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In literature an author sets the tone through words. The possible tones are bounded only by the number of possible emotions a human being can have. Diction and syntax often dictate what the author's (or character's) attitude toward his subject is at the time. An example: "Charlie surveyed the classroom but it was really his mother ...
Categorial grammar is another example of logical grammar in the modern context. More lately, in Donald Davidson's event semantics, for example, the verb serves as the predicate. Like in modern predicate logic, subject and object are arguments of the transitive predicate. A similar solution is found in formal semantics. [16]
Literary theory is the systematic study of the nature of literature and of the methods for literary analysis. [1] Since the 19th century, literary scholarship includes literary theory and considerations of intellectual history, moral philosophy, social philosophy, and interdisciplinary themes relevant to how people interpret meaning. [1]
Asking a question is an example of what Austin called an illocutionary act. Other examples would be making an assertion, giving an order, and promising to do something. To perform an illocutionary act is to use a locution with a certain force. It is an act performed in saying something, in contrast with a locution, the act of saying something.
Michael Tomasello has challenged Chomsky's theory of innate syntactic knowledge as based on theory and not behavioral observation. [160] The empirical basis of poverty of the stimulus arguments has been challenged by Geoffrey Pullum and others, leading to back-and-forth debate in the language acquisition literature.
Investigations into how language interacts with the world are called theories of reference. Gottlob Frege was an advocate of a mediated reference theory . Frege divided the semantic content of every expression, including sentences, into two components: sense and reference .
This theory is at the core of modern language acquisition theory [citation needed], and is perhaps the most fundamental of Krashen's theories. Acquisition of language is a natural, intuitive, and subconscious process of which individuals need not be aware. One is unaware of the process as it is happening and, when the new knowledge is acquired ...
The theories of Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) and Ernst Mach (1838–1916) influenced early Modernist literature. Ernst Mach argued that the mind had a fundamental structure, and that subjective experience was based on the interplay of parts of the mind in The Science of Mechanics (1883).