This paper introduces Chinese synthetic verbs and analyses their contributions to debates in manner/result complementarity studies and cognitive typology studies. Chinese synthetic verbs simultaneously express manner information and path/result information, but encode them into separate root slots under Beavers and Koontz-Garboden’s (2012. Manner and result in the roots of verbal meaning. Linguistic Inquiry 43(3). 331–369) scopal modifier test, so they differ from English “manner+result verbs” and further challenge the manner/result complementarity hypothesis. Synthetic verbs followed by redundant path/result verbs (...) constitute double-framing structures that twice encode the framing information, and the non-motion case, i.e., the “synthetic verb+result verb” structure, supplements Croft et al.’s (2010. Revising Talmy’s typological classification of complex event constructions. In Hans C. Boas (ed.), Contrastive studies in construction grammar, vol. 10, 201–235. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company) classification that only includes the motion case, so that Chinese synthetic verbs complement the discussion on double-framing structures. This paper thereby further falsifies the manner/result complementarity hypothesis and provides an overall illustration of the double-framing structure in cognitive typology. This paper also illustrates the diachronic changes of manner, which might be universal and await further investigation. (shrink)

Previous research on the INTRODUCTORY IT PATTERN unveiled various lexical and grammatical aspects of its use as a grammatical stance device, including the range of the most frequently used adjectival and verbal stance lexemes, associated stance meanings, the most frequent sub-patterns, and the distinct uses in various contextual settings of the pattern. However, the stance meanings of the pattern, which are deeply rooted in the associated lexical resources, are still understudied. This study explores the meanings of the INTRODUCTORY (...) IT PATTERN by referring to the stance meanings of the pattern associated with the adjectival and verbal lexemes that are statistically attracted to the pattern. The research samples were extracted from the British component of the International Corpus of English. The samples were manually annotated for different stance types and a collexeme analysis was performed to identify the full range of stance lexemes statistically associated with the INTRODUCTORY IT PATTERN. The results show that both adjectival and verbal collexemes are statistically and functionally significant for the delivery of discrete stance types/subtypes. Adjectival collexemes are frequently deployed for all four stance types: Epistemic stance, Evaluation stance, Dynamic stance, and Deontic stance, while verbal collexemes are valuable lexical resources for the Epistemic stance, as their use entails modalized evidentiality, pointing to epistemic judgment of the writer-speaker toward events/propositions. Close examination of the use of adjectival and verbal collexemes identified three fundamental meanings of the INTRODUCTORY IT PATTERN. First, the pattern is inherently evaluative as it tends to attract more lexemes with evaluative meanings and associates evaluative meanings with superficially non-evaluative lexemes. Second, it features a scalarized expression of diversified stance types/subtypes, thus, especially reflective of the scalarized semantic feature of stance expression. Third, it connotates an overwhelmingly positive likelihood judgment. The article concludes by discussing the limitations of this study. (shrink)

As contact languages, pidgins and creoles arise in mixed linguistic environments. Drawing much of their vocabularies from one, frequently European, language and – to a lesser extent – from a number of indigenous languages, they have lexicons that are reduced in comparison with those of their lexifiers. To compensate for the poor lexification, pidgin and creoles create novel polysemy-based extensions of lexical items or develop periphrastic constructions equivalent of the missing lexical roots. Assuming a cognitive linguistic perspective, which (...) emphasizes the role of conceptualization in the construction of meaning and the figurative character of concepts, the paper deals with the lexicons of Nigerian Pidgin English and Tok Pisin, two contact languages representative for the Atlantic and the Pacific – the two major areas of linguistic contact. The analysis focuses on the first of the above-mentioned compensation strategies. It is argued that (i) the expressions borrowed from English and various indigenous languages acquire senses that are absent in English; (ii) the new senses are frequently based on metonymy, which serves as a major polysemy-based strategy of lexicon extension; (iii) most of the novel lexical extensions fall within the metonymic patterns that are well-established in English. (shrink)

Overlaps in form and meaning between morphologically related words have led to ambiguities in interpreting priming effects in studies of lexical organization. In Semitic languages like Arabic, however, linguistic analysis proposes that one of the three component morphemes of a surface word is the CV-Skeleton, an abstract prosodic unit coding the phonological shape of the surface word and its primary syntactic function, which has no surface phonetic content (McCarthy, J. J. (1981). A prosodic theory of non-concatenative morphology, (...) Linguistic Inquiry, 12 373-418). The other two morphemes are proposed to be the vocalic melody, which conveys additional syntactic information, and the root, which defines meaning. In three experiments using masked, cross-modal, and auditory-auditory priming we examined the role of the vocalic melody and the CV-Skeleton as potential morphemic units in the processing and representation of Arabic words. Prime/target pairs sharing the vocalic melody but not the CV-Skeleton consistently failed to prime. In contrast, word pairs sharing only the CV-Skeleton primed reliably throughout, with the amount of priming being as large as that observed between word pattern pairs sharing both vocalic melody and CV-Skeleton. Priming between morphologically related words can be observed when there is no overlap either in meaning or in surface phonetic form. (shrink)

The meaning of any given lexical item emerges from an analysis of its contextual usage, but with biblical languages, often a traditional gloss will be accepted as if it were the clear meaning of a lexical item. Lexicons and dictionaries rarely go all the way back to a fresh analysis of the actual usage of a lemma, so the traditional meaning is rarely reconsidered. Those learning biblical languages accept the lexicon’s judgement without stopping (...) to reflect on how the lexicon reached its conclusion. The acceptance of a traditional gloss as the meaning then gets assumed as more and more texts are read, reinforcing the assumption that the meaning is the gloss learned early on as the equivalent for that lexical item. This study focuses on the biblical Hebrew root בשׁל and the Greek verb ἕψω, both traditionally understood to denote the activity of preparing food by boiling in liquid. These lexemes appear in the Old Testament in some exegetically challenging texts, so clarifying the range of meaning may help to illuminate the interpretation of difficult passages. The full context of the usage of these lexical items in the Hebrew Bible and Septuagint is examined using cognitive semantics with the goal of identifying the semantic and pragmatic clues that point to the conceptual meaning evoked by these lexical items in biblical Hebrew and Greek.Contribution: The re-analysis of the data serves to re-evaluate traditional assumptions about the meanings of these words. Clarifying the meaning may illuminate some exegetical difficulties. (shrink)

Aḥmed Cevdet Pasha (d. 1312/1895) is one of the influential and prominent Ottoman scholars in history and law. Besides history and law, he also produced works on literature, sīra (the life of the Prophet) and tafsīr (the Qur’anic exegesis). In the last years of his life, Cevdet Pasha aimed to translate the Qurʾān including short comments on the verses, but this work was remained limited to the sūrah al-Baqara. Correspondingly to this translation named Terjeme-i Sharīfa, he prepared a glossary to (...) the Qurʾān called Lāḥiqa-i Sharīfa for expressions and terms that require detailed explanation. Hereby, this work could only include the sūrah al-Baqara. After Cevdet Pasha’s death, his books passed to his daughter Ms Fāṭima ʿAliyye (d. 1936). The director of the Library of Maʿārif, Nācī Qāsim (d. 1963) gave a deed stipulating that he would take the first part of the Lāḥiqa-i Sharīfa and Terjeme-i Sharīfa from her and return them as they are. Later on, he published only the Muqaddima (introduction) and Lāḥiqa-i Sharīfa in the work named Tercemeli Ḳurʾân-ı Kerîm (İstanbul: 1927). Placing the Muqaddima at the beginning of the book and Lāḥiqa-i Sharīfa at the end misled some people by making them to think that the translation belongs entirely to Cevdet Pasha. Sulayman Tevfīq reprinted these two works together within his translation named el-Beyān fī ʾāyāti’l-Qurʾān in 1928. Terjeme-i Sharīfa has not been published anywhere else. Emine Armağan recently found and published a notepad in which Cevdet Pasha wrote Terjeme-i Sharīfa, mentioned Muqaddima and Lāḥiqa-i Sharīfa. In her book Emine Armağan printed the pages belonging to Cevdet Pasha as thumbnails, but she did not publish them in Latin. In this article, Muḳaddime and Lâḥika-i Şerîfe are Latinized and compared to the Terceme-i Şerîfe. The relevant parts of the translation are given in the footnotes. This study is an attempt to determine to what extent the translation in the manuscript form corresponds to the glossary and the soundness of relating the text to the author. In addition, many errors in the Ottoman edition of the glossary were also corrected. In the Muqaddima, Cevdet Pasha draws attention to the necessity of God’s existence, the illiteracy and the trustworthiness of his Messenger, and that the revelation is the primary source of knowledge for people. He summarizes the process of the Qurʾān’s revelation, notification and compilation. He briefly touches on the issues related to ʿUlūm al-Qurʾān. Cevdet Pasha, who passed from here to the miracle of the Qurʾān, talks about the qadim (pre-existing) nature of the divine word and teḥaddī. Cevdet Pasha emphasizes that understanding the Qurʾān is possible only by knowing the Arabic language very well and whithout this knowldege the Qurʾān cannot adequately be translated into another language. On the other hand, he also believes that the first meanings can be externally translated in order to explain the first meanings of the verses to those who do not know Arabic. Cevdet Pasha’s preface is considerably concise in structure. He shortly pointed to the crucial issues in one sentence and passed to the other subjects. While writing Terjeme-i Sharīfa, Cevdet Pasha left the extensive explanations of the polysemous words and terms that cannot be translated literally to the tafsīr and Lāḥiqa. Cevdet Pasha’s Lāḥiqa-i Sharīfa is entirely original and not merely a translation of any Qurʾānic dictionary. He compiled the meanings of a word existing in different verses, and he was very meticulous in choosing the meanings the words. He summarized very detailed informations in the sources in a simple, concise and fluent style. The arrangement of the words was based on the abbreviated versions used in the Qurʾān. In addition to the lexical meaning of the word, he sometimes mentioned the words’ roots, form, singular and plural forms, ism al-fāʿil, ism al-mefʿūl, ism al-mekān, synonym/antonym, lexical aspects, the meaning and terminology it expresses in different recitations of the Qur’an (al-qırāat). He in particular highlighted if the word is one of the al-asmāʾ al-ḥusnā. He explained the changes in the meaning of a word when it is used for Allah or for humans. He shortly touched on the legal rulings. Cevdet Pasha clearly expressed in his work the most vital issues that the community should know without tiring the general reader of scientific disputes, philosophical discussions and literary analysises. Cevdet Pasha did not refer to any sources in his work and did not mention the transmission chain of the narrations. As a result of our research, we determined that he benefited from the commentaries of al-Zamakhshari (d. 538/1144), al-Rāzī (d. 606/1210), al-Qurṭūbī (d. 671/1273) and Beyḍāvī (d. 685/1286). We have seen that there are some similarities between the explanations of the words in the Lāḥiqa-i Sharīfa and the famous Qurʾānic dictionaries such as al-Mufredāt, Umdet al-ḥuffāẓ and Beṣāir. (shrink)

