You might find it useful to think of question as a set of propositions. E.g. 'Is Paris the capital of France?' would correspond to the propositions: Paris is the capital of France and It is not the case that Paris is the capital of France . 'What is the capital of France?' would correspond to a large set of propositions of the form x is the capital of France . An answer to a question would be a proposition that rules out some or all of the propositions that make up the question. A request or command, in the abstract, could just be a proposition of the same kind as that expressed by a declarative: 'Shut the door' addressed to individual x would just be the proposition that x will shut the door. The idea of request or command would come it at the level of the language expressing the proposition rather than the kind of proposition expressed. For example, one could think of the meaning of 'Shut the door' in terms of fulfillment conditions rather truth conditions

It depends on what you take ‘language’ to mean. I take it to mean, roughly, a set of rules for constructing meaningful sentences. These rules specify a list of words and ways of putting them together to form sentences. It specifies the meaning of each word and how to compute the meaning of sentences from the component words and the way they are put together. All typical human languages conform to the principles of what Noam Chomsky called ‘Universal Grammar.’ Universal Grammar is a set of principles for the construction of languages, which severely constrain the range of possible human languages. All normal human children are born with a representation of Universal Grammar encoded in their mind/brains and they (or their mind/brains) use this representation to construct a representation of a language that resembles those of the people around them. Each normal adult human has at least one language represented in their mind/brains. Each such language is unique to the individual, though it will be very...

It doesn't matter to me. I would say 'my friend and me' rather than 'my friend and I' because it sounds better to me ... it is really just a question of taste. A lot of people get hung up about the 'correct' way of speaking .. with the idea that in some sense one formulation is 'right' and another is 'wrong'. Usually these people are ignorant of how language works in general, the actual syntactic and semantic properties of the words used, and their history. For example, in a conjunction like 'my friend and ...' no case is assigned to the individual words by the deep grammatical principles by which language actually does work .. which have to do with the computational systems in the mind-brain that underlie our linguistic capacities. So it is question of what form people happen to use as a default for the first-person pronoun: 'I' or 'me'. And both are widely used. I think 'me' is actually a more natural default form for English. So, for example, if someone is offering the last piece of cake and says 'who...

I would say that there is, in any general sense, a right or wrong way to use a word. There are various generalizations about how people actually use words that are captured in dictionaries. Dictionaries tell us how people do use words, not how they should use them. There is no such thing as the correct use of the term 'game', or any other term. If a person uses a word intending to mean something by it that is not in line with the dictionary, there is nothing wrong with that per se. We do it all the time. for many reasons, many of them very good. We just need to be careful not to be misunderstood. And we might use a word thnking we are using it in line withe dcitionaries and be wrong about that. Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynmann said "People often complain of the unwarranted extension of the ideas of particles, paths etc. into the atmomic realm." He responds to the complaint that the extension is unwarranted "Not so at all; there is nothing unwarranted about the extension. We...

Have a look at Ned Block's article 'Semantics, Conceptual Role' in The Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy . You can find this by Googling 'Conceptual Role Semantics', or going here http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/philo/faculty/block/papers/ConceptualRoleSemantics.html.

Philosophers of language explicitly deal both with issues concerning all possible languages and with issues concerning just human languages. They usually make clear which of the two they are discussing at the time.

I'd say: If it is a sentence of a public language, then it's English. It has English syntax. All of the expressions in it are English too, though two of them have been adopted from other languages.

There is valuable but inconsistent empirical evidence here: http://www.carlysimon.com/vain/vain.html . The evidence suggests that it is possible that the song is about one of Warren Beatty, James Taylor and Mick Jagger. If that is the case, then if you are that person, then it is 100% true that the song is about you. If you are not, then it is 100% false that the song is about you. The evidence also suggests, alternatively, that the song is about a ‘composite character’. I take that to be a fictional character, like Eleanor Rigby or the Urban Spaceman. Salient properties of this fictional character would have been based on those of real persons of Carly’s acquaintance, probably including Beatty, Taylor and Jagger, and possibly some others too. If that is the case, then, if you are an existing human being, the song isn’t strictly speaking, about you at all. But it may be that in the song, Carly is drawing attention to a certain type of individual. Then if you are an individual of that...

On my website there is a draft of a paper, labelled ''Poverty of Stimulus arguments', which provides a reasonably comprehensive review of the evidence that favours the hypothesis that humans have some innate special-purpose machinery dedicated to language acquisition.

Or, just following up on Amy's response, maybe the right answer is 'both'. Rather than thinking of the meaning of 'glory' in Humpty's mouth, we might think of what the word meant in Humpty's idiolect and what the word meant in English. Many linguists and philosophers (including Noam Chomksy) have doubts about whether there really is such a thing as English, because there are no very significant linguistic features in common among all and only those whom we call 'English speakers'. But even if that's right, we can still distinguish what 'glory' meant in Humpty's idiolect and what it meant to those he was addressing. It was easy for him to change the menaing of 'glory' in his idiolect. But that didn't suffice to change the way anyone else understood it. I think the issue of how malleable meaning is depends on how many people are involved. It's easy to change the meaning of a word in your own idiolect. It is a little harder to change the menaing of a word in a bit of language shared by two people...