Comparative study of two languages of different structures has both theoretical and practical significance, enables somebody to identify similar and distinctive features, find universals and unique, helps to penetrate deeper into the inner workings of each of the compared languages and understand their national identity. The subject of our comparative study are languages of different structures - Russian and Bashkir languages - the first refers to a group of inflected, the second - to the group of agglutinative languages. (...) Comparative research of languages of different structures can be carried out in two aspects: theoretical and linguistic. In the first case, the analysis of language material is subjected without restriction at all levels of the language system. Data from these studies can be used in the creation of comparative descriptive grammars in lexicographical work and in the translation business. In the second case only microlanguage is matched, which is represented in the lexical and grammatical minimum of studied second language. Materials of such a compressed comparative analysis used in the practice of language teaching, mainly in teaching a second, non-native language. When a comparative study of languages in linguistic aspect is important direction of comparisons - what language is elected as the original one. Since the formation of national-Russian bilingualism is the subject of study of Russian language, as the source, it is desirable to choose Russian language. In this case, the reference point is the absorption of funds Russian as a second language. Materials of comparative study of two languages gives a clear idea of what linguistic phenomena and their symptoms are identical in them, what is only partially overlap, what is completely different. This knowledge will help to consciously manage the impact of native language on the studied non-native Russian language. In the comparative study of Russian and Bashkir languages done very little, but it is a lot of work has already begun. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to explore some of the possibilities, advantages and difficulties of corpus-based analyses of semantic and pragmatic aspects of language in one particular field, namely the linguistic expression of emotion concepts. For this purpose, a methodological procedure is proposed and an exemplary analysis of the emotion concept “fear” in English is performed. The procedure combines Kövecses' lexical approach and Stefanowitsch's metaphorical pattern analysis with additional concepts from corpus linguistics such as semantic preference and semantic (...) prosody. The results of the study show that such a corpus-based analysis of emotion words offers several advantages. Firstly, by exploring the surroundings of the search word in a vast amount of text, we are not only able to find evidence of conceptual metaphor and metonymy that structure the emotion concept and of related emotion concepts, but also we can enrich the description of the emotion concept with information from a series of dimensions and add a pragmatic viewpoint by revealing an explicit or implicit evaluation of the emotion. The second advantage offered by a corpus-based approach lies in the possibility of quantifying results, i.e., comparing the frequency, productivity and creative use of individual metaphors and metonymies, which is especially interesting in view of contrastive studies. (shrink)

In this book, the author analyses the nature of the science of grammar.

Dans cet article, nous présentons et discutons de notre méthodologie pour la constitution d’un « petit corpus » comparatif de narration orale en occitan. Il s’agit d’un « petit corpus » nouveau et unique, dans une langue minorisée, ce qui soulève un certain nombre de défis particuliers : la complexité des rapports entre l’écrit et l’oral dans la pratique du conte d’une part, et d’autre part, de nombreuses difficultés méthodologiques (variations diatopique, diachronique et sociolinguistique ; absence de données numérisées ; (...) outils de traitement automatique des langues en cours de développement). Cet article propose non seulement une méthodologie pour la constitution d’un corpus permettant d’explorer divers degrés d’oralité, mais contribue aussi plus globalement au débat sur la problématique des « petits corpus » pour les langues minorisées. (shrink)

In Gradient Acceptability and Linguistic Theory, Elaine J. Francis examines a challenging problem at the intersection of theoretical linguistics and the psychology of language: the problem of interpreting gradient judgments of sentence acceptability in relation to theories of grammatical knowledge. This problem is important because acceptability judgments constitute the primary source of data on which such theories have been built, despite being susceptible to various extra-grammatical factors. Through a review of experimental and corpus-based research on a variety of syntactic (...) phenomena and an in-depth examination of two case studies, Francis argues for two main positions. The first is that converging evidence from online comprehension tasks, elicited production tasks, and corpora of naturally-occurring discourse can help determine the sources of variation in acceptability judgments and narrow down the range of plausible theoretical interpretations. The second is that the interpretation of judgment data depends crucially on one's theoretical commitments and assumptions, especially with respect to the nature of the syntax-semantics interface and the choice of either a categorical or a gradient notion of grammaticality. The theoretical frameworks considered in this book include derivational theories (e.g. Minimalism, Principles and Parameters), constraint-based theories (e.g. Sign-based Construction Grammar, Simpler Syntax), competition-based theories (e.g. Stochastic Optimality Theory, Decathlon Model), and usage-based approaches. While showing that acceptability judgment data are typically compatible with the assumptions of various theoretical frameworks, Francis argues that some gradient phenomena are best captured within frameworks that permit soft constraints-non-categorical grammatical constraints that encode the conventional preferences of language users. (shrink)

The history of the idea of progress and the history of the concept of progress are two different things, not least because they emanate from considerably different intellectual traditions. In anglophone history of ideas, progress has typically been viewed as a belief. Historians of ideas explore the past evaluating the extent to which a given society met certain conditions of belief. By contrast, in the history of concepts as developed by Reinhart Koselleck, progress has occupied the dual role of a (...) ‘basic concept’ that grasps modern sociopolitical reality and a ‘collective singular’ that aggregates previous and adjacent meanings in the one linguistic unit. This article compares these two historical research programmes, highlights their merits and deficiencies, and concludes by offering a new approach to the history of concepts as suggested by R.G. Collingwood’s theory of a scale of forms. In each of the approaches to the history of ideas and concepts addressed, particular attention is given to the problem of what qualifies as progress, and thus to a longstanding problem concerning the attribution of progress to past societies routinely excluded from its history, including those left out by Koselleck’s conventional secular-modern thesis. (shrink)

Quilty-Dunn et al. adopt a methodology for psychology connecting behavioral capacities to the format of the mental systems underlying them. This methodology opens up avenues connecting linguistic theory to comparative psychology. On the assumption that language structures thought, identifying the formal structure of human language can generate hypotheses connecting distinctively human cognitive traits to the distinctive structures of human language.

