Numerous difficulties arising in connection with developing an ontology for linguistic entities can be thought of as manifestations of a more general problem, aptly characterized by David Lewis (1975) as a tension between two conflicting conceptions of language. On the one hand, our best theories model languages as abstract semantic systems—roughly, functions assigning meanings to expressions. On the other hand, we think of languages as contingent and changing social constructs—both grounded in, and grounding, various social relations and institutions of human beings. There are various ways in which these conceptions appear to be in conflict. For instance, if languages are set-theoretical entities—as our best logical and linguistic theories would have it—how do we account for the fact that they change? Or that they could have been different in various respects? And how do we provide principled and noncircular conditions for set-membership, when there appears to be nothing in common to all tokens of the same expression other than belonging to the same type? This paper aims to develop an ontology of linguistic entities—specifically, of languages and linguistic communities—that can resolve these apparent tensions.

中文翻译：

---

语言和语言使用

与开发语言实体本体论相关的许多困难可以被认为是一个更普遍问题的表现，大卫·刘易斯（David Lewis，1975）恰当地将其描述为两种相互冲突的语言概念之间的紧张关系。一方面，我们最好的理论将语言建模为抽象语义系统——粗略地说，是为表达式分配含义的函数。另一方面，我们认为语言是偶然的、不断变化的社会结构——既植根于人类的各种社会关系和制度。这些概念在很多方面似乎是相互冲突的。例如，如果语言是集合论实体（正如我们最好的逻辑和语言理论所认为的那样），我们如何解释它们变化的事实？或者他们在各个方面可能有所不同？当同一表达式的所有标记除了属于同一类型之外似乎没有任何共同点时，我们如何为集合成员资格提供原则性和非循环条件？本文旨在开发一种语言实体的本体论，特别是语言和语言社区的本体论，以解决这些明显的紧张关系。