The Metaphysics of Words

The conference addresses questions about the nature of the linguistic entities that bear meaning.  “Word” 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 “Madagascar” pick out as used in:

 "Madagascar” means that island which is the dominant causal source of tokens of that word. 

The sorts of questions to be discussed include:

Whether 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?

 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?

 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. “Madagascar”), 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?