In this article, we analyze a seven-page speech delivered by Sukarno, first president of Indonesia, at the opening of the First Asia-Africa Conference where he advocated Afro-Asian unity/ solidarity as the panacea for colonialism, imperialism, and neocolonialism. Our aim, by focusing on a single text, is to demonstrate the role of an intensive analysis of ‘outstanding’ singular texts within the broad field of discourse analysis. The analysis is rooted within a positive discourse analysis (PDA) framework, with (...) special focus on lexical choices and variation, modality, intertextuality/interdiscursivity, metaphorical representations, ideological use of pronouns, indexical meaning, and strategies of argumentation. Through these rhetorical techniques, we illustrate how an independence leader constructs an emancipatory discourse aimed at reconciling the ideas and beliefs of the leaders of two continents that have a common history of colonialism. The study sheds light on the role of key speeches and political leaders in promoting an emancipatory discourse, and exemplifies how (presidential) rhetoric can be construed as offering a message of hope, strength, and inspiration while playing the role of a unifier, thereby highlighting the major underlying assumption of PDA: a commitment to a discourse of social change. (shrink)

Although for many years a sharp distinction has been made in language research between rules and words—with primary interest on rules—this distinction is now blurred in many theories. If anything, the focus of attention has shifted in recent years in favor of words. Results from many different areas of language research suggest that the lexicon is representationally rich, that it is the source of much productive behavior, and that lexically specific information plays a critical and early role in the interpretation (...) of grammatical structure. But how much information can or should be placed in the lexicon? This is the question I address here. I review a set of studies whose results indicate that event knowledge plays a significant role in early stages of sentence processing and structural analysis. This poses a conundrum for traditional views of the lexicon. Either the lexicon must be expanded to include factors that do not plausibly seem to belong there; or else virtually all information about word meaning is removed, leaving the lexicon impoverished. I suggest a third alternative, which provides a way to account for lexical knowledge without a mental lexicon. (shrink)

chapter The whole and its parts Towards a holistic understanding of language Human beings are social entities. We are a family member, a brother or a sister ...

In this article I analyse object labelling image macro internet memes as multimodal metaphors, taking the Distracted Boyfriend meme as a case study. Object labelling memes are multimodal texts in which users add labels to a stock photograph to convey messages that are often humorous or satirical in nature. Using the relevance-theoretic account of metaphor, I argue that object labelling memes are multimodal metaphors which are interpreted using the same processes as verbal metaphors. The labelling of the image guides the (...) viewer in the construction of ad hoc concepts, and it is these ad hoc concepts that contribute to the overall meaning that is communicated. The analysis in this article is rooted in the relevance-theoretic claim that pragmatic interpretive processes are triggered by all and any ostensive acts of communication. I also draw heavily on Deirdre Wilson’s work on lexical pragmatics to show how this plays out in the case of a multimodal digital text. Memes, like verbal metaphors, do not require a special theory or framework. They can be understood as ostensive stimuli which trigger the search for an optimally relevant interpretation. (shrink)

This study aims to investigate how the English Language used by the Indian Railways is different from other registers of English, and most importantly what is the effect of this register of English upon the common people. In other words, the present study aims at viewing the variety of language used by the Indian Railway as an independent register. For the purpose of investigation, a stylistic analysis is carried out. The data for the current study are collected from the (...) platform, directives at railway premises and inside the railway-coaches. Platform announcements have been collected from various railway stations across the country. Some amount of data has been collected from the directives inside the railway coaches. (shrink)

Many models of word recognition assume that processing proceeds sequentially from analysis of form to analysis of meaning. In the context of morphological processing, this implies that morphemes are processed as units of form prior to any influence of their meanings. Some interpret the apparent absence of differences in recognition latencies to targets (SNEAK) in form and semantically similar (sneaky-SNEAK) and in form similar and semantically dissimilar (sneaker-SNEAK) prime contexts at an SOA of 48 ms as consistent (...) with this claim. To determine the time course over which degree of semantic similarity between morphologically structured primes and their targets influences recognition in the forward masked priming variant of the lexical decision paradigm, we compared facilitation for the same targets after semantically similar and dissimilar primes across a range of SOAs. The effect of shared semantics on recognition latency increased linearly with SOA when long SOAs were intermixed (Exp. 1) and latencies were significantly faster after semantically similar than dissimilar primes at homogeneous SOAs of 48 ms (Exp. 2) and 34 ms (Exp. 3). Results limit the scope of form-then-semantics models of recognition and demonstrate that semantics influences even the very early stages of recognition. Finally, once general behavior across trials has been accounted for, we fail to provide evidence for individual differences in morphological processing that can be linked to measures of reading proficiency. (shrink)

Examines an important and controversial topic in lexical semantics: polysemy, the capacity of words to manifest a range of different meanings when employed in different contexts."--Publishers website.

Contemporary semantic theories can be classified along two dimensions: (i) the way and time-course in which contextual factors influence sentence truth-conditions; and (ii) whether and to what extent comprehension involves sensory, motor and emotional processes. In order to explore this theoretical space, our ERP study investigates the time-course of the interaction between the lexically specified telic component of a noun (the function of the object to which the noun refers to, e.g., a funnel is generally used to pour liquids into (...) containers) and an ad-hoc affordance contextually induced by the situation described in the discourse. We found that, if preceded by a neutral discourse context, a verb incongruent with the noun’s telic component as in “She uses the funnel to hang her coat” elicited an enhanced N400 compared to a congruent verb as in “She uses the funnel to pour water into a container”. However, if the situation introduced in the preceding discourse induced a new function for the object as an ad-hoc affordance (e.g., the funnel is glued to the wall and the agent wants to hang the coat), we observed a crossing-over regarding the direction of the N400 effect: comparing the ad-hoc affordance-inducing context with the neutral context, the N400 for the incongruent verb was significantly reduced, whereas the N400 for the congruent verb was significantly enhanced. We explain these results as a consequence of the incorporation of the contextually triggered ad-hoc affordance into the meaning of the noun. Combining these results with an analysis of semantic similarity values between test sentences and contexts, we argue that one possibility is that the incorporation of an ad-hoc affordance may be explained on the basis of the mental simulation of concurrent motor information. (shrink)

Drobňák and Kaluziński argue that normative inferentialism is an attractive theory of meaning, which can play an important part in the semantic minimalism—contextualism debate. In particular it can explain such phenomena as context-sensitivity, ambiguity and conversational implicatures. In what follows I’ll critically asses their approach, point out its weaknesses and suggest possible improvements and modifications. In Sect. 2 I take issue with some of the analyses of contextualists’ scenarios proposed by Kaluziński and offer a more uniform treatment. I also (...) argue—pace Kaluziński and following Drobňák—that inferentialism is best seen as a variant of contextualism. In Sect. 3 I describe Drobňák’s approach to implicatures, homonymy and polysemy, whereas in Sect. 4 I analyze this approach in detail and indicate its shortcomings. I also suggest an alternative analysis of implicatures and an important modification of the way in which inferential significances are constructed. As far as I can see, my suggestions are in line with inferentialism’s spirit and could easily be incorporated within its framework. (shrink)

