The conference addresses questions about the nature of the linguistic entities that bear meaning. \;&ldquo\;Word&rdquo\; itself is a folksy and imprecise notion\, but we are particularly interested in what entities (perhaps natural or social kinds) play the word-role in syntactic\, semantic and metasemantic theory. For example\, what does &ldquo\;Madagascar&rdquo\; pick out as used in:
\n\;"Madagascar&rdquo\; means that island which is the dominant causal source of tokens of that word. \;
\nThe sorts of questions to be discussed include:
\nWhether words are abstract or concrete\, whether they are natural or artefacts\, whether or not they are public\, whether they exist at all. \; Are they types\, kinds\, objects?
\n\;What noises\, marks etc lie in the extension of particular words\, and what principles determine this? \; Is it a matter of their phonetic or graphemic composition\, their causal history\, their meaning\, some combination of these\, or something else? Do we need a systematic theory at all?
\n\n\;How can particular accounts of the nature and extension of words assist with issues such as the Paderewski problem\, the phenomenon of semantic drift (cf. &ldquo\;Madagascar&rdquo\;)\, the semantics and syntax of proper names\, the nature of quotation. Several issues arise turning on ambiguity. e.g. \; Is ambiguity a phenomenon of one word "bank" with two meanings or two words?
ORGANIZER;CN=Gail Leckie: METHOD:PUBLISH END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR