Table of Contents

Acknowledgements; Part I. Speech Act Theory and Formal Semantics: 1. The primary units of meaning; 2. Illocutionarily significant sentence types; 3. Intensional logic and illocutionary logic; Part II. A General Success and Truth Conditional Semantics: 1. Main features of general semantics; 2. Philosophical interest; 3. Criteria of adequacy; 4. The place of general semantics in semiotics; Part III. On The Logical Form of Propositions: 1. Historical remarks; 2. Propositions and truth values; 3. Propositions and illocutionary acts; 4. The law of propositional identity; 5. Logical operations on propositions; Part IV. On The Logical Form of Locutionary Acts: 1. Analysis of the notion of illocutionary force; 2. Recursive definition of the set of all illocutionary forces; 3. The semantic concepts of success and satisfaction; Part V. Fundamental Laws For Meaning and Use: 1. Laws for illocutionary points and sentential types; 2. Laws for illocutionary forces; 3. Laws of entailment and analyticity; Part VI. Semantic Analysis of English Performative Verbs: 1. English assertives; 2. English commissives; 3. English directives; 4. English declaratives; 5. English expressives; Conclusion; Notes; Appendices.

Promotional Information

In Meaning and Speech Acts Daniel Vanderveken further develops the logic of speech acts and the logic of propositions to construct a general semantic theory of natural languages.