The article is devoted to the study of the etymology and semantic connotations of Sanskrit terms: sat, bhāva, sambhava, bhavitṛ, bhavya, bhavat, bhūti, bhūta, sarvabhūta, bhavaka, sattva, sattā, saṃvṛtti, jāstāmātā sampatti, vartamāna, āvitta, āvinna as lexical representatives of the conceptosphere of being in the Sanskrit-English dictionary of Monier-Williams. The method of conceptual analysis is implemented based on the assumption of the determining influence of language culture on the content and nature of philosophical creativity. This study is only the (...) first stage of the project to reveal the way of interpreting "being" in the history of Indian philosophy. The key semantic connotations of this concept in the Monier-Williams English-Sanskrit dictionary are revealed. The semantic connection of the concept of "being" with the concepts: "life" and "time" is defined. In this context, "to live" is to be "someone" in order to embrace "one's place" and play "one's role" that can provide "possession" for "subsistence", and the relationship between "being" and "time" is the concreteness of the existing event that is happening or has happened and belonging to the future that is about to happen. Although we do not trace a transparent connection between the concepts of "being" and "space" in Sanskrit, there are reasons to believe that the first of all, the etymology of the terms of our chosen conceptosphere clearly presents the interpretation of being as a long and a spatially defined location. Noticeable is the fact that the connection between the interpretation of the concept of "being" in Sanskrit and the ethical concept of "good" and aesthetic "beauty" we trace only in terms derived from as and bhū, and at the same time only the terms sat and bhava can be translated as "truth", and the meaning of "essence" we find only in the translation of the terms sat and sattva. This explains the fact why the term sat is considered as close as possible to the "Western" interpretation of the concept of "being". It has been suggested that the polysemy of lexical representatives of the concept of being in Sanskrit and the complexity and variability of the grammar compliance of this language can be interpreted as an obstacle to the extreme problematization of this concept. (shrink)

This book offers a new approach to the analysis of the multiple meanings of English modals, conjunctions, conditionals, and perception verbs. Although such ambiguities cannot easily be accounted for by feature-analyses of word meaning, Eve Sweetser's argument shows that they can be analyzed both readily and systematically. Meaning relationships in general cannot be understood independently of human cognitive structure, including the metaphorical and cultural aspects of that structure. Sweetser shows that both lexical polysemy and pragmatic ambiguity (...) are shaped by our metaphorical folk understanding of epistemic processes and of speech interaction. Similar regularities can be shown to structure the contrast among root, epistemic and speech act uses of modal verbs, multiple uses of conjunctions and conditionals, and certain processes of historical change observed in Indo-European languages. Since polysemy is typically the intermediate step in semantic change, the same regularities observable in polysemy can be extended to an analysis of semantic change. (shrink)

Lexical ambiguity is pervasive in language, and the nature of the representations of an ambiguous word's multiple meanings is yet to be fully understood. With a special focus on Chinese characters, the present study first established that native speaker's perception about a character's number of meanings was heavily influenced by the availability of its distinct word formations, while whether these meanings would be perceived to be closely related was driven by further conceptual analysis. These notions were operationalized as (...) two computed metrics, which assessed the degree of dispersion across individual word formations and the degree of propinquity across clusters of word formations, respectively, in a distributional semantic space. The observed correlations between the computed and the perceived metrics indicated that the utility of word formations to tap into meaning representations of Chinese characters was indeed cognitively plausible. The results have demonstrated the extent to which distributional semantics could inform about meaning representations of Chinese characters, which has theoretical implications for the representation of ambiguous words more generally. (shrink)

In this essay I examine three different indexical processes that inform meaning during a mbira performance in Zimbabwe in order to clarify the nature of meaning in musical practice. I continue others’ efforts to provincialize language and correct the damage done by “symbolocentrism’s” continued reliance on post-Saussurian models of signification and structure by addressing processes of purpose, effect, and agency in meaning. Emphases on language and/or structure mislead explanations of musical meaning and compromise the understanding of (...) meaning itself. By foregrounding the unique properties of indexicality in musical practice, and highlighting three distinct indexical processes that drive music’s meaning (deictic, metonym, and replica), I help free meaning from language and offer an ethnomusicological counterpoint to multidisciplinary efforts that define meaning within linguistic and physiological paradigms. Indexical meaning is direct but unpredictable, rooted in experience, embodied habits, and the here and now. (shrink)

What is the nature of lexical meanings such that they can both compose with others and also appear boundless? We investigate this question by examining the compositional properties of for-time adverbial as in “Ana jumped for an hour.” At issue is the source of the associated iterative reading which lacks overt morphophonological support, yet, the iteration is not disconnected from the lexical meanings in the sentence. This suggests an analysis whereby the iterative reading is the result of (...) the interaction between lexical meanings under a specific compositional configuration. We test the predictions of two competing accounts: Mismatch-and-Repair and Partition-Measure. They differ in their assumptions about lexical meanings: assumptions that have implications for the possible compositional mechanisms that each can invoke. Mismatch-and-Repair assumes that lexical meaning representations are discrete, separate from the conceptual system from which they originally emerged and brought into sentence meaning through syntactic composition. Partition-Measure assumes that lexical meanings are contextually salient conceptual structures substantially indistinguishable from the conceptual system that they inhabit. During comprehension, lexical meanings construe a conceptual representation, in parallel, morphosyntactic and morphophonological composition as determined by the lexical items involved in the sentence. Whereas both hypotheses capture the observed cost in the punctual predicate plus for-time adverbial composition (e.g., jump (vs. swim) for an hour), their predictions differ regarding iteration with durative predicates; for example, swim for a year (vs. for an hour). Mismatch-and-Repair predicts contrasting processing profiles and nonoverlapping activation patterns along punctuality differences. Partition-Measure predicts overlapping processing and cortical distribution profiles, along the presence of iterativity. Results from a self-paced reading and an functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) studies bear out the predictions of the Partition-Measure account, supporting a view of linguistic meaning composition in line with an architecture of language whereby combinatoriality and generativity are distributed, carried out in parallel across linguistic and nonlinguistic subsystems. (shrink)

In Semitic languages, the consonantal root is central to morphology, linking form and meaning. While psycholinguistic studies highlight its importance in language processing, the role of meaning in early lexical access and its representation remain unclear. This study investigates when meaning becomes accessible during the processing of Maltese verb forms, using a computational model based on the Discriminative Lexicon framework. Our model effectively comprehends and produces Maltese verbs, while also predicting response times in a masked (...) auditory priming experiment. Results show that meaning is accessible early in lexical access and becomes more prominent after the target word is fully processed. This suggests that semantic information plays a critical role from the initial stages of lexical access, refining our understanding of real-time language comprehension. Our findings contribute to theories of lexical access and offer valuable insights for designing priming studies in psycholinguistics. Additionally, this study demonstrates the potential of computational models in investigating the relationship between form and meaning in language processing. (shrink)

We develop a formal semantic analysis of the alarm calls used by Campbell’s monkeys in the Tai forest and on Tiwai island —two sites that differ in the main predators that the monkeys are exposed to. Building on data discussed in Ouattara et al. :e7808, 2009a; PNAS 106: 22026–22031, 2009b and Arnold et al., we argue that on both sites alarm calls include the roots krak and hok, which can optionally be affixed with -oo, a kind of attenuating suffix; (...) in addition, sentences can start with boom boom, which indicates that the context is not one of predation. In line with Arnold et al., we show that the meaning of the roots is not quite the same in Tai and on Tiwai: krak often functions as a leopard alarm call in Tai, but as a general alarm call on Tiwai. We develop models based on a compositional semantics in which concatenation is interpreted as conjunction, roots have lexical meanings, -oo is an attenuating suffix, and an all-purpose alarm parameter is raised with each individual call. The first model accounts for the difference between Tai and Tiwai by way of different lexical entries for krak. The second model gives the same underspecified entry to krak in both locations, but it makes use of a competition mechanism akin to scalar implicatures. In Tai, strengthening yields a meaning equivalent to non-aerial dangerous predator and turns out to single out leopards. On Tiwai, strengthening yields a nearly contradictory meaning due to the absence of ground predators, and only the unstrengthened meaning is used. (shrink)

Having an agreed-upon definition of character education would be useful for both researchers and practitioners in the field. However, even experts in character education disagree on how they would define it. We attempted to achieve greater conceptual clarity on this issue through a prototype analysis in which the features perceived as most central to character education were identified. In Study 1 (N = 77), we asked character education experts to enumerate features of character education. Based on these lists, we (...) identified 30 features. In Study 2 (N = 101), experts assessed which features were central to character education through a categorization task. In Study 3 (N = 166), we assessed the extent of centrality using scalar items. We conclude by offering practical advice for the development of future character education studies and programs rooted in what is deemed central to such programs. (shrink)

