Deriving the correct meaning of such colloquial expressions as "I am parked out back" requires a unique interaction of knowledge about the world with a person's natural language tools. In this volume, Markus Egg examines how natural language rules and knowledge of the world work together to produce correct understandings of expressions that cannot be fully understood through literal reading. An in-depth and exciting work on semantics and natural language, this volume will be essential reading for scholars in computational linguistics.

Philosophers and theorists have long been puzzled by humans' ability to talk about things that do not exist, or to talk about things that they think exist but, in fact, do not. Empty Names, Fiction, and the Puzzles of Non-Existence is a collection of 13 new works concerning the semantic and metaphysical issues arising from empty names, non-existence, and the nature of fiction. The contributors include some of the most important researchers working in these fields. Some of the papers develop and defend new positions on these matters, while others offer important new perspectives and criticisms of the existing approaches. The volume contains a comprehensive introductory essay by the editors, which provides a survey of the philosophical issues concerning empty names, the various responses to these issues, and the literature on the subject to date.