Existing accounts of Foucault’s archaeological methodology have not (a) contextualized the concept properly within the intellectual field of its emergence and (b) explained why it is called ‘archaeology’ and not simply ‘history’. Foucault contributed to the field of ‘history of systems of thought’ in France around 1960 by broadening its scope from the study of scientific and philosophical systems into systems of ‘knowledge’ in a wider sense. For Foucault, the term ‘archaeology’ provided a response to new methodological questions arising (...) from this initiative. Archaeological methodology had already been developed into a distinct comparative approach for the study of linguistic and cultural systems, notably by Dumézil. Foucault redevised archaeological methodology for the post-Hegelian tradition of studying ‘problems’ prevalent in the history of systems of thought. The article thus furnishes the groundwork for a ‘sociological archaeology’ or ‘problem analysis’ that is not particularly dependent on Foucault as a social theorist of power. (shrink)

This paper employs the methodological framework of linguistic analytic philosophy to explore the conceptual issues arising from a study of the different models of disorder implicit in five groups of stakeholders concerned in the community care of people with a diagnosis of long-term schizophrenia. Linguistic analysis, gives a precise fix on the nature of the practical difficulties presented by such models, suggests a powerful heuristic for displaying and comparing models, is the basis of a methodology which is neutral as (...) between users and providers of services, provides an intuitively powerful way of understanding the results of work of this kind, and facilitates the translation of research into practice. (shrink)

This book presents a collection of chapters on the nature, flexibility and acquisition of lexical categories. These long-debated issues are looked at anew by exploring the hypothesis of lexical polycategoriality –according to which lexical forms are not fully, or univocally, specified for lexical category– in a wide number of unrelated languages, and within different theoretical and methodological perspectives. Twenty languages are thoroughly analyzed. Apart from French, Arabic and Hebrew, the volume includes mostly understudied languages, spoken in New Guinea, Australia, New (...) Caledonia, Amazonia, Meso- and North America. Resulting from a long-standing collaboration between leading international experts, this book brings under one cover new data analyses and results on word categories from the linguistic and acquisitional point of view. It will be of the utmost interest to researchers, teachers and graduate students in different fields of linguistics (morpho-syntax, semantics, typology), language acquisition, as well as psycholinguistics, cognition and anthropology. (shrink)

Comparison across formal languages is an essential part of formal linguistics. The study of closely-related varieties has proven extremely useful in comparing differences that might otherwise appear unrealted, and has helped to identify the core principles of Universal Grammar. This comprehensive handbook serves two functions. It will provide a general and theoretical introduction to comparative syntax, its methodology, and its relation to other domains of linguistic inquiry; and it will provide a systematic selection of the best (...) class='Hi'>comparative work being done today on those language groups and families where substantial progress has been achieved. With top-notch editors and contributors from around the world, this volume will be an essential resource for scholars and students in formal linguistics. (shrink)

The essay attempts to shed light on some examples of the relationship between prescriptive and descriptive, norms and facts in comparative law. In particular, it examines: the methodological choices (in the alternative between normative paradigms and open pluralism), the ontology of the law (in the alternative between abstract dogmatism and experiential realism), the act of dividing the global spatiality into different units of legal meaning (in the alternative between neutral observation and constructive projectuality). Capturing the tension between doubt, displacement, (...) rupture (on the one side) and recovery, revision, creative renewal (on the other side) that has marked the genealogy of an “undisciplined discipline”, the Author proposes to assign it for the future a space of _inter-esse_, an interstitial threshold in which every binary opposition can be dynamically resolved. (shrink)

This is a work of literary history in which the author reconstructs the epistolary network of a German philologist and philosopher named Gottfried Leibniz and his extended coterie of far-flung correspondents who exchanged information and insights, by way of letters, about the emergent study of historical linguistics, as a means of retracing the origins of the various peoples of Europe. This book contributes to our understanding of the so-called international Republic of Letters in the early-modern period of Europe and (...) the near East. (shrink)

This book reports on the contrastive-semantic investigation of sadness expressions between English and Chinese, based on two monolingual general corpora and a parallel corpus. The exploration adopts a unique theoretical approach which integrates corpus-linguistic theories on meaning (as a social construct, usage and paraphrase) with a corpus-linguistic lexical model. It employs a new complex but workable methodology which combines computational tools with manual examination to tease meaning out of corpus evidence, to compare and contrast lexical items that do not (...) match up neatly between languages. It looks at sadness expressions both within and across languages in terms of three corpus-linguistic structural categories, i.e. colligation, collocation and semantic association/preference, and paraphrase (both explicit and implicit) to capture their subtle nuances of meaning, disclose the culture-specific conceptualisations encoded in them, and highlight their respective cultural distinctiveness of emotion. By presenting multidisciplinary original work, Sadness Expressions in English and Chinese will be of interest to researchers in corpus linguistics, contrastive lexical semantics, psychology, bilingual lexicography and language pedagogy. (shrink)

ABSTRACTHierarchies of information –inclusion, omission and presentation of society and its citizenry – is a critical aspect of news presentation. This paper looks at newspaper reportage of two tragic events in 2015: a balcony collapse in Berkeley, USA, in which six Irish students died; and a fire at a halting site in Carrickmines, Ireland, which claimed the lives of four adults and six children who were members of the Irish Traveller community. This latter group are an officially recognised indigenous ethnic (...) minority within Irish society, and the community experiences the type of structural inequalities and stigmatisation associated with membership of less powerful groups within a broader society. A bottom-up corpus linguistic methodology is used to generate and interpret perspectives on the newspaper coverage to probe and to assess similarities and, critically, differences, in the nature of the discourses surrounding the communities affected by the tragedies. In doing so, it finds the language used... (shrink)