The thesis concerns itself with the selection constraints governing the basic distributional patterns of five complement constructions in English--the bare clause, the that-clause, the interrogative, the concealed question construction and the exclamative complement--across a wide array of knowledge, belief and communication predicates. The relevant distributional phenomena--which predicates are capable of embedding which complement types--have traditionally been captured by stipulative grammatical markings such as subcategorization frames, semantic selection frames and case-theoretic lexical markings. These theoretical tools, even to the extent that (...) they successfully reduplicate the observed phenomena, are of no explanatory value, as they do not derive the different behavioral patterns from some independently established properties of the embedding predicates or their complements. In the thesis, I present an epistemically-based theory, which attempts to derive the relevant distributional phenomena, including those traditionally assumed to reflect hard-core syntactic idiosyncrasies, from a linguistic-epistemic theory of knowledge, belief and communication. ;The theory is based on a lexical-semantic analysis of the embedding predicates, according to which they denote ternary relations between agents, objects of attitude and objects of representation. Thus, to give an example, the predicate think denotes a ternary relation between a thinker, a thought mentally represented by the thinker, and a proposition expressed by the thought and believed by the thinker to be true. This analysis, developed on linguistic grounds for linguistic purposes, echoes some of the recent insights in the philosophy of mind, especially Crimmins . Coupled with a theory of the meanings of the different complement types--partially based on the formal semantic insights of Karttunen , Groenedijk and Stokhof and Ginzburg --this account derives the distributional patterns from simple considerations of semantic compatibility: those predicates which are capable of embedding a certain complement type are exactly those whose lexical semantics is compatible with the semantics of the complement. ;Some of the distributional patterns discussed in the thesis, especially the one involving concealed questions, have traditionally been taken to provide empirical support for the hypothesis of the autonomy of syntactic representations . The analysis presented in this thesis reveals the dramatic extent to which the semantics and the syntax of lexical selection are transparent to each other, and thus implies, at least with respect to the core domain of lexical selection, that the autonomy hypothesis is empirically unjustified. (shrink)

Lexical Semantics for Terminology: An introduction explores the interconnections between lexical semantics and terminology. More specifically, it shows how principles borrowed from lexico-semantic frameworks and methodologies derived from them can help understand terms and describe them in resources. It also explains how lexical analysis complements perspectives entirely focused on knowledge. Issues such as term identification, meaning, polysemy, relations between terms, and equivalence are discussed thoroughly and illustrated with various examples taken from different fields of knowledge. (...) This book is intended for readers who are interested in words and need to handle specialized terms as part of their activities, i.e. terminologists, translators, lexicographers, corpus linguists. A background in terminology or lexical semantics is not required since all notions are defined and explained. This book should complement other textbooks on terminology that do not focus on lexical semantics per se. (shrink)

