ABSTRACT
The prominence of philosophy of language was a consequence of the fact that it synthesized two major currents of thought within analytic philosophy: the philosophy of ordinary language and the philosophy of ideal language. By the early 1960s debates about descriptions—as well as related debates about conditionals, the existential import of quantification, identity statements and modality—revealed that there is no clear and broadly shared conception of how linguistic analysis is supposed to work. Linguistics also generated a number of new theoretical concepts—anaphoric link, binding, discourse referent, empty category, genericity, incorporation, scalar implicature, thematic role, and type shifting to mention a few—that are of philosophical interest. The three main branches of linguistics that are of special philosophical significance—syntax, semantics and pragmatics—operate within the broad frameworks laid by philosophically minded linguists and linguistically minded philosophers. Perhaps the most exciting thing about recent philosophy of language is its openness towards genuine linguistic problems.
