in medicine arises not from what is known about the patient, but from a willingness to engage with what remains unknown and unknowable-their singularity, vulnerability, and alterity. The clinical encounter is reimagined as a moral space where language becomes the medium through which care is not only delivered but ethically constituted. In this reconfiguration, the practice of medicine moves beyond procedural norms and toward a relational ethics rooted in proximity and attentiveness. By bringing together Levinas's philosophy of language and responsibility with decolonial critiques of medical rationality, the article calls for a fundamental transformation in how healing is conceived: not as mastery over the body, but as a dialogical and ethical relation between singular beings.

ABSTRACTRecent philosophy of language has seen a growing interest in what is often called the dynamics of conversation or conversational scorekeeping, that is, the ways in which speech and context mutually interact in the course of a conversation. This paper provides an introduction to the scorekeeping approach to linguistic interaction and its different developments and applications. Starting from the seminal work of Stalnaker and Lewis in the 1970s, it looks at subsequent proposals for enriching and extending their conceptions of context or conversational score to account for various linguistic phenomena. In addition, it discusses different, and sometimes conflicting, interpretations of the idea of conversational scorekeeping; the prospects for integrating the scorekeeping approach with two other prominent frameworks in pragmatics, namely, Grice's theory of conversational implicatures and speech act theory; and applications of the approach in the area of social and political philosophy of language.

Works by a plethora of 20th-century Spanish thinkers, such as Miguel de Unamuno, José Ortega y Gasset, and Salvador de Madariaga, have played an important role in the history of world philosophy. Philosophical thought in Spain has always been contemplative, characterized by polemical sharpness of judgment and a special rhetorical style. Spanish philosophers did not propose any doctrine as dogma, nor did they seek to create schools; still, their concepts had a holistic approach to the evaluation of phenomena, which is now commonly referred to as interdisciplinarity. Their style of philosophical thinking bore the hallmarks of psychological, sociological, and hermeneutic analysis when it comes to revealing the existential essence of events. This style was marked by a philological depth of understanding of the relationship between language and national consciousness. The Spanish fully inherited the interest in language and speech, which were considered a form of art in antiquity, and lent new perspectives on language in the first editions of Spanish grammar published in late 15th century (the first Spanish grammar was published by Antonio de Nebrija in 1492). Speech as an art and a reflection of the national peculiarities of a people’s life, its instinct (intuition) are ideas in the works of the 16th-century Spanish humanists Juan Luis Vives and Juan de Valdés that were centuries ahead of the European linguistic thought. Language philosophy in Spain in the 19th century developed in line with German idealism, which had the strongest influence on Spanish philosophy in general.The philosophical thought concerning language acquired a new and truly original dimension in the works of Miguel de Unamuno and José Ortega y Gasset, as it gained an ethnopsychological element and took on an existentialist approach to the description of the facts of language and speech production. The views of these philosophers on language manifested themselves in their art as well. The aim of this study is to show how the existentialist dimension of the philosophical thought of Miguel de Unamuno, José Ortega y Gasset, and Salvador de Madariaga helped to reveal the profound mechanisms of speech production, determined the dominant features of national linguistic consciousness, and demonstrated the interdependence of speech behavior and national character. The author uses metalinguistic, psycholinguistic, and ethnosociological methods in the analysis and interpretation of works by these authors.

Abstract Petr Chaadaev’s retirement from military service in 1821 has always attracted attention and a number of explanations; however, as the extent of these different theories makes clear, the sense of this event remains incompletely understood. This article offers a deeper contextualization of the affair, one that considers how an emotional affect – Chaadaev’s display of contempt for authority in a personal letter – lies at the heart of the matter. This Chaadaevan affect only becomes fully legible when considered in relation to various contextual elements, including Romantic philosophy of language, early nineteenth-century “radical” political emotions, Russian liberal elite sentiment toward Alexander I, the global democratic movements of the 1810s, and, finally, the intricacies of contempt itself. Taken together, these different elements greatly expand understanding of how Chaadaev and his contemporaries understood his behavior – and why it was ultimately so meaningful as to inspire writers across the nineteenth century from Pushkin to Dostoevsky.

