Propositional Attitudes: Category, Type And Function

A propositional attitude (PA) reflects the internal relations of language, mind and the world in which we live. It is the main research dimension of the Philosophy of Language. According to the theoretical foundation of the Philosophy of Language of PA, this thesis defines and classifies PA in the dimension of the Philosophy of Language. Based on the actual use of PA predicate in the British National Corpus (BNC) we find that the highest frequency of use in everyday life are cognitive PA utterances (think, know and believe). By contrasting and analyzing the semantic-syntactic and pragmatic function of these three cognitive PAs this thesis explores PA's intentionality and rules in the process of recognizing the world and human how to obtain, use and transfer knowledge by using language; this reveals that the subjective intention of the speaker plays an important role in understanding the meaning of language and shows language as"being"in the human world, that is the principle"Human is the core of language, language is the way of human existence".