I am very pleased recently to have signed up as Series Editor of Continuum Studies in Theoretical Linguistics.

This new series publishes work in the forefront of present-day developments in the field. The series is open to studies from all branches of theoretical linguistics and to the full range of theoretical frameworks. Titles in the series present original research that makes a new and significant contribution and are aimed primarily at scholars in the field, but are clear and accessible, making them useful also to students, to new researchers and to scholars in related disciplines.

We are now accepting proposals for the series for research monographs or edited collections. Guidelines for preparing proposals can be found at the Continuum website.

The first title in the series, Deviational Syntactic Structures by Hans Gotzsche, is due to be published in February 2010.

I’m pleased to see a review by Nicola Lennon of my book Thinking about Language: Theories of English, together with Lesley Jeffries’s book Discovering Language: The Structure of Modern English in the current issue of Language and Literature. These are the two books that launched the Palgrave series Perspectives on the English Language.

My book Paul Grice, Philosopher and Linguist, first published in 2005, is now available in paperback.

I have just received copies from Palgrave of my new book Language and Empiricism, After the Vienna Circle, published on 17th April.

Following on my last post about this, the paperback version of my book on Paul Grice has now appeared on the Palgrave website; it’s available to pre-order and will be published in June 2008.

Here’s the link to the page.

I have just heard from Palgrave Macmillan that they are going ahead with the publication of a paperback version of my book Paul Grice, Philosopher and Linguist. This is going into production later this month, and should be out in the early part of 2008.

I have just been reading Bethan Davies’s article ‘Grice’s cooperative principle: meaning and rationality’ in the current issue of the the Journal of Pragmatics. Davies argues for the need to read Grice’s work on cooperation in the context of his philosophy as a whole. In particular, she suggests that such a reading might provide a check on what she aptly calls ‘cooperation drift’, by which Grice’s very specific and technical notion tends to merge in discussions by linguists into the more general notion of ‘cooperation’ as an admirable form of human behaviour.

I argue in my book Paul Grice, Philosopher and Linguist that Grice’s few well-known articles can fully be understood only in relation to his work as a whole, and it’s good to see this particular demonstration of that claim.

Here is a link to Davies’s article, although you’ll need a ScienceDirect login to access it in full.

Last week I was at the LAGB conference at King’s College, London, where I heard some very interesting papers and discussions. My paper was called ‘Empirical semantics: the case of “or”‘. In this, I used two separate accounts of ‘or’ from the 1960s, Grice’s famous treatment of generalised conversational implicatures in his lectures on ‘Logic and Conversation’, and an empirical study by Arne Naess, as a way of comparing the assumptions and methodologies of ordinary language philosophy with those of Naess’s empirical semantics. Linguists are becoming increasingly interested in questions of methodology and of data and, as I argued in my paper, some of the things being said in present-day linguistics are remarkably similar to the views expressed in Naess’s little-known philosophy of language.

The most recent edition of Teorema celebrates the fiftieth anniversary this year of the publication of the hugely important paper ‘Meaning’ by Paul Grice. I have contributed an article, ‘”Meaning”: Philosophical Forebears and Linguistic Descendants’, in which I trace some of the influences on Grice’s thinking and also consider how these influences, via Grice’s work, have fed into linguistics.

I’ve recently submitted an article with the above title to appear in Meaning and Analysis: themes from H. Paul Grice, a new collection of essays on Grice’s work being edited by Klaus Petrus.

Klaus is a Director of a research group at the University of Berne that is currently running a number of projects based on Grice’s work.