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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Words and Other Linguistic Entities

Words and Other Linguistic Entities

Miller, J. T. M.

Hardcover

PhilosophyLinguistics

PREORDER - Expected ship date October 8, 2026

ISBN10: 0197911498
ISBN13: 9780197911495
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: Oct 8 2026
Pages: 248
Language: English
Linguistic entities play a major part in almost all elements of our lives. Despite this, relatively little work exists in philosophy that considers what such entities are. In the work that does focus specifically on the metaphysics of words, the dominant view is type-realism, which posits that words are abstract types, instantiated by concrete tokens. This book argues, however, that type-realism faces a range of problems and that positing abstract types cannot help us to explain a range of ordinary everyday linguistic phenomena.

In its place, this book argues in favour of a novel version of nominalism about words, holding that ordinary claims about words are in fact claims about collections of word-tokens only. Through combining nominalism with a trope-bundle metaphysics, this book proposes a 'bundle-nominalist' metaphysics of words, in which word-tokens are analysed as bundles of particular properties, which cluster in repeatable and predictable ways due to the acting of various homeostatic mechanisms. This view is then extended to other linguistic entities, such as morphemes, phonemes, sentences, and languages. The result is a unified metaphysics of linguistic entities, which is argued to be both consistent with linguistic theorising and highly explanatory. Words and Other Linguistic Entities outlines how this 'bundle-nominalist' metaphysics can provide new insights into a range of linguistic phenomena, including linguistic mistakes, linguistic change, and the nature of offensive language, and can help illuminate ongoing debates over the subject matter of linguistics and the evolution of language.

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