This book is about beliefs, language, communication and cognition. It deals with the fundamental issue of the interpretation of the speaker's utterance expressing a belief and reporting on beliefs of other people in the form of oratio obliqua. The main aim of the book is to present a new account of the problem of interpreting utterances expressing beliefs and belief reports in terms of an approach called Default Semantics.AUDIENCE: Students and researchers in linguistics (especially semantics and pragmatics), social anthropology, and philosophy of language.CONTENTS (Chapter Headings only):Semantic Ambiguities and Semantic Underspecification.Semantic DefaultsIntentionality and Propositional AttitudesThe Default De Re PrincipleLexicon and the Power of ReferringVehicles of Thought in Attitude AscriptionDiscourse Representation Theory and Propositional AttitudesBelief Reports in a Contrastive PerspectiveDinouement: Double Occam's RazorREVIEW: 'extremely interesting and original...the majority of researchers interested in this topic are explicitly aware of the fact that it crosses the boundary between (linguistics and philosophy). This book clearly crosses that boundary and seems to have a broader scope than most works in this area.' Dr Billy Clark, Middlesex University, September 1996