Chapter 1 First Person Access to Mental States. Mind Science and Subjective Qualities -/- Abstract. The philosophy of mind as we know it today starts with Ryle. What defines and at the same time differentiates it from the previous tradition of study on mind is the persuasion that any rigorous approach to mental phenomena must conform to the criteria of scientificity applied by the natural sciences, i.e. its investigations and results must be intersubjectively and publicly controllable. In Ryle’s view, philosophy (...) of mind needs to adopt an antimentalist stance to achieve this aim. Antimentalism not only definitively rejects the idea that mind is a substance separated from the body, it also denies that mental phenomena radically differ from physical phenomena by virtue of several unique features. Most problematically, mental phenomena have a conscious character (mental states are related to specific qualitative feelings) and are accessible only to the first-person (only the subject knows directly what s/he is experiencing inside his/her mind). Ryle takes a strong stance on antimentalism going so far as to maintain that an approach to mind which aims to meet the criteria of scientificity set by the natural sciences must avoid any reference to internal, unobservable mental states. In his view (which is considered a specifically philosophical version of psychological behaviorism and also addresses questions put forward in psychological research), mental states can be redescribed in terms of behavioral dispositions. In this chapter, we address the historical roots of the antimentalist view and analyze its relation to the later tradition of research on mind. We show that, compared to the antimentalist stance, functionalism and cognitivism take a step back when they maintain that direct reference to mental states is necessary since mental states cause and therefore explain human behavior. This step backwards is often interpreted as a return to mentalism. However, this is only partially true. Indeed, we suggest that these later traditions retain one important element of Ryle’s antimentalism, i.e. the idea that mental states must be uniquely identified using external and publicly observable criteria, while excluding any reference to introspection and those qualitative dimensions of a mental state, which are accessible only to the first-person. According to the perspective we put forward, this epistemological stance has continued to influence contemporary research on mind and current philosophical and psychological theories which both tend to exclude the subjective qualities of human experience from their accounts of how the mind works. The issue we raise here is whether this is legitimate or whether subjective qualities do play a role with respect to the way our mind works. The conclusion of this chapter anticipates the argument the book makes in in favor of this latter position, starting from a particular angle, i.e. the problem of how we categorize concepts related to our internal states. -/- Chapter 2 The Misleading Aspects of the Mind/Computer Analogy. The Grounding Problem and the Thorny Issue of Propriosensitive Information -/- Abstract. After the crisis of behaviorism, cognitivism and functionalism became the predominant models in the field of psychology and of philosophy, respectively. Their success is mainly due to the new key they use for interpreting mental processes: the mind/computer analogy. On the basis of this analogy, mental operations are seen as cognitive processes based on computations, i.e. on manipulations of abstract symbols which are in turn understood as informational unities (representations). This chapter identifies two main problems with this model. The first is how these symbols can relate to and communicate with perception and thus allow us to identify and classify what we perceive through the senses. Here we limit ourselves to presenting this issue in relation to the classical symbol grounding problem originally put forward by Harnad on the basis of Searle’s Chinese room argument. An attempt to address the problem raised here will be made in chap. 3. The second point we discuss in relation to the mind/computer analogy concerns the idea of information it fosters. Indeed, following this analogy, information is something available in the external world which can be captured by the senses and transmitted to the central system without being influenced or modified by the procedures of transmission. This perspective does not take into account that – unlike computers – in living beings information is acquired by means of the body. As Ulric Neisser has already pointed out, the body is itself an informational source that provides us with additional sensory experience that influences (modifies or complements) the information extracted from the external world by the senses. To develop this line of analysis and to determine exactly what information is provided by the body and how this might influence cognition, we examine Sherrington’s and Gibson’s positions. Moving on from their views, we qualify bodily information in terms of ‘proprioception’. We use ‘proprioception’ in a broad sense to describe any kind of experience we have of our internal states (including postural information as well as sensations related to the general state of the body and its parts). Following Damasio’s and Craig’s studies, we further elaborate this position, arguing that living beings are equipped with an internal propriosensitive monitoring system which maps all the changes that constantly occur in our body and that give us perceptual (‘proprioceptive’ or propriosensitive) information about what happens inside us. Moreover, relying on Goldie’s and Ratcliffe’s view, we show that emotional information can also be considered as a form of ‘proprioception’ which contributes to determining everything we perceive. This analysis leads us to the second main thesis of this book: ‘proprioception’ is a form of internal perception and it is an essential component of the sensory information we can access and use for all cognitive purposes. -/- Chapter 3 Semantic Competence from the Inside: Conceptual Architecture and Composition -/- Abstract. Concepts are essential constituents of thought: they are the instruments we use to categorize our experience, i.e. to classify things and group them together in homogeneous sets. Here we define concepts as the internal mental information (representations) that allows us, among other things, to master words in natural language. By analyzing the way in which individuals master word meanings we explore a number of hypotheses regarding the nature of concepts. Following Diego Marconi’s research, we differentiate between two kind of abilities that underpin lexical competence – so-called ‘referential’ and ‘inferential competence’ – and we suggest that, in order to support these abilities, concepts must also include two corresponding kinds of information, i.e. inferential and referential information. We point out that the most widely used and acknowledged theories of concepts do not make this distinction, instead broadly characterizing the information used for categorization in terms of propositionally described feature lists. However, we show that while feature lists can explain inferential competence, they do not account for referential competence. To address the issue of referential competence we examine Ray Jackendoff’s hypothesis that to account for the possibility of linking perceptual and conceptual information we need to assume the existence of a (visual) representation that encodes the geometric and topological properties of objects and bridges the gap between the percept and the concept. Furthermore, we analyze the extension of this work by Jesse Prinz who introduced the notion of a proxytype, a perceptual representation of a class of objects that incorporates structural and parametric information related to their appearance. However, as we point out, proxytypes can only explain the relationship between perception and concepts with respect to instances that can be perceived through the senses and that belong to the same class by virtue of their physical similarity. We suggest that this notion be extended to include larger conceptual classes. To accomplish this, we further develop Mark Johnson, George Lakoff and Jean Mandler’s idea of a schematic image and argue that conceptual representations include a perceptual schema. Perceptual schemata are non-linguistic, structured experiential gestalts (patterns or maps) that make use of information taken from all sensory modalities, including body perception. They accomplish a quasi-conceptual function: they allow us to recognize and to classify different instances. In this work, we hypothesize that perceptual schemata are an essential component of concepts, but not identical to them. Instead, we suggest that concepts include both perceptual and propositional information with perceptual schemata providing the ‘perceptual core concept’ that grounds related propositional information. -/- Chapter 4 In the Beginning There Were Categories. The Bodily Origin of Prelinguistic Categorical Organization: The Example of Folkbiological Taxonomies -/- Abstract. Studies of categorization in psychology and the cognitive sciences have made use of the notions of ‘category’ and ‘concept’ without precisely defining what is meant by either; in fact, often these terms have been used as synonyms, making it difficult to address specific issues related to conceptual development. This chapter begins by discussing the definitions of, as well as the distinctions between, ‘categories’ and ‘concepts’ in the classical philosophical tradition (Aristotle, Kant and Husserl). We introduce our view of categories with reference to Husserl. Categorization is defined as the way in which our experience is originally (pre-linguistically) organized in a passive and fully unconscious manner on the basis of universal structuring principles. Conceptualization is explained as a later process in which the earlier categorical macro-classes are further subdivided into more specific and detailed sets; this later process also relies on linguistic learning and exposure to culture. On the basis of Ray Jackendoff, Jean Mandler, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s work, we hypothesize that categorization is a two-step process that begins with the formation of homogeneous sets of entities partitioned into regions that describe the ontological boundaries of the objects that humans perceive (categories) and continues at a later stage with the development of more specific classifications (concepts). In this chapter, we mainly address three related issues: Why should we assume that there is categorical organization which precedes the development of a conceptual system? How do categories and concepts relate to each other? Shall we hypothesize that categories are innate or that they are formed before concepts on the basis of information and organizational structure available at a very early developmental stage? We show that categorical partitions are necessary for categorization and, following Mandler, that the general categories we form at an early age do not match our adult superordinate concepts. As for the third issue, we argue that there might be no need to assume that categories are innately present in the human mind, since their formation can be explained – at least in certain cases – by basic mechanisms that work on body (propriosensitive) information. This hypothesis will not be discussed in general, but in relation to a particularly relevant example of categorical partition, i.e. the folk-biological dichotomy between ANIMATE/INANIMATE. This is compared with other dichotomies that derive from it, but are not directly categorical such as LIVING/NON-LIVING and BIOLOGICAL/NON-BIOLOGICAL. -/- Chapter 5 Internal States: From Headache to Anger. Conceptualization and Semantic Mastery -/- Abstract. Here we ask if we can also apply the distinction between referential and inferential competence we introduced in Chapter 3 to words that do not refer to things that are perceived using the external senses, especially to words/concepts that denote bodily experiences (such as pain, thirst, hunger, etc.) or emotions. We introduce and discuss the hypothesis that – even though such words/concepts do not refer to intersubjectively identifiable entities in the external world – they do have a kind of referent that can be accessed via direct perception, more specifically ‘proprioception’, as we have defined it in terms of all propriosensitive information we can consciously access. In the first part of the chapter, we specifically consider terms denoting bodily experiences such as ‘pain’ or ‘hunger’ and argue that their referents are identified and classified from a first-personal point of view on the basis of four main characteristics: their specific intensity, their localization in the body, their co-occurrence with other signals and above all their specific qualitative sensations. Emotions are addressed in the second part of the chapter. We suggest that there is a continuity between bodily experiences and emotions. In particular, we argue for a perceptual theory of emotions in line with that proposed by James and Lange at the end of the 19th century and developed more recently by authors such as Damasio (see also chap. 2§5, §6). The hypothesis we put forward is that the referential information that supports the categorization of emotions and therefore also our mastery of terms referring to emotions consists in the perception (i.e. the ‘proprioception’) of those bodily states and changes in bodily states which constitute our emotional experience. In the context of this discussion we examine some objections to this line of reasoning that arise from a cognitivist perspective and following authors such as Oatley, Johnson-Laird and Frijda, we distinguish between basic emotions that can be identified and classified solely on the basis on how they feel and complex emotions whose identification and classification additionally depends on cognitive factors. To describe how emotions are identified and classified on the basis of how they feel, we rely on Marcel and Lambie’s distinction between an ‘emotion state’ and an ‘emotion experience’. Both notions indicate kinds of feelings that we consciously experience. However, they describe first-order and second order emotion awareness respectively. The emotion state is the feeling we have of the bodily states and changes that occur when we are experiencing an emotion, while the emotion experience is the fully developed and integrated emotion we both experience and are, with reflection, aware of experiencing. On the basis of this differentiation, we also show that the same characteristics that aid in the identification and classification of bodily experiences (specific qualitative sensations; somatic localization; specific intensity; presence/absence of specific concomitant sensations) can also be used for the identification and classification of emotions – at least basic emotions. In the last two sections of the chapter we present some clinical evidence on the semantic competence of people who suffer from Alexithymia and Autism Spectrum Disorder which supports the conclusions of our preceding analyses. -/- Chapter 6 The ‘Proprioceptive’ Component of Abstract Concepts -/- Abstract. In this chapter, we address the issue of whether the mastery of abstract words requires only inferential knowledge and thus, if the concepts that support the mastery of abstract words include only linguistic information. We start by differentiating the notions of ‘abstract’ and ‘general’ which are often erroneously confused. We then identify a strict definition of abstract, as contrasted with ‘concrete’, that applies to words or concepts whose referent cannot be experienced by the senses. We argue that abstract words/concepts would be better described as theoretical, because they are usually conceived as structured sets of inferential knowledge expressed linguistically; that is, as small theories. Pointing out parallels with Carnap’s analysis of this issue in philosophy of science, we hypothesize that words/concepts denoting non-observable entities are not all ‘equally theoretical’, because their link to sensory experience can be stronger or weaker. We revive the distinction, inspired by Quine, between theoretical and intertheoretical concepts/words. This distinction relies on the fact that the former – unlike the latter – retains a strong, although indirect, connection with perception. In Quine’s discussion, perception is understood uniquely in terms of observability, i.e. of external sensory experience. Here we argue, however, that bodily, ‘proprioceptive’ (i.e. propriosensitive) experience can also serve to referentially ground theoretical (i.e. abstract) concepts/words. We frame this issue using the example of the theoretical concept ‘freedom’ and Lakoff’s hypothesis that this concept is developed on the basis of bodily information. We contrast this with the example of ‘democracy’ which more closely resembles an intertheoretical concept/word. Furthermore, we show that one of the classical views put forward in psycholinguistic research to explain how abstract concepts are mentally represented – i.e. Paivio’s Dual Coding Theory – points in the same direction as our analysis. The same is true of Barsalou’s work suggesting that we use internal information to understand at least some abstract words. To sustain this position, we put forward two lines of evidence: the first comes from psycholinguistic studies while the second examines deficits of semantic competence exhibited by people with Autism Spectrum Disorder. On the basis of our analysis, we put forward a classification that distinguishes between different kinds of concreteness and different degrees of abstraction: concepts/words referring to body experiences and basic emotions are described as analogous to concrete concepts/words because they are grounded in perceptual (i.e. propriosensitive) experience, while abstract concepts/words are considered more or less abstract depending on whether they are intratheoretical (and rely entirely on inferential information) or theoretical (and are partially grounded in perceptual – or more often in propriosensitive perceptual – information). In the last section of the chapter we consider two scales that have been used in psycholinguistic research to measure the degree of concreteness vs. abstractness of words and we show that – used conjointly – they can provide a measure of the internal vs. external grounding of specific words. (shrink)

The meanings of words are not permanent but change over time. Some changes of meaning are quick, such as when a pronoun changes its reference; some are slower, as when two speakers find out that they are using the same word in different senses; and some are very slow, such as when the meaning of a word changes over historical time. A theory of semantics should account for these different time scales. In order to describe these different types (...) of meaning changes, I present an analysis of three levels of communication: instruction, coordination of common ground and coordination of meaning. My first aim is to show that these levels must be considered when discussing lexical semantics. A second aim is to use the levels to identify the communicative roles of some of the main word classes, in particular nouns, adjectives, verbs, indexicals and quantifiers. I argue that the existence of word classes can, to a large extent, be explained by the communicative needs that arise on the different levels. (shrink)

This paper is devoted to an exploration of the implications for the theory of pre-lexical syntax as developed by McCawley, and for syntactic theories in general, of an analysis of English emphatic conjunctions along the lines of Green . Among the conclusions are: The underlying representation of sentences must be much more abstract than has even been imagined previously, referring, in some as yet undiscovered way, to assumptions of the speaker about the real world, in order to account (...) for the grammatical occurrence of both terms of suppletive lexical items in otherwise identical surface strings with corresponding differences in meaning. A grammatical theory which purports to be capable of relating the sentences of a language to what they mean in a systematic way must be capable of referring directly to relevant assumptions made by the speaker of any given utterance at the time of utterance. So-called 'contrastive stress' is only one of the phenomena whose ultimate explanation depends on direct reference to such assumptions. Transformational grammars, which explicitly claim to be capable of relating in a systematic way the sentences of a language and what they mean, must be capable of referring to the sub-lexical, semantic structure of sentences, and furthermore, must be capable of doing so at an indefinite number of points in their derivation. This means that the semantic representation of a sentence must be available for reference at every stage in the derivation of the sentence. (shrink)

