Communicative Action

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-ix

   PDF

2. Language in Communication

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 1-1

      PDF

   2. Names, Descriptions, and Assertion

      • Ray Buchanan

      Pages 3-15

   3. Indefinites in Action

      • Hsiang-Yun Chen

      Pages 17-31

   4. A Defense of the Knowledge Account of Assertion: From a Model-Theoretic Perspective

      • Syraya Chin-mu Yang

      Pages 33-50

3. Action and Bodily Awareness

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 51-51

      PDF

   2. When Actions Feel Alien—an Explanatory Model

      • Timothy Lane

      Pages 53-74

   3. Self-Consciousness and Its Linguistic Expression

      • Rory Madden

      Pages 75-92

   4. Personal and Sub-Personal: Overcoming Explanatory Apartheid

      • Hong Yu Wong

      Pages 93-104

4. Sensorimotor Interaction and Language Acquisition

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 105-105

      PDF

   2. How Infants Learn Word Meanings and Propositional Attitudes: A Neural Network Model

      • Alistair Knott

      Pages 107-124

   3. What Action Comprehension Tells Us About Meaning Interpretation

      • Tzu-Wei Hung

      Pages 125-137

5. Erratum

   • Timothy Lane

   Pages E1-E1

This book focuses on the connection between action and verbal communication, exploring topics such as the mechanisms of language processing, action processing, voluntary and involuntary actions, knowledge of language and assertion. Communication modelling and aspects of communicative actions are considered, along with cognitive requirements for nonverbal and verbal communicative action.

Contributions from expert authors are organised into three parts in this book, focussing on language in communication, action and bodily awareness and sensorimotor interaction and language acquisition.

Readers will discover various methods that have been employed in investigations presented here, including neurological experiment, computational modeling and logical and philosophical analysis.

These diverse expert perspectives shed light on the extent to which a mechanism for processing actions also facilitates the processing of language and the authors’ work prompts further interdisciplinary investigation of the relationship between language and action.

This book is written for readers from different academic backgrounds; from graduate students to established academics in disciplines ranging from neuroscience to psychology, philosophy, linguistics and beyond.

Earlier versions of the selected essays in this book were presented at the 2013 IEAS Conference on Language and Action, held in Taipei, Taiwan.

• Communication-based approach to the study of language
• Communicative actions
• Constitutive condition on action
• Davidson’s approach to evaluations
• Deictic and anaphoric uses of demonstrative noun phrases
• Dialectic between Drefus and Searle
• Indefinite expressions in communication
• Indefinites in action
• Intentions in action
• Motor Motor representations
• Motor representations
• Norms of assertion
• Philosophy of action
• Relationship between action and language
• Relationship between speech act content and assertion
• Semantics
• Speech act content
• Verbal communication

• Institute of European and American Studies, Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan

  Tzu-Wei Hung

Tzu-Wei Hung is an assistant research fellow and a project coordinator at the Institute of European and American Studies at the Academia Sincia, the highest academic institution in Taiwan. He received his PhD from Kings College London in 2011 for a dissertation on the relation between the shared circuits model and language processing supervised by Shalom Lappin and Jim Hopkins. His work primarily focuses on the questions of how, and to what extent, the mechanism of action imitation can also describe sentence imitation. His honors include the Taiwan Merit Scholarship, National Science Council and the Academia Sinica Fellowships for Doctoral Candidates in the Humanities and Social Sciences.

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