This Element investigates which ontological categories (such as individuals, properties, events, degrees, and kinds) are minimally required to provide a semantics for natural language. It yields insights into the requirements on minimal semantic ontologies for natural language and the challenges for semantic ontology engineering.

This Element investigates which ontological categories (such as individuals, properties, events, degrees, and kinds) are minimally required to provide a semantics for natural language. It yields insights into the requirements on minimal semantic ontologies for natural language and the challenges for semantic ontology engineering.

This work can be read as a sequel to Kripke's classic Naming and Necessity, confronting important issues left open in that work and developing a novel approach to questions concerning empty names and existence. It provides along the way novel treatments of fictional and mythological discourse, the pragmatics of definite and indefinite descriptions and the language of sense data.

This volume develops a "reflexive-referential" account of indexicals, demonstratives and proper names. On these issues the philosophy of language in the 20th century was shaped by two competing traditions, descriptivist and referentialist. This book reconciles the insights of both traditions.

The first of its kind, this book provides a full account of 'referential expressions' in language. It offers an integrated framework, which combines perspectives from functional grammar and cognitive linguistics with psycholinguistic evidence. It is essential reading for academic researchers in syntax, discourse analysis and cognitive linguistics.

Everyone is interested in words, from questions of why they mean what they mean, to whether something is a 'real' word. Looking back over a five-decade career, the author considers ways in which word-formation has been studied, raises fundamental questions, and looks for data that might help untangle old controversies.