It is argued that the theory of opposition is in position to contribute as a formal method of conceptual engineering, by means of an increasing dichotomy-making process that augments the number of elements into any structured lexical field. After recalling the roots of this theory and its logical tenets, it is shown how the processes of expansion and contraction of discourse can modify a lexical field and, with it, our collective representation of ideas. This theory can also bring (...) some order to the question of disagreement in philosophical discourse: what do philosophers disagree about; how can we clarify the distinction between verbal disagreement (focused on words) and substantive disagreement (focused on things)? The ensuing construction of conceptual systems will be exemplified through three case studies of philosophy: desire, truth judgment, and the left–right political divide. The construction rules of such systems resort to the theory of opposition, which intends to improve our understanding of what entails either agreement or disagreement about the meaning of concepts. Such a better understanding of philosophical discourse relies on its formalization in terms of closed lexical fields, thereby leading to a comparative analysis of concepts in light of logical relations between their definitions. (shrink)

The ArgumentErnst Cassirer's theory of language as a symbolic form, one of the richest and most insightful philosophies of language of the twentieth century, went virtually unnoticed in the mainstreams of modern linguistics. This was so for what seems to be a good metatheoretical reason: Cassirer insisted on the constitutive role of meaning in the explanation of linguistic phenomena, a position which was explicitly rejected by both American Structuralists and Chomskian Generativists. In the last decade, however, a new and (...) promising linguistic framework has emerged — the framework of lexical semantics — which seems to bear close theoretical resemblance to Cassirer's theory. In this paper, I show how the empirical results accumulated within the framework of lexical semantics serve to validate Cassirer's most fundamental philosophical insights, and suggest that Cassirer's philosophy helps position these empirical results in their appropriate epistemological context. I discuss the following fundamental points, which, for me, constitute the backbone of both Cassirer's philosophy and the theory of lexical semantics: natural language grammars constitute structural reflections of a deeply-rooted, highly structured level of semantic organization; the representational level of linguistic meaning, which is prior to experience in the Kantian sense, comprises a partial set of semantic notions, which language selects as centers of perceptual attention; this partial set is potentially different from the sets selected by other symbolic forms, such as myth, science, and art; and linguistic variability is to be explained in universalistic terms, thus allowing for specific patterns of variability within universally-constrained limits. (shrink)

This paper investigates the semantics of derived statives, deverbal adjectives that fail to entail there to have been a preceding (temporal) event of the kind named by the verb they are derived from, e.g. darkened in a darkened portion of skin. Building on Gawron’s (The lexical semantics of extent verbs, San Diego State University, ms, 2009) recent observations regarding the semantics of extent uses of change of state verbs (e.g., Kim’s skin darkens between the knee and the calf) and (...) Kennedy and Levin’s (Adjectives and adverbs: syntax, semantics and disclosure, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2008) theory of change, it is shown, contrary to previous analyses, that a fully compositional semantic analysis is possible, and thus that there is no argument from derived statives for word formation differing from semantic composition above the word level in requiring deletion operations, as in Dubinsky and Simango’s (Language 72:749–781, 1996) analysis. Further, such an analysis, by contrast with previous ones, both compositional (Jackson in Resultatives, derived statives, lexical semantic structure, Doctoral dissertation, UCLA, 2005b; Condoravdi and Deo in Proceedings of the 18th International Congress of Linguists (CIL 18), Seoul, 2008 and non-compositional (Dubinsky and Simango 1996), correctly predicts, as shown by a range of arguments, that the meaning of the derived stative contains the meaning of the verb it is derived from and that it therefore contrasts fundamentally with morphologically simple adjectives in the kind of meaning that it has. (shrink)

In the ancient Arabic dictionaries, the root “ḍ-r-r” has three main meanings: “to harm”, “to gather” and “strength”. In the course of history, many words have been derived from these root meanings and have acquired various meanings. In the present article, the words derived from the root “ḍ-r-r” are semantically analyzed. First, the etymological origins of the root as well as its compounds and their meanings in early Arabic dictionaries are analyzed. In this context, it was (...) aimed to determine the literal and figurative meanings they acquired over time. In doing so, Arabic poetry of the Jahiliyyah period and hadiths were also utilized. Afterwards, in order to determine the semantic meaning pattern of the root “ḍ-r-r” and its compounds, words containing antonymous and proximate meaning relations with this root were included and their semantic relations were compared. While words have “essential meanings” that they always carry and do not lose no matter which system they enter, there are also “relative meanings” that do not originate from the root of words but arise from the system of relations they are in. For this reason, in the next stage, it was aimed to determine the relative meanings of the related words in the Qur’anic context by including the uses of the root “ḍ-r-r” and its derivatives in the Qur’an. Finally, various uses of words that have a semantically antonymous or proximate relationship with the root “ḍ-r-r” and its de-rivatives in the Qur’an were presented and their semantic pattern was tried to be determined. (shrink)

The numerous perspectives offered on consciousness reflect a multifaceted phenomenon that results from a system of relations. An etymological approach identifies linguistic roots of the meanings of consciousness and illustrates their concern with self-referenced informational relationships of an organism with its environment, a "knowing system" formed in the epistemological relations between knower and known. Common elements of contemporary models suggest that consciousness involves interacting components of a system, including: attention-awareness; phenomenal experiences; self reference; action-behavior, including representations and learning; use of (...) information; interpretation of meaning; goal-directed behavior; and systems of social reference. It is suggested that manifestations of consciousness through the physical properties of the brain are universally represented in language. A preliminary systems model of consciousness is outlined with widespread lexical roots proposed as a culture-neutral framework for constructing theories of consciousness and identifying cognitive constructs which reveal the epistemological roots of consciousness within Indo-European traditions. (shrink)

Studies have shown that children vary in the trajectories of their language development after cochlear implant (CI) activation. The aim of the present study is to assess the preverbal and lexical development of a group of 20 Italian-speaking children observed longitudinally before CI activation and at three, 6 and 12 months after CI surgery (mean age at the first session: 17.5 months; SD: 8.3; and range: 10–35). The group of children with CIs (G-CI) was compared with two groups of (...) normally-hearing (NH) children, one age-matched (G-NHA; mean age at the first session: 17.4 months; SD: 8.0; and range: 10–34) and one language-matched (G-NHL;n= 20; mean age at the first session: 11.2 months; SD: 0.4; and range: 11–12). The spontaneous interactions between children and their mothers during free-play were transcribed. Preverbal babbling production and first words were considered for each child. Data analysis showed significant differences in babbling and word production between groups, with a lower production of words in children with CIs compared to the G-NHA group and a higher production of babbling compared to the G-NHL children. Word production 1 year after activation was significantly lower for the children with CIs than for language-matched children only when maternal education was controlled for. Furthermore, latent class growth analysis showed that children with CIs belonged mainly to classes that exhibited a low level of initial production but also progressive increases over time. Babbling production had a statistically significant effect on lexical growth but not on class membership, and only for groups showing slower and constant increases. Results highlight the importance of preverbal vocal patterns for later lexical development and may support families and speech therapists in the early identification of risk and protective factors for language delay in children with CIs. (shrink)

After a quick overview of the field of study known as “Lexical Semantics”, where we advocate the need of accessing additional information besides syntax and Montague-style semantics at the lexical level in order to complete the full analysis of an utterance, we summarize the current formulations of a well-known theory of that field. We then propose and justify our own model of the Generative Lexicon Theory, based upon a variation of classical compositional semantics, and outline its formalization. (...) Additionally, we discuss the theoretical place of informational, knowledge-related data supposed to exist within the lexicon as well as within discourse and other linguistic constructs. The formalization of the structure of natural language utterances around a surface form (phenogrammatics), a deep structure (tectogrammatics) and the meaning thereof as a logical form (semantics) has developed from the original theories of Curry and Montague to form coherent, type-driven models. Most of these new theories rely upon variations of the compositional analysis of the sentence: from pheno to tectogrammatics, and then to semantics. Our contribution to this work aims at giving such a model a means to overcome the problems posed by polysemous lexical units during the semantical analysis of the tectogrammatical form. Building upon an assumed “deep structure”, we formalize parts of Pustejovsky’s Generative Lexicon Theory, linguistically motivated in Pustejovsky (The generative lexicon, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1995), in a pre-processing of the semantics of the sentence. The mechanisms of Lexical Semantics we propose are an additional layer of classical Montague compositional semantics, and, as such, integrate smoothly within such an analysis; we proceed by converting the lexical data to modifiers of the logical form. This treatment of Lexical Semantics furthermore induces us to think that some sort of non-evident background knowledge of the common use of words is necessary to perform a correct semantic analysis of an utterance. This “commonsense metaphysics” would therefore not be strictly confined to pragmatics, as is often assumed. (shrink)

