This is a book about semantic theories of modality. Its main goal is to explain and evaluate important contemporary theories within linguistics and to discuss a wide range of linguistic phenomena from the perspective of these theories. The introduction describes the variety of grammatical phenomena associated with modality, explaining why modal verbs, adjectives, and adverbs re...(展开全部)

Kit Fine has, since the 1970s, been one of the leading contributors to work at the intersection of logic and metaphysics. This is his eagerly-awaited first book in the area. It draws together a series of essays, three of them previously unpublished, on possibility, necessity, and tense. These puzzling aspects of the way the world is have been the focus of considerable philosoph...(展开全部)

Modality: A History provides readers a sweeping study of the history of philosophical work on modal concepts. Everyday discourse is saturated with appeals to what might be the case or to what must be true or to what cannot happen. Possibility, necessity, and impossibility are modal terms, and philosophers have long wondered how to best understand them. This volume traces the hi...(展开全部)

Nahum Brown is a lecturer in philosophy at Miyazaki Interantional College, Japan.

This book is the first edited collection of papers on the work of one of the most seminal and profound contemporary philosophers. Over the last five decades, Kit Fine has made thought-provoking and innovative contributions to several areas of systematic philosophy, including philosophy of language, metaphysics, and the philosophy of mathematics, as well as to a number of topics...(展开全部)

Putting Properties First considers the metaphysics of natural science. It develops and defends a contemporary metaphysical theory of natural modality called 'Modal Platonism', which puts properties first in the metaphysical hierarchy. According to this theory, natural properties-such as mass and charge-are fundamental entities which ground the laws of nature and the behavioural...(展开全部)

Joan Bybee and her colleagues present a new theory of the evolution of grammar that links structure and meaning in a way that directly challenges most contemporary versions of generative grammar. This study focuses on the use and meaning of grammatical markers of tense, aspect and modality and identifies a universal set of grammatical categories. The authors demonstrate that th...(展开全部)