In this chapter we use methods of corpus linguistics to investigate the ways in which mathematicians describe their work as explanatory in their research papers. We analyse use of the words explain/explanation (and various related words and expressions) in a large corpus of texts containing research papers in mathematics and in physical sciences, comparing this with their use in corpora of general, day-to-day English. We find that although mathematicians do use this family of words, such use is considerably less (...) prevalent in mathematics papers than in physics papers or in general English. Furthermore, we find that the proportion with which mathematicians use expressions related to ‘explaining why’ and ‘explaining how’ is significantly different to the equivalent proportion in physics and in general English. We discuss possible accounts for these differences. (shrink)

Purpose. The paper is aimed at analyzing in a comparative way the philosophical conceptions of the human, proposed by Ludwig Wittgenstein and Martin Heidegger as the main representatives of the analytic and continental tradition of philosophizing in the XXth century. The theoretical basis of the study is determined by Wittgenstein’s legacy in the field of logical and linguistic analysis, as well as Heidegger’s existential, hermeneutical, and phenomenological ideas. Originality. Based on the analysis of the philosophical works of Wittgenstein and (...) Heidegger, the initial principles of their anthropological concepts in the unity of transcendental preconditions, essential foundations, and correlations to the world in the technosphere are reconstructed. It is demonstrated that, despite the difference in the explanation of the peculiarities in the interpretation of the realm of the transcendental and basic characteristic of the inner world of human, both philosophers emphasized the understanding of the human being through the prism of language and the need for anthropologization of science and technology. Conclusions. Wittgenstein and Heidegger developed their own original considerations on the nature of human being, which fully conform to the basic theoretico-methodological principles of their philosophical conceptions. The former focused on how language reflects a human’s world and serves as a means of expressing their knowledge and aspirations. The latter, on the contrary, interpreted the world as a reflection of language that expresses itself through human. As a supporter of analytic methodology and, accordingly, of accuracy in formulations, Wittgenstein came to the concept of the unspeakable in the process of reflection on the being of human over the language. But in Heidegger’s existential discourse, which is full of metaphors and neologisms, being of human is limited by the concept of Nothing. As a consequence, it is noted that the ontological status of values is transcendental to the world according to Wittgenstein, but it is immanent to the world, according to Heidegger. It is argued that the Austrian thinker developed a linguo-psychological approach to the study of human through the prism of the mental, but the German philosopher comprehended the human on the basis of the concept of self in the ontological sphere. It has been demonstrated that both thinkers have pointed to the challenges faced by humans in the development of science and technology while emphasizing the importance of substantiating their anthropological foundations. (shrink)

The aim of the present paper is to understand what the notions of explanation and prediction in contemporary linguistics mean, and to compare various aspects that the notion of explanation encompasses in that domain. The paper is structured around an opposition between three main styles of explanation in linguistics, which I propose to call ‘grammatical’, ‘functional’, and ‘historical’. Most of this paper is a comparison between these different styles of explanations and their relations. A second, more methodological aspect (...) this paper seeks to clarify concerns the extent to which linguistic explanations can be viewed as predictive, rather than merely descriptive, and the problem of whether linguistic explanations ought to be causal, rather than noncausal. I argue that the notion of prediction is equally applicable in linguistics as in other empirical sciences. The extent to which the computational model of generative syntax can be viewed as providing a causal or psychologically realist model of language is more controversial. (shrink)

The purpose here is to explore metaphorical conceptions of the self in a fourth century B.C.E. Chinese text, the Zhuangzi, from the perspective of cognitive linguistics and the contemporary theory of metaphor. It is argued that the contemporary theory of metaphor provides scholars with an exciting new theoretical grounding for the study of comparative thought, as well as a concrete methodology for undertaking the comparative project. What is seen when the Zhuangzi is examined from the perspective (...) of metaphor theory is that conceptions of the self portrayed in this text are based on a relatively small set of interrelated conceptual metaphors, and that the metaphysics built into the Zhuangzi's classical Chinese metaphors resonates strongly with the (mostly unconscious) metaphysical assumptions built into the metaphors of modern American English. This should not be surprising, considering the claims of contemporary cognitive linguists that the metaphoric schemas making up the foundation of human abstract conceptual life are not arbitrarily created ex nihilo, but rather emerge from common embodied experience and are conceptual, rather than merely linguistic, in nature. (shrink)

This paper examines the controversy that followed the 1987 publication of Joseph Greenberg's book, Language in the Americas, attending to the role of language and linguistic research within overlapping disciplinary traditions. With this text, Greenberg presented a macro‐level tripartite classification that opposed then dominant fine‐grained analyses recognizing anywhere from 150 to 200 distinct language families. His proposal was the subject of a landmark conference, examining strengths and weaknesses, the unpublished proceedings of which are presented here for the first time. For (...) specialists in the anthropological and comparative‐historical study of Indigenous American languages, Greenberg's intervention highlighted the tension between language, conceived as an abstract object of study, and languages, understood to be carriers of specific cultural knowledge. For physical anthropologists and archaeologists, his theory was initially fortuitous on programmatic, substantive, and methodological grounds. The essay will show how interdisciplinary appeals were figured by supporters as a virtue, and by critics as a vice. The essay further highlights ethical reasons for integrating historical narratives of science and the humanities. (shrink)

This book compares attitudes to empiricism in language study from mid-twentieth century philosophy of language and from present-day linguistics. It focuses on responses to the logical positivism of the Vienna Circle, particularly in the work of British philosopher J. L. Austin and the much less well-known work of Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess.