The word “şuū’r” comes from the root “ş-a'-r”, which means hair, feather, hair. There are forty words in different forms from this root in the Qur'an. We see that twenty-seven of these words, set in forty different verses, are included as verbs in the form of gaib and interlocutor, and thirteen as nouns. Since the derivatives mentioned as verbs are explained with the infinitive ”shū'r” in exegesis, in the study, priority was given to determining the meaning of (...) this word in the syllabary and terminology. The close meanings of the word Shu'ur in the sources; It can be said that it is possible to determine knowledge and perception based on intelligence, attention and sensitivity and delicacy. It has been determined that twenty-one of the derivatives from the rout take place in the form of verb-i muzârî gâib with the preposition "māandlā" in different verses.We see that ten of the words in which the expression efy-i shuūr are related top asttribes, eight to polytheists, two to the People of the Book, and two to ohypocrites. Two of the three verses in which the derivative in the form of verb-i muzâri inter locator with the preposition “lā” nefy take place are about believers and one is about the general. A verse containing the derivative in the form of verb-i muzârî with the preposition "lev" is about the people of Noah, and another verse in which the derivative with the question preposition "ma" is about believers. We have handled other words that come from the original root with a certain classification. In our research, we tried to examine the word “Şuū‘r”and other words from the root “ş-a‘-r” through the verses by going down to the sources. Examples of the use of root in Arabic poetry and hadiths of the Jahiliyya period are also given. (shrink)

BackgroundType-Token Ratio, given its relatively simple hand computation, is one of the few LSA measures calculated by clinicians in everyday practice. However, it has significant well-documented shortcomings; these include instability as a function of sample size, and absence of clear developmental profiles over early childhood. A variety of alternative measures of lexical diversity have been proposed; some, such as Number of Different Words/100 can also be computed by hand. However, others, such as Vocabulary Diversity and the Moving Average Type (...) Token Ratio rely on complex resampling algorithms that cannot be conducted by hand. To date, no large-scale study of all four measures has evaluated how well any capture typical developmental trends over early childhood, or whether any reliably distinguish typical from atypical profiles of expressive child language ability.Materials and MethodsWe conducted linear and non-linear regression analyses for TTR, NDW, VocD, and MATTR scores for samples taken from 946 corpora from typically developing preschool children, engaged in adult-child toy play, from the Child Language Data Exchange System. These were contrasted with 504 samples from children known to have delayed expressive language skills. We also conducted a separate sub-analysis which examined possible contextual effects of sampling environment on lexical diversity.ResultsOnly VocD showed significantly different mean scores between the typically -developing children and delayed developing children group. Using TTR would actually misdiagnose typical children and miss children with known language impairment. However, computation of VocD as a function of toy interactions was significant and emerges as a further caution in use of lexical diversity as a valid proxy index of children’s expressive vocabulary skill.DiscussionThis large scale statistical comparison of computer-implemented algorithms for expressive lexical profiles in young children with traditional, hand-calculated measures showed that only VocD met criteria for evidence-based use in LSA. However, VocD was impacted by sample elicitation context, suggesting that non-linguistic factors, such as engagement with elicitation props, contaminate estimates of spoken lexical skill in young children. Implications and suggested directions are discussed. (shrink)

Lexical ambiguity can be syntactic if it involves more than one grammatical category for a single word, or semantic if more than one meaning can be associated with a word. In this article we discuss the application of a Bayesian‐network model in the resolution of lexical ambiguities of both types. The network we propose comprises a parsing subnetwork, which can be constructed automatically for any context‐free grammar, and a subnetwork for semantic analysis, which, in the spirit (...) of Fillmore's (1968) case grammars, seeks to fulfill the required cases of all candidates for verb of the sentence. Solving for the highest joint probability of the variables conditioned upon the evidences to the network yields the most likely candidate with its meaning, along with its cases and respective meanings. This is achieved by fixing the values of all evidence nodes concurrently, and then performing a stochastic simulation in which the remaining nodes are updated probabilistically with a high degree of parallelism. The process of disambiguation is directed neither by the syntax nor the semantics, but rather by the interrelation between the two subnetworks. The use of a Bayesian‐network model allows us to express this interrelation between the two subnetworks and among their constituents in a rather direct and rigorous way that, in connection with the convergence properties of the stochastic simulation, reveals a very robust model. (shrink)

This study examines the semantics of a root form underlying a wide range of Dene lexical expressions. The root evolved from a simple nominal denoting “club” to expressions lexicalizing the movement of stick-like objects and the rotation of helicopter blades. These semantic extensions arise through source-in-target and target-in-source metonymies. Drawing on Cognitive Linguistics, especially the theory of metonymy, offers a method of describing the range of meanings expressed by this root in a concise manner. Focusing on (...) the results of metonymic meaning extensions also opens the way to addressing questions in the history of Dene languages. This study contributes to increasing the typological scope of Cognitive Linguistic approaches and argues for the usefulness of the theory in addressing problems in Dene linguistics. (shrink)

I give an analysis of how empirical terms do their work in communication and the gathering of knowledge that is fully externalist and that covers the full range of empirical terms. It rests on claims about ontology. A result is that armchair analysis fails as a tool for examining meanings of ‘basic’ empirical terms because their meanings are not determined by common methods or criteria of application passed from old to new users, by conventionally determined ‘intensions’. Nor do (...) methods of application used by individual speakers constitute definitive reference-determining intensions for their idiolect terms or associated concepts. Conventional intensions of non-basic empirical terms ultimately rest on basic empirical concepts, so no empirical meaning is found merely ‘in the head’. I discuss the nature of lexical definition, why empirical meanings cannot ultimately be modelled as functions from possible worlds to extensions, and traps into which armchair analysis of meaning can lead us. A coda explains how ‘Swampman’ examples, as used against teleosemantic theories of content, illustrate such traps. (shrink)

This study seeks to clarify the nature of linguistic synesthesia using a lexical-conceptual account. Based on a lexical analysis of Mandarin synesthetic usages, we find that linguistic synesthesia maps the metaphorical meaning between two domains; and linguistic synesthetic mappings and conceptual metaphoric mappings have similar behaviors when sense modalities are treated as conceptual domains that contain a set of mappings constrained by Mapping Principles. This lexical-conceptual account is designed to capture the fact that linguistic synesthesia (...) involves mapping between lexicalized concepts of sensory properties, instead of the real-time sensory input that is processed in neurological synesthesia. The incorporation of a lexical semantic view with the framework of Conceptual Metaphor Theory not only offers a coherent and comprehensive account for the nature of linguistic synesthesia, but also handles aspects of linguistic synesthesia previously only accounted for by non-metaphorical accounts. These design features make this proposal the most comprehensive account to fit the current data. Furthermore, by showing linguistic synesthesia as a type of metaphor, our study strengthens the role of conceptual metaphors as the link between the perceived world and our conceptualization of that world. (shrink)

Given the controversies over Mandarin Chinese in terms of Talmy’s bipartite language typology, this paper presents an exhaustive study of Chinese motion verbs collected from two authoritative dictionaries, namely, The Ancient Chinese Dictionary (2nd Edition) and The Contemporary Chinese Dictionary (7th Edition). An analysis of 662 motion verbs in ancient Chinese and 693 motion verbs in modern Chinese indicates that Mandarin Chinese has undergone a typological shift from verb-framed to satellite-framed as far as the lexicalization pattern is concerned. The (...) typological shift seems to have been driven by two forces, the decline of monosyllabic motion verbs and the upsurge of disyllabic motion verbs, which, upon second thoughts, can be boiled down to a single but predominant process of disyllabification in Chinese, whereby two (former) roots that bear a wide range of syntactic relations are lexicalized into a disyllabic word. Thus, we see an intriguing case of how phonology and morphosyntax interact to impact the typological properties of a language. (shrink)

