ABSTRACT
Philosophical concern with language has progressed on a broad front. For Herder it was associated with an interest in the history of mankind, for Gruppe with the advances of philology and the critique of Hegelian metaphysics. Frege thought about language in conjunction with his foundational investigations in logic and mathematics. At the same time Mauthner’s reflections on language were motivated by Mach’s critical epistemology. In the twentieth century philosophers like Carnap and Tarski concerned themselves with the study of the syntactic and semantic properties of formal languages, Wittgenstein thought about the language of everyday life, and Heidegger about the language of the poet. In the last thirty years philosophers have produced a rich harvest of theories about language which range from theories that offer recursive descriptions of the syntax and semantics of formal and natural languages, through theories that deal with language in terms of truth and verification, or intention and speech act, or in causal and referential terms, to theories that set out to investigate the deep structure of actual discourse.