This paper is an historical study of Tarski's methodology of deductive sciences (in which a logic S is identified with an operator Cn S, called the consequence operator, on a given set of expressions), from its appearance in 1930 to the end of the 1970s, focusing on the work done in the field by Roberto Magari, Piero Mangani and by some of their pupils between 1965 and 1974, and comparing it with the results achieved by Tarski and the Polish (...) school (Łoś, Suszko, Słupecki, Pogorzelski, Wójcicki). In the last section of the paper we will then compare these works with some recent developments in algebraic logic: this will lead to a better understanding of the results of the methodology of deductive science, but at the same time will show some intrinsic limits to such an approach to logic. Even if Magari's work on diagonizable algebras and universal algebra and Mangani's axiomatization of MV-algebras and results in model theory are rather famous, the articles on closure operators, published in the 1960s, are almost totally unknown outside Italy (mainly because of a linguistic limitation, the papers we analyse having been written and published in Italian). This paper aims to fill the gap in the literature and to enable the international community to get acquainted with this part of Italian logic. The same applies to some works published in Barcelona (in Catalan) at the end of the 1970s, analysed in the last section. (shrink)

This essay provides an overview of the working mechanisms of abductive reasoning and discusses the possible applications of this logic tool in comparative law research. Indeed, abductive reasoning pertains to the role of explanatory reasoning in formulating hypotheses and, as commonly utilised in contemporary literature of social sciences, in verifying those ideas. Comparative thinking is a logic process of the human mind that employs a particular set of logic and epistemic tools to manage and process data. Arguing that (...) comparative law has not conceptualised a precise and consistent method but only a set of practical guidelines to guide the research process of scholars, this study claims that observation of socio-legal phenomena and theory formation are not only inherently linked in comparative law research but also already theory-driven through an abductive logic process. In this sense, the scholar of comparative law does not rely exclusively on the logic instruments of the traditional legal practitioner but can deepen the potentialities of an abductive logic of discovery and justification already scrutinised by the other human and social sciences. While it is not desirable for the science of comparative law to adopt a single rigid method for research but to maintain a methodological flexibility open to interdisciplinarity, it must question the logic of discovery and justification of its results in a manner similar to that of the other social sciences of which it is a full member. Accordingly, it is assumed that the logic set of tools of comparative law can be enriched by developing the potentialities of the structure of abductive reasoning. (shrink)

The way comparative law methodology is handled by the variety of experiences of normative complexity around the world is, in itself, a stimulating and promising field of research. In particular, the “hybrid” character of the European Union legislation, being juridical and linguistic at the same time, remains the core of comparative law studies, but the dynamic relationship between law and language is constanlty producing ever-changing scenarios, calling for combined scientific approaches. Along with comparative law, semiotics in (...) particular has ensured the proper reading of the complex juridical and linguistic interconnections between the EU legislation and the national courts interpreting and applying them, thanks to its implicit dynamicity and ability to favor the visualization of the real normative semantic flow. By means of a case study, the opening of this “Pandora’s box” will demonstrate that, despite the lack of correspondence among EU categorical and conceptual structure, legal language, court enforcement and spirit of the people (social group), shared contexts of meanings within the EU and the national contexts are already flourishing and become visible when approached from a specifically comparative and semiotics point of view, that's to say as legal _formants_ and as _signs_ and _meta-concepts._. (shrink)

This article considers Quentin Skinner's critique and methodology in his seminal essay "Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas " vis-a-vis the current methodological debates in Chinese and comparative philosophy. It surveys the different ways in which philosophers who work with ancient Chinese texts in those related fields deal with the tension between textual contexts and autonomy and how some of the errors criticized by Skinner under the mythology of coherence, mythology of doctrines, mythology of parochialism, and (...) mythology of prolepsis might apply to those fields. It argues that Skinner's insistence that understanding a text requires recovering its author's intended meaning by studying its linguistic context has limited application to Chinese and comparative philosophy because those fields' most important texts are not best understood as means of communication by specific historical authors with intended messages to convey to readers. These texts are instead the means by which Chinese traditions perpetuate their respective beliefs and practices. Instead of being circumscribed by authorial intent, the meanings of traditional texts are dynamic and co-created in the process of producing, reproducing, and consuming texts as well as in the evolution of practices that also constitute each tradition. The meanings received by the audience are never exactly what authors or transmitters intended but have been transformed by each audience's own concerns and interests, even if the audience attempts to grasp what the former intended. Using the Five Classics and the Analects as examples, this article illustrates how such texts' purposes to teach and perpetuate the practices that constitute a way of life determine their meanings. Understanding is not merely cognitive but practical as well. The meanings of such texts are not static but dynamic as traditions evolve. The debates about methods of reading and interpreting ancient Chinese texts are also debates about the nature of Chinese traditions and struggles over their futures. (shrink)

How do historians, comparative linguists, biblical and textual critics and evolutionary biologists establish beliefs about the past? How do they know the past? This book presents a philosophical analysis of the disciplines that offer scientific knowledge of the past. Using the analytic tools of contemporary epistemology and philosophy of science the book covers such topics as evidence, theory, methodology, explanation, determination and underdetermination, coincidence, contingency and counterfactuals in historiography. Aviezer Tucker's central claim is that historiography as a scientific (...) discipline should be thought of as an effort to explain the evidence of past events. He also emphasizes the similarity between historiographic methodology to Darwinian evolutionary biology. This is an important, fresh approach to historiography and will be read by philosophers, historians and social scientists interested in the methodological foundations of their disciplines. (shrink)