Social media platforms, especially Instagram, have become a significant source of digital communication where users can interact through satire, humour, and irony. Sarcasm is a rhetorical device primarily used to convey hidden meaning, criticism, or humour. This study examined sarcastic comments on the Instagram page @Sarcastic_us, categorising them into different types of Sarcasm based on contextual and linguistic features. A descriptive, qualitative approach was employed to analyse 600 comments from 30 posts using content analysis. Key findings of the study reveal six primary types of Sarcasm employed by Instagram users: absurd Sarcasm, deadpan Sarcasm, polite Sarcasm, playful Sarcasm, ironic Sarcasm, and self-deprecating Sarcasm. The study analysed different types of Sarcasm in Instagram comments. It also presented the most dominant form of self-deprecating Sarcasm (30%), which is used for humour and relevance. Additionally, exaggeration and emojis play a crucial role in amplifying the Sarcasm. The study contributes to the understanding of Sarcasm in digital spaces, taking into account such challenges and enhancing sentiment analysis. Future studies should focus on AI-driven sarcasm detection models incorporating multimodal cues to enhance accuracy. References Austin, J. L. (1962). How to do things with words. Oxford University Press. Fadilah, I., & Wijayanto, A. (2024). Sarcasm in social media: A study of comments on Sam Smith’s Instagram posts. Jurnal Onoma: Pendidikan, Bahasa, dan Sastra, 10(1), 1–15. https://doi.org/10.30605/onoma.v10i1.3077 Farabi, M. (2024). A comprehensive survey on multimodal sarcasm detection. Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, 75(3), 210–235. Ghosh, D. (2018). Detecting Sarcasm in online conversations: Contextual approaches and challenges. Journal of Computational Linguistics, 47(2), 355–378. Goyal, I. (2022). Multimodal sarcasm and satire detection on social media platforms. Proceedings of the International Conference on Social Media Analysis, 102–115. Goyal, I., Bhandia, P., & Dulam, S. (2022). Finetuning for sarcasm detection with a pruned dataset. arXiv Preprint. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2212.12213 Grice, H. P. (1975). Logic and conversation. In P. Cole & J. Morgan (Eds.), Syntax and semantics (Vol. 3, pp. 41–58). Academic Press. Igaab, A. (2023). Sarcasm as a communicative strategy: An analysis of expressive and assertive acts. Journal of Pragmatics and Communication Studies, 15(2), 112–127. Jawaid, A., Batool, M., Arshad, W., Haq, M. I. ul, Kaur, P., & Arshad, S. (2025, January 26). English language vocabulary building trends in students of higher education institutions and a case of Lahore, Pakistan. Contemporary Journal of Social Science Review, 3(1), 730–737. https://contemporaryjournal.com/index.php/14/article/view/360 Jawaid, A., Batool, M., Arshad, W., Kaur, P., & Haq, M. I. ul. (2024). English language pronunciation challenges faced by tertiary students. Contemporary Journal of Social Science Review, 2(4), 2104–2111. https://contemporaryjournal.com/index.php/14/article/view/361 Khurdula, H. V., Naik, S. S., & Rusert, J. (2024). Sarcasm through the looking glass: Multi-domain analysis for improved detection. In Proceedings of SoutheastCon 2024 (pp. 650–654). IEEE. https://doi.org/10.1109/southeastcon52093.2024.10500167 Kumar, A., & Garg, G. (2019). Sarc-M: Sarcasm detection in typographic memes. Social Science Research Network. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3384025 Lestari, D. A. (2024). The types of irony in memes: A study on Instagram. Journal of Language and Literature Studies, 5(2), 45–56. Oshii, A. M. (2023). A deviation-based ensemble algorithm for sarcasm detection in online comments. In IEEE International Conference on Electrical, Computer and Communication Technologies (pp. 1–7). IEEE. https://doi.org/10.1109/ICECCT56650.2023.10179724 Sandor, T. (2023). Detecting Sarcasm in online comments using machine learning models. Journal of Computational Social Science, 6(1), 55–78. Sasirekha, P. (2024). Methodologies for sarcasm detection on social media: A review. International Journal of Computational Linguistics, 12(2), 89–104. Schifanella, R., de Juan, P., Tetreault, J., & Cao, L. (2016). Detecting Sarcasm in multimodal social platforms. In Proceedings of the 2016 ACM Multimedia Conference (pp. 1136–1145). ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/2964284.2964321 Searle, J. R. (1969). Speech acts: An essay in the philosophy of language. Cambridge University Press. Srivastava, R. (2024). Understanding Sarcasm in digital discourse: A multimodal perspective. International Journal of Linguistics and Communication Studies, 14(1), 77–94. Yasmin, A. P., & Zuhriah, Z. (2024). Analysis of sarcasm language use on Instagram social media (Case study of students from the Faculty of Social Sciences, UINSU). JKOMDIS: Jurnal Ilmu Komunikasi dan Media Sosial, 4(2), 55–64. https://doi.org/10.47233/jkomdis.v4i2.1918

