Includes bibliographical references and index.

Reference and referring -- Definite descriptions -- Proper names: the description theory -- Proper names: direct reference and the causal-historical theory -- Theories of meaning -- Traditional theories of meaning -- Use theories -- Psychological theories: Grice's program -- Verificationism -- Truth-condition theories: Davidson's program -- Truth-condition theories: possible worlds and intensional semantics -- Pragmatics and speech acts -- Semantic pragmatics -- Speech acts and illocutionary force -- Implicative relations -- The expressive and the figurative -- Expressive language -- Metaphor.

"Now in its Third Edition, Philosophy of Language: A Contemporary Introduction introduces students to the main issues and theories in twentieth-century philosophy of language, focusing specifically on linguistic phenomena. Author William G. Lycan structures the book into four general parts. Part I, Reference and Referring, includes topics such as Russell's theory of descriptions (and its objections), Donnellan's distinction, problems of anaphora, the description theory of proper names, Searle's cluster theory, and the causal-historical theory. Part II, Theories of Meaning, surveys the competing theories of linguistic meaning and compares their various advantages and liabilities. Part III, Pragmatics and Speech Acts, introduces the basic concepts of linguistic pragmatics and includes a detailed discussion of the problem of indirect force. Part IV, The Expressive and the Figurative, examines various forms of expressive language and what "metaphorical meaning" is and how most listeners readily grasp it."-- Provided by publisher.