This paper compares the associative system of early-learned verbs and body parts in Hebrew with previously published data on American English (Maouene, Josita, Shohei Hidaka & Linda B. Smith. 2008. Body parts and early-learned verbs. Cognitive Science 32(7). 1200–1216). Following the methodology of the former study, 51 Hebrew-speaking college students gave the first body part that came to mind for each of 103 early-learned Hebrew verbs, 81 of which were translational equivalents. Rate of convergence and divergence and underlying patterns (...) were used to make inferences about the constraints at work. Overall convergence (92.3% of the Hebrew data and 93.7% of the English data) reveal similar entropy levels, comparable semantic field shapes of verbs organized by body parts and similar general cluster patterns of verbs by body parts. Most divergence lies in the infrequent responses (offered fewer than 1% of the time) which arise around body parts that are internal, very detailed, very general categorically, used in figurative language, uniquely provided and tend to be subject to cultural taboos. This is a new contribution, as previous work has not quantified the relative proportion of convergent to divergent associations. We discuss how these findings support neural and developmental continuity and stability in the verbal system with respect to the categorization of verbs by body parts cross-culturally. (shrink)

This thesis focuses on models of conceptual change in science and philosophy. In particular, I developed a new bootstrapping methodology for studying conceptual change, centered around the formalization of several popular models of conceptual change and the collective assessment of their improved formal versions via nine evaluative dimensions. Among the models of conceptual change treated in the thesis are Carnap’s explication, Lakatos’ concept-stretching, Toulmin’s conceptual populations, Waismann’s open texture, Mark Wilson’s patches and facades, Sneed’s structuralism, and Paul Thagard’s conceptual (...) revolutions. -/- In order to analyze and compare the conception of conceptual change provided by these different models, I rely on several historical reconstructions of episodes of scientific conceptual change. The historical episodes of scientific change that figure in this work include the emergence of the morphological concept of fish in biological taxonomies, the development of scientific conceptions of temperature, the Church-Turing thesis and related axiomatizations of effective calculability, the history of the concept of polyhedron in 17th and 18th century mathematics, Hamilton’s invention of the quaternions, the history of the pre-abstract group concepts in 18th and 19th century mathematics, the expansion of Newtonian mechanics to viscous fluids forces phenomena, and the chemical revolution. I will also present five different formal and informal improvements of four specific models of conceptual change. I will first present two different improvements of Carnapian explication, a formal and an informal one. My informal improvement of Carnapian explication will consist of a more fine-grained version of the procedure that adds an intermediate, third step to the two steps of Carnapian explication. I will show how this novel three-step version of explication is more suitable than its traditional two-step relative to handle complex cases of explications. My second, formal improvement of Carnapian explication will be a full explication of the concept of explication itself within the theory of conceptual spaces. By virtue of this formal improvement, the whole procedure of explication together with its application procedures and its pragmatic desiderata will be reconceptualized as a precise procedure involving topological and geometrical constraints inside the theory of conceptual spaces. My third improved model of conceptual change will consist of a formal explication of Darwinian models of conceptual change that will make vast use of Godfrey-Smith’s population-based Darwinism for targeting explicitly mathematical conceptual change. My fourth improvement will be dedicated instead to Wilson’s indeterminate model of conceptual change. I will show how Wilson’s very informal framework can be explicated within a modified version of the structuralist model-theoretic reconstructions of scientific theories. Finally, the fifth improved model of conceptual change will be a belief-revision-like logical framework that reconstructs Thagard’s model of conceptual revolution as specific revision and contraction operations that work on conceptual structures. -/- At the end of this work, a general conception of conceptual change in science and philosophy emerges, thanks to the combined action of the three layers of my methodology. This conception takes conceptual change to be a multi-faceted phenomenon centered around the dynamics of groups of concepts. According to this conception, concepts are best reconstructed as plastic and inter-subjective entities equipped with a non-trivial internal structure and subject to a certain degree of localized holism. Furthermore, conceptual dynamics can be judged from a weakly normative perspective, bound to be dependent on shared values and goals. Conceptual change is then best understood, according to this conception, as a ubiquitous phenomenon underlying all of our intellectual activities, from science to ordinary linguistic practices. As such, conceptual change does not pose any particular problem to value-laden notions of scientific progress, objectivity, and realism. At the same time, this conception prompts all our concept-driven intellectual activities, including philosophical and metaphilosophical reflections, to take into serious consideration the phenomenon of conceptual change. An important consequence of this conception, and of the analysis that generated it, is in fact that an adequate understanding of the dynamics of philosophical concepts is a prerequisite for analytic philosophy to develop a realistic and non-idealized depiction of itself and its activities. (shrink)

The research conducted in this article is aimed at analyzing color symbols in Russian, French and Chinese linguistic cultures using the analysis of phraseology and proverbs. The research methodology is based on a comparative analysis of phraseological units and proverbs containing color components in these languages. In the course of the study, both common and unique features in the color symbolism of each of the linguistic cultures under consideration were identified. Through a comparative analysis of phraseology and (...) proverbs in different languages, it was possible to better understand how color embodies cultural norms, worldview and historical contexts in each nation. This allowed us to see which aspects of color are particularly significant for each culture and what associations and symbolic meanings are associated with them. Special attention is paid to the analysis of differences and similarities in the interpretation of color in the idiomatic expressions of each language. This allows us to understand which cultural and historical factors form unique views and ideas about color in each of the linguistic cultures under consideration. The study also highlights that the interpretation of color symbols in idiomatic expressions depends on the cultural and historical contexts of each language. Idioms are a reflection of the collective consciousness and worldview of the people, and the study of color phenomena in idioms helps to better understand national identity and linguistic evolution. In addition, the study found that the red color can acquire different meanings and connotations in different languages, despite common dictionary definitions. This indicates that the use and attitude towards the color red depends on the cultural and historical characteristics of each language group. The scientific novelty of the work lies in the fact that it combines linguistic analysis with the analysis of cultural characteristics and uses the methodology of synergetic symbolism. This approach allows us to understand how the interaction of different colors creates new symbolic meanings and associations specific to each culture. (shrink)