This article explores the implications posed by Willard Van Orman Quine (1908-2000), an American philosopher and logician in the analytic tradition, recognized as one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century. Quine’s holistic and behaviorist approach to language challenges traditional notions of meaning, reference, and translation. Quine’s philosophy of language is particularly interesting in relation to how we understand the process of making meaning both in language acquisition and language learning. Language acquisition is a natural process that aligns closely with Quine’s views, while foreign language learning is a more conscious process that can incorporate Quinean principles but also faces unique challenges highlighted by his philosophy. Succinctly, Quine encourages language learners to adopt a more pragmatic approach, focusing on communication, context, and cultural understanding, rather than on individual words or grammar rules.

The relevance of this study lies in the need for historical reflection on successful models of intercivilizational dialogue, particularly the accommodation strategy that demonstrates the efficacy of cultural interaction. The focus is on the musical component of Matteo Ricci's mission in China, which remains a peripheral topic in the study of the particular style of musical thinking within Chinese culture. The aim of this research is to identify the philosophical and cultural foundations of the musical dimension of Ricci's mission and to describe them within the context of the cultural accommodation techniques he employed. To achieve this, the following objectives were set: 1) to systematize available data on China's first “musical encounter” with Europe and refine approaches to understanding the initial appearance of European music in China; 2) to identify the prerequisites for Ricci's use of musical activity as a missionary tool; 3) to clarify factual information regarding dates, names of musical instruments, compositions, and other aspects of Ricci's mission relevant to the topic; 4) to describe the communicatively significant outcomes of the musical “interaction” between Ricci and the Wanli Emperor, Chinese scholars, and officials; 5) to establish how the Jesuits utilized elements of European music theory in teaching the Chinese language. The research materials included primary sources, commentaries, and scholarly literature in Chinese and European languages pertaining to the theme of the “first encounter” between European music and Chinese culture. The methodology is based on a synthesis of hermeneutic analysis of compared texts (Ricci's works, letters, Latin and Chinese sources) and the principles of historical-cultural anthropology, enabling the reconstruction of symbolic meanings and communicative intentions embedded in musical practices. A comprehensive interdisciplinary approach was applied, combining perspectives from the philosophy of culture, history, musicology, semiotics, and linguistics. Hermeneutic analysis of the texts employed biographical and historical-genetic methods, as well as techniques for comparing corresponding European and Chinese names for instruments. The results demonstrate that music served as a key component of Ricci's missionary strategy due to its worldview significance in Chinese culture, its relative accessibility, the permissibility of using a “musical” form of preaching among the Chinese elite, and the rich potential for accommodating musical material to their worldview and ethical frameworks. These findings can be summarized as follows:1. Ricci's mission successfully overcame initial misunderstanding and rejection through a well-chosen initial accommodation strategy, in which music played a significant role. 2. The use of music as a specific “code” for evangelization was determined by Ricci's affiliation with the Jesuit Order and his education, which included music as a significant component. 3. Comparing a wide range of available data suggests with a high degree of probability that the first Western instrument brought to China by Matteo Ricci was a harpsichord, not a clavichord. Furthermore, discrepancies in existing data regarding the appearance of the first European instrument in China can be resolved by comparing key sources with known biographical facts: based on this, the construction year of the first Catholic church in mainland China was 1585, not 1583. 4. The gradual development of a “musical” dialogue with the Chinese elite led Ricci to closer interaction with its representatives based on technical interest in musical instruments, as well as the development of mutual respect due to a convergence of moral ideas embedded in the texts of Ricci's “Songs”. It is evident that the musical solutions in these works did not contradict the norms of Chinese scholarship, and that musical practices (performance, gifting of instruments, creation of song texts) were not merely a form of symbolic exchange but also a diplomatic gesture aimed at demonstrating intellectual and aesthetic equality between cultures. 5. Thanks to the “musical component” of Ricci's mission, the Jesuits created and expanded a strategy of using elements of European music theory in the process of teaching Chinese as a tonal language, which requires sound production and recognition techniques uncommon in European languages. Further study of the functional role of Western European music as an instrument of cultural accommodation, and subsequently adaptation, in the context of Chinese culture's interaction with foreign cultural environments can contribute to developing a more complete picture of the historical and contemporary pathways for interaction between representatives of Chinese culture and non-Chinese partners.

The article is an attempt to summarize and survey the historical development of the Russian phi­losophy of language, as well as to problematize the national peculiarities of this field of philoso­phical knowledge. The authors present the history of Russian philosophy of language as an evolu­tion of a kind of paradigms, identifying as such rationalistic, historical, psychological, formal, structural-systemic, ontological, social and anthropocentric paradigms, and also trace the close connection between the development and change of these paradigms with the social, cultural and historical challenges facing Russian society at different moments of its development. It is shown that the cultural and historical context was a source of fundamental methodological principles and intuitions for each paradigm. Russian language philosophy is characterized as an intellectual space with a pronounced duality that arises from close interaction with European culture and at the same time attentive attitude to its own cultural, historical and socio-political contexts, linguistic and cul­tural realities, the problem of religious/national identity: in other words, the Russian philosophy of language is structured by consistent attempts to combine national and universal. According to the authors, the close connection of the Russian philosophy of language with cultural and his­torical challenges led to special attention to applied aspects: each paradigm had a more or less pro­nounced pragmatic character.

The article discusses the position expressed by Peter Engelmeyer, the first Russian philosopher of technology, that signs, language and thinking can be subsumed under the concept of technology. The author shows that there is indeed a problem here, to solve the problem it is necessary to understand and distinguish between the concept of technology and non-technology, represented by signs, language and thinking. Based on his studies of the nature and genesis of technology, he characterizes the latter as a cultural and historical formation, a solution to unsolvable problems and tasks, as an artifact that allows solving such problems and creating new natural processes that were previously unobservable and even non-existent, and finally, as a conceptualization of technology. Characterizing signs, the author shows that the meaning and the sign as a whole, as a concept, in contrast to the artifact, as a product of activity, relate to the inner, to the life world of a man. For a better understanding of this thesis, a case is considered – a story told by K. Jung in his last book, on the material of which the concept of the life world and the scheme explaining Jung’s act are introduced. Regarding language and thinking, two cases are distinguished: in one they are not technology, in the other, if rules and methodology are used, they can be considered as intellectual technology. The last part of the article discusses hybrid types of technology, specifically neural computers. The author shows that in a neurocomputer, due to technical imitation of the neural network and training, a model is created that allows, at the request of a person, to take information from the Internet, construct written speech according to the rules of language and reason according to the rules of logic. At the same time, this model does not replace natural intelligence, which lives and unfolds in people and in social communications. Since people are constantly improving computer technology and trying to replace natural intelligence with artificial intelligence, the neurocomputer as a model becomes more and more perfect in terms of the product (the results of linguistic communication and thinking).

