Tista Bagchi

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The Department of English Invites you to a talk “Of Spooks and Other Referents: Semantic Interpretation and the Faculty of Language” By Tista Bagchi Time : Friday, November 13, 2.45 pm Venue: Room 56, The Faculty of Arts, Delhi University Abstract: Under the overall view of language as a biologically grounded faculty possessed by us as human beings, there is some debate as to whether the interpretation of meaning in linguistic expressions should fall within the ambit of any theory of language seeking to be of universal import. Theoretical linguists are themselves divided in their positions on this debate, with a key criticism regarding semantics hinging on the primacy accorded to the language-world relation that has classically come to be understood as “reference”, beginning especially with Frege’s use of the term Bedeutung. In this talk, I shall try to argue that certain aspects of semantic interpretation do demand to be recognized as being relevant to any such theory of language. However, “reference” need not be a matter of direct concern for such theorizing about language at all – as I shall try to establish on the basis of the Frege-initiated notion of intensionality, thereafter following up on Akeel Bilgrami’s naturalistic view of meaning as exclusive of “reference”. Thus, issues of fictitious or indeterminate reference such as those arising in the case of spooks, unicorns, and fictional characters do not ultimately pose any serious threat to the biological grounding of aspects of meaning-construal in the faculty of language and in language processing. I conclude by pointing out that this is also suggested by some recent work on the neurocognitive moorings of the interpretation of the participant roles Agent and Patient in linguistic meaning-construal. Tista Bagchi is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Delhi. She received her Ph.D. with distinction from the University of Chicago and was briefly with the Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata, before joining the Department of Linguistics at the University of Delhi over two decades ago. During 2001-2002 she was the Robert F. & Margaret S. Goheen Fellow at the National Humanities Centre, Research Triangle Park, North Carolina; she has also been a Member of the Indian Council for Philosophical Research (2006-2008), and a CSIR Mobility Scientist at NISTADS (2010-2012). Her most recent book is the paperback edition (2015) of The Sentence in Language and Cognition (Lexington Books); she has translated and/or co-edited four other volumes, and has published numerous articles in academic anthologies and journals. She has additionally spoken and written on topics in applied ethics and the philosophy of science, and also on dance signage and issues in musicology. .

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