The subject of this study are the argumentation strategies applied by the Polish and German apex courts competent in criminal matters, namely the Supreme Court and the Federal Court of Justice, respectively. The investigation encompasses a total of 200 rulings issued by the criminal panels of these bodies. Particular focus was put on examining which arguments both courts apply to solve interpretation problems, and secondly, how these courts systematize the interpretation process. Methodologically, the examination utilizes, inter alia, the principles of (...) qualitative research, without neglecting the legal dogmatic perspective. A crucial theoretical foundation underlying this study is the distinction between formalistic and substantive legal cultures. The examination reveals that neither the Polish nor the German legal culture is purely formalistic or value-oriented. Nevertheless, the Supreme Court of Poland shows greater affinity for formalistic arguments, whereas the substantive interpretation methods are more widespread in the judicature of the German Federal Court of Justice. In particular, the Polish Court prefers the linguistic interpretation, whereas the German Court favours the purposive approach. (shrink)

In this study, Muarrij al-Sadusi (d. 204/820 or later) and his Kitāb al-amthāl which he wrote in the field of proverbs, are focused on. In this context, first of all, Muarrij’s life, scientific and literary personality are mentioned, his teachers and students are pointed out, and information about his works is given. Then, Kitāb al-amthāl was discussed; It was examined in terms of its content, classification and commentary method, and its contribution to the proverb literature. After spending part of his (...) life in the desert and learning Arabic from Bedouin Arabs, Muarrij came to Basra and educated himself by taking lessons from various teachers in fields such as hadith, lineage and history, especially linguistics. Also, in addition to Kitāb al-amthāl, he wrote works such as Kitābu Hazf min nesebi Quraysh, Kitāb al’-Anvâ’, Ansâbu Şaybân, Cemâhîru'l-kabâ'il, Garîbü'l-Qur'ân, Kitābu al-Maʿânî and Maʿânî al-Qurʾân also sheds light on his competence in many fields. Although Muarrij is a scholar who has written works in various fields, he has come to the fore mostly in linguistic sciences. In this context, qualities such as being the greatest of linguists, a scholar in Arabic, and the leader of grammarians have been attributed to him. It was also said that he was a star among Halil ibn Ahmed’s students who knew vocabulary and poetry well. Unfortunately, only two couplets of Muarrij, who is said to have been a poet and the author of many poems in addition to his knowledge of poetry, have survived to the present day. It has been stated that these two couplets are the best poems ever written on the subject on which they were written. Muarrij’s Kitāb al-amthāl is the second book written in the field of proverbs that has survived to the present day. In addition to proverbs, this book contains Arabic words, unfamiliar words, itbaʿ type words, poems, hadiths and a verse from the Quran. Although the author usually explained the unfamiliar words, he included in his work by bringing witnesses from the poem, he rarely mentioned the parable in which it was included. While it is seen that he used the hadiths and itbaʿs in his book as proverbs, he brought the verse of the Quran as a witness to the meaning of a word. The author mentioned many poems in his work, used poems as a source of istishhad for the explanation of unfamiliar words while explaining proverbs or to show that the proverbs he mentioned in his work were mentioned in poems. Apart from these, it is also seen that he included poems without any purpose and did not provide an explanation for them. For a long time, in the writing of proverbs books, the historical method, which corresponds to including events and stories related to the proverbs, or the lexical method, which envisages commenting on the strange words in the text, touching on the nuances between word groups, including grammatical analysis and making istishhad for them, have been followed. Kitāb al-amthāl, which was written by using the lexical method of these two methods, is accepted as the first work that has survived to the present day written with the lexical method in proverb literature. It can be said that Muarrij’s identity as a grammarian and lexicographer was effective in writing the work with this method. Due to these features, Kitāb al-amthāl is a book that has played a pioneering role in the formation of some understandings and traditions in proverb literature. As a matter of fact, it is the first book of proverbs in which a proverb was classified according to the time and geography in which it appeared, the hadiths that became proverbs were included for the first time, the tradition of accepting itbâʿs as proverbs was started. Kitāb al-amthāl is a work that is accepted in the proverb literature and continues the understandings it puts forward. This is demonstrated by the fact that scholars such as Abu Ubayd al-Qasım, Al-Mufaddal ibn Salama, Abu Bakr ibn Anbari, Abu Hilal al-Askari and Maidani, who wrote books on the subject, quoted and benefited from this book in their works. In addition, when the quotations and transfers made by the mentioned scholars from Kitāb al-amthāl are compared with the current version of the work, it is concluded that some of the transfers are not present in the work we have or are incomplete. This situation reveals that Kitāb al-amthāl was more voluminous and comprehensive and has not survived to the present day in its original form. (shrink)

(2008). Meta-Linguistics: Methodology and Ontology in Devitt's Ignorance of Language. Australasian Journal of Philosophy: Vol. 86, No. 4, pp. 643-656.