In the 20th century, philosophy saw a number of rediscoveries of the idea of culture and, accordingly, the formation of approaches to its study. Given the extremely “confused and ambiguous social history” (T. Eagleton) of this idea, the article reveals its presence in the thoughts of different generations of Russian philosophers. The article is based on the materials of the book “Philosophical Generations” (Moscow, 2022), which contains a collection of autobiographical narratives of Russian philosophers of the mid-20th – early 21st centuries. Based on the memoirs and thoughts of philosophers about their time, the development of the concept of “culture”, its semantic emphases and fluctuations in the second half of the 20th century are studied. The rich material presented in this “chronicle of the Moscow philosophical community” allows us to trace the specifics of philosophical solutions to the “problem of culture” and the reverse impact of structural transformations of culture, art, and aesthetics on philosophy. The search for a relevant philosophical language to describe cultural dynamics in an era of constant and multiple crises deserves special attention. The author of the article suggests looking for ways to place the problem of culture in a philosophical context associated with tradition, modernity and new methodologies in the humanities. In search of the specifics of the domestic approach to the phenomenon of culture, the author turns to the analysis of discussions around the ‘philosophy of culture’, ‘cultural studies’, ‘cultural research’, ‘dialogue of cultures’. Particular attention is paid to the humanitarian discussions of the 1980–1990s, in particular, the discussion around the relevance of the Silver Age, the ‘cult’ of which fell precisely on these years, is reconstructed. The conducted research made it possible to identify, on the one hand, the generational specificity of the theoretical positions and formulations of the issue of culture presented in the book (fixing points of misunderstanding and breaks), and on the other, to catch traces of their interactions.

ABSTRACT Beneath Stanley Cavell’s philosophy for the future lies a view of history and historicity expressed by the ideas of ‘declining decline’ and ‘finding as founding’. In this article, I analyze how such ideas arise from readings of Emerson, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Benjamin. In his dialogues with these thinkers, Cavell engages with issues in the philosophy of history that are mostly absent from discussions of human life within the analytic tradition. I claim that Cavell’s notion of the ordinary is as much inherited from this engagement as from the philosophies of language of Austin and Wittgenstein. I end by suggesting that despite Cavell’s fascination with Heidegger, his philosophy for the future is in fact closer to Benjamin in the way they both conceive relations between art and the ordinary.

Abstract Theorists trying to model natural language have recently sought to explain a range of data by positing covert operators at logical form. For instance, many contemporary semanticists argue that the best way to capture scalar implicatures is through the use of such operators. We take inspiration from this literature by developing a novel operator that can account for a wide range of linguistic effects that until now have not received a uniform treatment. We focus on what we call redundancy effects, which occur when attitude verbs and modals imply that certain bodies of information are unsettled about various claims. We explain three pieces of data, among others: diversity inferences, ignorance inferences, and free choice inferences. Our account yields an elegant model of redundancy effects, and has the potential to explain a wide range of puzzles and problems in philosophical semantics.

ABSTRACT The first section of this paper presents a range of theoretical views on the linguistic status of proper names. These form a spectrum that is anchored on the one side by the received lexicographical position that they do not strictly form part of the basic lexicon of the language, as described in the dictionary, but belong in a separate onomastic gazetteer. There is then a spread of positions, all assuming that proper names are essentially proper words but are idiosyncratic in multiple and incremental ways. The second part of the paper is a case study of the treatments of proper names in the context of 17th-century philosophical language schemes, which illustrates how a single theoretical paradigm can nevertheless allow seemingly contradictory viewpoints to co-exist. In the final section, this case study provides a starting point to move towards an integrated pragmatic approach, whereby proper names are accorded full pragmatic status, with special attention being paid to the nicknames and placeholder names as marginal categories.

The advancement of Artificial Intelligence has sparked an argument about its ability to understand the subtleties of human language and meaning. This paper explores AI’s linguistic and semantic competence from philosophical and technical perspectives. In tandem with this fundamental question: whether AI truly understands meaning? Others are: what are the current capabilities of AI? How is contemporary AI constrained in terms of comprehension? And what are the possibilities related to enhancing their understanding? The research stems out of these queries and is underpinned by linguistic philosophy, cognitive science and machine learning. While current AI with remarkable linguistic competence can model human language, it understands only form not content because of its constraints in embodiment, context-sensitivity and intentionality. However, future research directions offer possibilities for enhanced AI’s understanding of meaning.

