We know that words change all the time and over time, a process language experts describe as “semantic shift,” semantics being the field of language concerned with meaning. Even if we may not ...

A sentence must never be interpreted out of context, as any scholar knows. It is pointless, furthermore, to suggest that separate sentences are true out of a context of linguistic and nonlinguistic ...

Traditionally the relation between philosophy and religion has been one either of identity, as in the early Middle Ages, or of hostility, as in the Age of Reason. In the eighteenth and nineteenth ...

Much has been said about the remarkable ability humans have to extract meaning from language. That ability is remarkable indeed. In a split second, we perceive a spoken or written word and immediately ...

There is no question that my love of language is an inherited trait. My father was a lay linguist, in addition to being a teacher, writer, and public intellectual. In the last few years of his life, ...

For 20 years, Berkeley author Susan Schaller has been trying to understand the experience of deaf people without language. Schaller was an American Sign Language interpreter when she first encountered ...

The death of Joan Didion, the most profound essayist about language since George Orwell, comes at a time when one of her most astute observations — that words have meaning and consequences — is being ...