Gary Kemp is a philosopher of language who focuses on the relationship between language and thought, how language is used to express information, and how crucial context shapes the meaning of language. 

Some preliminary ideas that he states have motivated the philosophy of language is that, language expresses thought, language represents the world, the analysis of language- the theory of meaning and that the study of language is partly a philosophical enterprise. 

Kemp begins with giving an example of a girl screaming “we won” about her tennis tournament. He then

gave a list of descriptions of what had happened when this occurred. For instance, she made certain sounds, moved tongue, her mouth and lips, created a disturbance in the atmosphere and more. This portrays how much language as little as two words can portray. 

Kemp continues on to decide theoretical linguistics which is the nature of human language into three main areas. Syntax, semantics and pragmatics. Syntax deals with symbols and signs concerned with grammaticality, semantics deals with what symbols mean or express, and pragmatics is concerned with the use of sentences. 

Kemp also talks about cognitive meaning. He expresses that although expressive meaning can be different, the cognitive meaning can essentially be the same. This is when two sentences convey the same objective fact or the same information, thus having the same truth condition. 

Kemp then discusses meaning and force. He states that one can say something that is equivalent to a complete sentence without doing so. For instance if someone is questioned “are you a student” and the respondent says yes, that is equivalent to stating, “I am a student”. Kemp also considers that sentences can have the same proposition even with different forces including assertoric, interrogative and imperative forces. However with certain sentences, even with a proposition the meaning isn’t complete in this sentence because you need to know the context. There are many words that refer to different things depending on time, place, identity of speaker or hearer. These are context dependent sentences 

After this, Kemp talks about Propositional attitudes. Here Kemp discusses that although people might say the same exact phrase, it might mean something different if the sentences express different propositions. Propositions are the meaning of content of sentences with context.

Finally, Kemp discusesses compositionality and structure. Kemp states that compositionality, which is the meaning of a sentence, is determined by the meaning of the words, and semantic significance of grammatical structure of the sentence. He emphasizes that in order to understand a sentence, you would need to know which proposition it expresses, the meaning of individual words and the bases of how it’s put together. Essentially the structure is very important in understanding the sentence. Knowing what a  sentence means does not result in sufficient understanding of the sentence.

Overall Kemp focuses on the relationship between language and thought. Kemp thought processes and close examinations of language is fascinating. One thing I found very interesting about this paper was the list he provided emphasizing how powerful language can be and listed very descriptive details about how impactful it is when talking about the little girl who won her tennis competition. He then goes on to say that that’s what philosophers look into- theoretical linguistics, however his paper focused more on the actual dialogue rather than the power of the dialogue which I was hoping he would have gone deeper into. This is because the list I found very interesting because of how detailed it was and yet a little redundant at times it made me realize how something as little as two words can have a great impact on the environment and surroundings leading me to realize the true power of language. Kemp instead looks into the structure of dialogue, the context, the propositions and such and such which is also fascinating however unexpected from the way he began his paper. Overall, I did enjoy his paper and respect Kemp as he is very observant and knowledgeable when it comes to language.