Abstract The present study examines the patterns of speech act in the herdsmen-farmers conflict (HFC) news headlines and interrogates the choice of words and context of the patterns of speech act in the headlines. The study adopts Searle, John. 1969. Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Approach to speech act considering its relevance to the study of news headlines. Six Nigerian newspapers that cover a period between March 2019 and March 2021 were selected. Hundred headlines were sampled from each of the selected newspapers making a total of 600 headlines. Twenty-five were purposively selected for analysis. Four illocutionary acts were identified in the newspapers’ headlines, namely, assertive, commissive, directive, and declarative. The study submits that the headlines are capable of spiraling the conflict, therefore, newspaper writers should use headlines that can help to curb the conflict and readers must also go beyond the headlines because of their sensationalism.

This study explores the concepts of ontology and epistemology of meaning in the Arabic language through the lens of the philosophy of language, highlighting the relationship between the existence of meaning, the process of its formation, and how it is understood. The primary issue addressed is how meaning in Arabic is influenced by the ontological and epistemological structures inherent in the language, particularly in relation to its use across various social, cultural, and historical contexts. The study aims to identify and analyze the philosophical foundations that shape meaning in Arabic and to examine how meaning is understood and represented through linguistic symbols. The method used in this research is the literature review method. The findings indicate that meaning in Arabic is characterized by complexity, involving the interaction between symbols, concepts, and reality, and is significantly influenced by cultural and social factors. Furthermore, meaning in Arabic exhibits a dynamic dimension, continually evolving with changes in its contextual usage. The study concludes by emphasizing the importance of understanding the ontology and epistemology of meaning in Arabic to provide a deeper insight into the relationship between language, thought, and reality, which is not only relevant in linguistic studies but also in the fields of philosophy, literature, and cultural studies.

Effective communication is widely recognized as a cornerstone of successful medical treatment, as extensively documented in prior research. The doctor-patient relationship relies on clear, accurate information exchange to ensure precise diagnoses, treatment adherence, and patient satisfaction. Yet misunderstandings can seriously undermine this process, creating barriers to optimal care and weakening the therapeutic alliance—a critical element of effective healthcare. Consequently, identifying, understanding, and addressing these misunderstandings is essential. This paper introduces a novel approach to detecting and analyzing such misunderstandings in clinical interactions by drawing on concepts from the philosophy of language. Specifically, we present the ToUCAN Codebook, a structured framework designed to systematically classify and examine instances of textual miscommunication in doctor-patient dialogues. By offering a clear methodology for identifying and preventing potential communication breakdowns, the ToUCAN Codebook contributes to improved healthcare outcomes and a deeper understanding of the dynamics that shape medical discourse.

The paper is an expository essay in which I run an assessment of compositionality from the vantage point of Kit Fine’s semantic relationist approach to meaning. This relationist view is deepening our conception about how the meanings of propositions depend not only on the semantic features and roles of each separate meaningful unit in a complex, but also on the relations that those units hold to each other. The telling feature of the formal apparatus of this Finean relationist syntax and semantics, viz. the coordination scheme, has some unexpected consequences that will emerge against the background of an analogy with the counterpart theoretic semantics for modal languages. In the evaluation of a de re modal formula at a world in a counterpart theoretic model, as opposed to the evaluation in a possible world semantic model, one may choose different possible objects as referents or semantic values of two tokens of a single type individual constant or individual variable. Likewise, in the relationist semantics for variables or individual constants (proper names), within a coordination schema one may choose different objects if the variables or the constants are not strictly coordinated. I shall leave the working out of this comparison for a future paper. The program defends ‘referentialism’ in philosophy of language; Fine holds that semantic relations that have to be added to the assigned intrinsic values in our semantic theory, especially the relation which he calls ‘coordination’, can do much of the work of (Fregean) sense. A relationist referentialism has certain important explanatory virtues which it shares with the Fregean position, but the former is better off ontologically than the latter, since it is not committed to the existence of sense.