The author reviews the collective work Military Sciences versus the Science of War in Austria and in Russia. The reviewed book considers methodological and ideological problems of modern war and its aspects. The author draws attention to several topics, which are important for understanding modern war. The reviewed work is analyzed from the point of view of its contribution to the development of the philosophy of war. The author focuses on the peculiarities of classical researches on war, pays attention to (...) the conceptual and categorical apparatus, conducts a comparative analysis of thoughts and judgments of Russian and Austrian scholars, shows their conceptual vision of everything related to the war. The article considers the approach to the modern science of war. The possibility of its exclusion from the historical process is analyzed. The main factor preventing the elimination of war is a strong social inertia. Analyzing concepts and categories of the philosophy of war, the collective work discussing the art of war, strategy, and the meaning of war. Strategy, even being divided into military and political one, is a part of the art of war. The review’s author considers the views on philosophical foundations of war of Russian and Austrian scholars, who are in search for moral basis for countering this social and political phenomenon. It is noted that analyzing the views on the nature of war of scientists in Austria and Russia, the political ambitions of their nations should be taken into account. The monograph emphasizes that an effective opposition to militarism should be based on an analysis of its nature and the real historical situation. (shrink)

The necessity of the study of mistakes of bilingual students in the use of nominal parts of speech is grounded in the article, it provides valuable material for scientific and methodological conclusions, as these mistakes reflect linguistic, psychological and pedagogical aspects that affect the ability of schoolchildren to learn peculiarities of using nominal parts of speech of Russian language. In this regard, ascertaining experiment with pupils of schools with native teaching language was held. Students were offered the tasks based on (...) formation of the four types of competence: language, linguistic, communicative and cultural. The results of the experiment made possible to reveal numerous mistakes in using nominal parts of speech in oral speech and in writing of students. These mistakes are a consequence of the complexity of semantic and grammatical nature of the names in the Russian language, of interfering influence of the native language and as well are explained by the imperfection of the content and methods of teaching nominal parts of speech at school. (shrink)

Linguistic choices have different attributions beyond their literal meaning according to their contexts. This paper looks at the variations in the discourses seen in the written colonial agreements and treaties during the Malabar conquest. The study employs the archived documents of various discourses during this period as a part of power shifting from the local elites to the colonial power. It explores how power is intertwined in the linguistic choices of different communication files. The study employs a hybrid methodology (...) of forensic linguistics and legal history. The analysis progresses in two phases: i) the linguistic attributions of power in the communications between the local elites and the colonial authorities and ii) the comparative analysis of variations in the linguistic choices by the colonial authorities correlating their varying power positions over the given period. It explores the dynamics of the linguistic choices of the local elites initially as a powerful entity in communication with the colonial authorities. The analysis shows a variation in the linguistic choices of the colonial authorities that suggests how they are used to reflect the power positions on a scale from weaker to powerful along the timeline. The paper argues that the linguistic choices of the colonial communication files aided them in projecting their power to society and assisted as one of the tools for reiterating their power position in various contexts. (shrink)

Visual search studies have shown that East Asians rely more on information gathered through their extrafoveal (i.e., peripheral) vision than do Western Caucasians, who tend to rely more on information gathered using their foveal (i.e., central) vision. However, the reasons for this remain unclear. Cognitive linguists suggest that the difference is attributable linguistic variation, while cultural psychologists contend it is due to cultural factors. The current study used eye-tracking data collected during a visual search task to compare these explanations by (...) leveraging a semantic difference against a cultural difference to determine which view best explained strategies used on the task. The task was administered to Chinese, American, and Japanese participants with a primary focus on the Chinese participants’ behaviors since the semantic difference aligned the Chinese participants with the Americans, while their cultural affiliation aligned them with the Japanese participants. The results indicated that the Chinese group aligned more closely with the American group on most measures, suggesting that semantic differences were more important than cultural affiliation on this particular task. However, there were some results that could not be accounted for by the semantic differences, suggesting that linguistic and cultural factors might affect visual search strategies concurrently. (shrink)

Ralph Weber’s recent criticism sheds light on the methodological predicament of comparative philosophy. I examine Weber’s analytical tool and argue that its general applicability and potential unbridled use can lead to a conflict between its own legitimacy and the legitimacy of comparative philosophy as an established sui generis sub-discipline of philosophy which largely functions as “intercultural” or “trans-cultural philosophy”. I defend the cultural approach, and argue that comparative philosophy should be viewed as philosophical data analysis from different (...) spatiotemporal origins, in order to achieve better explanatory power for philosophical study. I point out that philosophy in China has its own peculiar methodological predicament. The comparative study of philosophy is a joint project of inter-cultural dialogue that rests on the collective effort of global participants. (shrink)

I compare the tasks that Noam Chomsky and W. V. Quine assign the grammarian and point out that in many cases where Chomsky sees a question of fact Quine sees only a question of convenience. I argue that these differences are attributable, at least in part, to a difference in view concerning the data. Chomsky relies mostly on a speaker's reports of his linguistic intuitions. Quine finds this source methodologically moot. I develop a series of arguments that draw on Quine's (...) theory of radical translation to defend Quine's doubts. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Comparative discourse analysis emerged in France, more precisely in the CEDISCOR laboratory of the Sorbonne Nouvelle University – Paris 3, around the year 2000. Currently, it is being implemented in Brazil within the Diálogo group (CNPq/USP). The purpose of this article is to reflect on the theoretical and methodological possibilities involved in the practise of Bakhtinian-inspired comparative discourse analysis in Brazil. To this end, we start from a theoretical reflection on the notion of category (of analysis). We (...) investigate, on the one hand, how the notion of category was already present in the creation of CEDISCOR and comparative discourse analysis in France, when one sought to determine “comparable categories”; on the other hand, we show how the creation of a science by Bakhtin – metalinguistics – also starts from a revision of the notion of linguistic category, which has implications for the way Bakhtinian-inspired comparative discourse analysis can be practised in Brazil. (shrink)

Experiments on theories of reference have mostly tested referential intuitions. We think that experiments should rather be testing linguistic usage. Substantive Aim (I): to test classical description theories of proper names against usage by “elicited production.” Our results count decisively against those theories. Methodological Aim (I): Machery, Olivola, and de Blanc (2009) claim that truth-value judgment experiments test usage. Martí (2012) disagrees. We argue that Machery et al. are right and offer some results that are consistent with that conclusion. Substantive (...) Aim (II): Machery et al. provide evidence that the usage of a name varies, being sometimes descriptive, sometimes not. In seven out of eight tests of usage, we did not replicate this variation. Methodological Aim (II): to test the reliability of referential intuitions by comparing them with linguistic usage. Earlier studies led us to predict that we would find those intuitions unreliable, but we did not. Our results add to evidence that tests of referential intuition are susceptible to unpredictable wording effects. (shrink)