Over the past decades there has been increasing interest in the idea that Heidegger was a “transcendental philosopher” during the late 1920s. Furthermore, a consensus has started to emerge around the idea that Heidegger must be thought of as a transcendental thinker during this time. For the most part this means to first experience how Heidegger's work inherits this term from Kant or Husserl so that one can then experience how Heidegger creatively adapts this inheritance. The aim of this paper (...) is to show that such an approach is unhelpful. The aim of this paper is instead to show that transcendental philosophy bears a wholly renewed meaning in Heidegger's fundamental ontology and that this meaning must be understood in an intrinsic connection with the fundamental-ontological problem of transcendence. Articulating this connection will show how Heidegger makes transcendental philosophy properly phenomenological. Over the past decades there has been increasing interest in the idea that Heidegger was a “transcendental philosopher” during the late 1920s. Furthermore, a consensus has started to emerge around the idea that Heidegger must be thought of as a transcendental thinker during this time. For the most part this means to first experience how Heidegger's work inherits this term from Kant or Husserl so that one can then experience how Heidegger creatively adapts this inheritance. The aim of this paper is to show that such an approach is unhelpful. The aim of this paper is instead to show that transcendental philosophy bears a wholly renewed meaning in Heidegger's fundamental ontology and that this meaning must be understood in an intrinsic connection with the fundamental-ontological problem of transcendence. Articulating this connection will show how Heidegger makes transcendental philosophy properly phenomenological. For a brief time during the late 1920s Heidegger speaks of his philosophical vision in “transcendental” terms; indeed, the title for the whole first part of Being and Time even speaks of winning a specifically “transcendental horizon” for the question of being. Conversely, the past few decades have seen an increasing interest in transcendental philosophy. Indeed, one might even say that there has been a renewed desire for the transcendental – for its rationality, for its metaphysical power and loftiness, for its epistemological armour or for its power to unify traditions – and this desire has lead to all sorts of “transcendental interpretations of … ” Accordingly, while under other circumstances Heidegger's talk of the transcendental might have been brushed under the rug as a “metaphysical” embarrassment it has instead become increasingly commonplace for scholars to thematically engage with this aspect of Heidegger's work. Properly speaking, there is no getting around the way that Heidegger positions his work in transcendental terms during the late 1920s. But language is a mercurial thing; so if there is no getting around the idea that there is something “transcendental” about Heidegger's work from the late 1920s, there is equally no getting around the question concerning the meaning of this ascription. What does it mean to be transcendental? What does it mean for Heidegger to be transcendental? These are questions which remain for us, and how we respond to these questions will have a significant effect on our reading of Heidegger. In fact, as this paper will demonstrate by example, how we respond to these questions has a significant effect on our understanding of the meaning and demands of the “task of thinking” as presented to us by Heidegger's work from the late 1920s. The question about the meaning of the term “transcendental” in Heidegger's late 20s philosophy is both modest and immodest. On the one hand it is a very small topic – perhaps, one might even suspect, a merely pedantic one – but on the other hand it aims at the highest question, namely, the Seinsfrage. In order to investigate these questions I will begin by presenting the most common contemporary interpretations of Heidegger's transcendental philosophising in connection with some reflections on the history of the concept of the transcendental. Secondly, I will demonstrate the formal meaning of the word “transcendental” in Heidegger. Thirdly, working from this foundation I will more fully clarify the meaning of a Heideggerian transcendental philosophy through an investigation of the concepts, problems and phenomena arising from the preceding analysis. Here, in §3, the significance of Heidegger's concept of the “transcendental” is explicitly grappled with. (shrink)

Authorship Analysis (AA) is a natural language processing field that examines the previous works of writers to identify the author of a text based on its features. Studies in authorship analysis include authorship identification, authorship profiling, and authorship verification. Due to its relevance, to many applications in this field attention has been paid. It is widely used in the attribution of historical literature. Other applications include legal linguistics, criminal law, forensic investigations, and computer forensics. This paper aims to (...) provide an overview of the work done and the techniques applied in the authorship analysis domain. The examination of recent developments in this field is the principal focus. Many different criteria can be used to define a writer’s style. This paper investigates stylometric features in different author-related tasks, including lexical, syntactic, semantic, structural, and content-specific ones. A lot of classification methods have been applied to authorship analysis tasks. We examine many research studies that use different machine learning and deep learning techniques. As a means of pointing the direction for future studies, we present the most relevant methods recently proposed. The reviewed studies include documents of different types and different languages. In summary, due to the fact that each natural language has its own set of features, there is no standard technique generically applicable for solving the AA problem. (shrink)

In this paper, I discuss the distribution and interpretation of free choice items (FCIs) in Greek, a language exhibiting a lexical paradigm of such items distinct from that of negative polarity items. Greek differs in this respect from English, which uniformly employs any. FCIs are grammatical only in certain contexts that can be characterized as nonveridical (Giannakidou 1998, 1999), and although they yield universal-like interpretations in certain structures, they are not, I argue, universal quantifiers. Evidence will be provided that (...) FCIsare indefinites; the quasi-universal effect is shown to be the result of binding by an operator with universal force. Additionally, the limited distribution of FCIs in non veridical contexts can be accounted for by analyzing them as indefinites which must always be interpreted in an intensional type. The difference between ``regular'' indefinites and FCIs, therefore, is reduced to a type difference which captures the fact that only the latter exhibit limited distribution: because of their intensional type, FCIs will be grammatical only in contexts providing alternatives (worlds or situations), and nonveridical contexts do exactly this. By contrast, FCIs are excluded from veridical and episodic contexts because these provide no alternatives and hence do not satisfy the lexical semantic requirement ofFCIs. The proposed analysis is supported by data from other languages as well (Spanish, Catalan,French) and has important consequences regarding the analysis of English any. If FCIs are not universal quantifiers but indefinites, then the usual ambiguity thesis (free choice any being universal, negative polarity any an existential) can no longer be maintained, at least not as one in terms of quantificational force. (shrink)

This chapter proposes a corpus-based investigation and a semantic analysis of the Italian word "altro" ‘other’, focusing on two values of "altro" identified in the previous literature: difference (D-interpretation) and increment along a scale (M-interpretation). In syntax-based studies, focused on cardinal noun phrases, the two values have been related to distinct syntactic positions occupied by "altro" within the NP’s extended projection (Cinque 2015, Kayne 2021): a lower position, associated with the D-interpretation (altro N = ‘other kind of N’), and (...) a higher position, associated with the M-interpretation (altri n N = ‘n more tokens of N’). Conversely, discourse-based studies assume that the two values are due to a lexical ambiguity of "altro", with the D-interpretation being triggered by a discourse relation of contrast and the M-interpretation by an additive relation (Gianollo and Mauri 2020). We examine the distribution of the two values in the CORIS corpus of contemporary Italian (Rossini Favretti et al. 2002) and consider the question of whether they are equally basic interpretations or one of them is derivable from the other. The analysis we propose relies on the idea that the semantic core of "altro" is the relation of non-identity. The D-interpretation and M-interpretation result from the interaction between this semantic core and features of the larger discourse context, with additive and contrastive features playing a major role. Non-identity is introduced in the semantic representation of the sentence irrespective of the syntactic position of "altro", while discourse context—including lexical properties of the noun—determines at what ontological level (whether type or token) non-identity is evaluated. The analysis is cast in the framework of Segmented Discourse Representation Theory (SDRT; Asher and Lascarides 2003), which allows a modular representation of the separate contributions of "altro" and discourse structure. (shrink)

In the present study, cross-modal (i.e., across sensory modalities such as smell and sound) iconicity (i.e., resemblance) and indexicality (i.e., contiguity) in lexical sensory and emotional signs in Finnish Sign Language will be considered from an articulatory perspective (i.e., the production of signs). Such cross-modal iconicity has not been extensively studied previously, so here, with the help of cognitive semiotics, I aim to carefully describe the cross-modal patterns observed across 118 signs, including 60 sensory signs and 58 emotional signs. (...) The analysis is framed within the theoretical model of Semiotic Hierarchy, which entails a non-reductionist view of meaning. In addition, a pheno-methodological triangulation will be applied: phenomenology (first-person method), literature of phenomenological and semiotic descriptions (second-person perspective) and experimental findings (third-person perspective). The results of this analysis show that (a) 71 of the 118 sensory and emotional signs are cross-modally indexical, (b) only 10 of the 71 signs can be regarded as cross-modally iconic, (c) cross-modal iconicity is highly diagrammatic, (d) iconicity and indexicality are highly integrated, and (e) articulatory feedback matters in the formation of semiotic patterns. This study contributes to our understanding of cross-modal iconicity in signed languages, as well as studies in semiotic systems more generally. (shrink)

This article explores the ways in which language users make sense of metaphoricity when manifest in a variety of ways within the language. The research provides an analysis of the lexical characteristics of a single item when used in potentially, but not clearly identified, metaphoric contexts. The analysis focuses on flexible patterns of meaning and the relationship between metaphor and other aspects of figurative language such as polysemy, metonymy, and meronymy. The research stands as a follow (...) up to a larger corpus-driven study that found differences in the lexical behavior of clearly defined metaphoric and nonmetaphoric instances of items, when looking at a large set of collocations, colligations, and semantic, pragmatic and textual associations. These behaviors or patterns are consequently avoided by the non-metaphoric instances of that same item, in order to avoid ambiguity. In the case of more ambiguous or unclear cases of metaphor, this article aims to determine if these patterns are still visible and the extent to which they signal metaphoricity. Evidence of such patterns would imply that lexical, grammatical, textual, and pragmatic manifestations in language play an important role in distinguishing between subtleties in word senses and meanings, even in the case of less obvious metaphoricity. As a consequence, awareness of these behaviors or characteristics should be at the forefront of any lexical metaphor theory. (shrink)