Agency and Intentions in Language (Brill Research Perspectives in Linguistics)

Our sense of agency and ability to distinguish between intentional and accidental actions are fundamental for social interaction. They allow us to plan and perform joint actions and assign responsibility for our own actions and those of others. Research on the nature of agency and intentions has been very fruitful over the last few decades in philosophy, linguistics, and psychology. However, trully new discoveries could be made only when we engage in interdisciplinary discussions. This volume is the result of such discussions.

Julie Goncharov is a post-doctoral researcher at the Seminar for English Philology and the University Center for Text Structures at the Georg-August-University in Göttingen. Her main areas of interest are semantics/pragmatics of natural languages and philosophy of language. Her current projects revolve around questions concerning agency, intentions, free will and their representations in language.

Hedde Zeijlstra is Professor at the Seminar for English Philology at the Georg-August-University in Göttingen. His main interest is the relation between sentence meaning and form: how does the meaning of a sentence follow from its parts, and why are there so many different ways of expressing the same meaning across languages?