Comparative law is a subject always in motion. Scholarly discussion about its methodology is always vivid, in search of better tools to make the different possible comparative endeavors. The paper explores the concept of lawscape and its link with comparative legal methodology. The concept of lawscape will be linked with other relevant concepts in comparative law, like those of legal pluralism, legal transplants, legal formants and legal fluxes to make the necessary connections and find (...) its space within the tools of comparative law. (shrink)

I discuss the role of translatability in philosophical justification. I begin by discussing and defending Thomas Reid’s account of the role that facts about comparative linguistics can play in philosophical justification. Reid believes that common sense offers a reliable but defeasible form of justification. We cannot know by introspection, however, which of our judgments belong to common sense. Judgments of common sense are universal, and so he argues that the strongest evidence that a judgment is a part of (...) common sense is that it is to be found in all languages. For Reid, then, evidence that a certain distinction is to be found in all languages is evidence that the distinction is part of common sense rather than being a common local prejudice. From such a perspective, empirical work in comparative linguistics can play a defeasible justificatory role in philosophical arguments. I contrast Reid’s position with the more radical position of defenders of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage approach, such as Anna Wierzbicka, who argues that only judgments that are translatable into all natural languages are justifiable. I show how such a position is rooted in an implausible view, although one common among cognitive scientists and linguistics, about the nature of concepts, which does not allow for novel concepts. (shrink)

We investigate claims about the frequency of "know" made by philosophers. Our investigation has several overlapping aims. First, we aim to show what is required to confirm or disconfirm philosophers’ claims about the comparative frequency of different uses of philosophically interesting expressions. Second, we aim to show how using linguistic corpora as tools for investigating meaning is a productive methodology, in the sense that it yields discoveries about the use of language that philosophers would have overlooked if they (...) remained in their "armchairs of an afternoon", to use J.L. Austin’s phrase. Third, we discuss facts about the meaning of "know" that so far have been ignored in philosophy, with the aim of reorienting discussions of the relevance of ordinary language for philosophical theorizing. (shrink)

Referring to foreign legal systems for the sake of producing a convincing judicial argument has been a custom in judicial decision-making for more than a century. However, a generally accepted theoretical framework for this kind of reasoning is yet to be established. The article suggests that such a framework must answer at least the following three fundamental questions: first, what is the normative relationship, as a matter of principle, between domestic and foreign law?; second, what is the primary motive and (...) functioning of comparative legal reasoning?; and third, what methodological approach enables such reasoning to work in practice? Drawing in particular on linguistic philosophy, as well as recent work on the theory of argumentation, the article outlines a theoretical framework that addresses these questions in order to understand, evaluate and rationalise the use of comparative arguments in legal practice. (shrink)

The paper highlights the problems of the methodology of linguistics in the light of modern cultural transformations. The research object is the methodology of linguistic studies in the paradigm of postmodernism. The purpose is to substantiate the need for parity between rational and irrational approaches in the methodology of linguistic research. A point of the problem is the state inconsistency of the linguistic methodology with modern requests of global communication. In the process of research, a (...) brief analysis of postmodernism in its relationship with linguistics is given; the causes of methodological disagreements of linguistic practices are determined; the parity of rationalism and irrationalism in the interpretation of the text is declared; a philosophical substantiation of the position on the correspondence of the narrative form of linguistic methodology to the humanistic potential of postmodernism is given. The conclusion is that the requirements of the philosophy of postmodernism should become an immanent part of research in linguistic methodology. The significance is improving the efficiency of the practical implementation of linguistic research. (shrink)

Sentence comprehension - the way we process and understand spoken and written language - is a central and important area of research within psycholinguistics. This book explores the contribution of computational linguistics to the field, showing how computational models of sentence processing can help scientists in their investigation of human cognitive processes. It presents the leading computational model of retrieval processes in sentence processing, the Lewis and Vasishth cue-based retrieval mode, and develops a principled methodology for parameter estimation (...) and model comparison/evaluation using benchmark data, to enable researchers to test their own models of retrieval against the present model. It also provides readers with an overview of the last 20 years of research on the topic of retrieval processes in sentence comprehension, along with source code that allows researchers to extend the model and carry out new research. Comprehensive in its scope, this book is essential reading for researchers in cognitive science. (shrink)

The absence of a universally recognized definition of national minority is perceived as problematic by legal scholars on the international level as well as in domestic jurisdictions [Kymlicka, Will. 2015. Solidarity in diverse societies: Beyond neoliberal multiculturalism and welfare chauvinism. _Comparative Migration Studies_. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40878-015-0017-4, Ringelheim, Julie. 2010. Minority Rights in a Time of Multiculturalism-The Evolving Scope of the Framework Convention on the Protection of National Minorities. _Human rights law review_. https://doi.org/10.1093/hrlr/ngp038, Velázquez, Elisa Ortega. 2017. Minority rights for immigrants: From Multiculturalism (...) to Civic Participation. _Mexican Law Review_, no. 1., Dimitras, Panayote Elias. 2004. _Recognition of minorities in Europe: Protecting rights and dignity_. London: Minority Rights Group International]. National minority under Czech law is defined by the Act on National Minorities, and the definition combines the objective and subjective criteria of Capotorti’s [Capotorti, Francesco. 1977. _Study on the Rights of Persons belonging to Ethnic, Religious and Linguistic Minorities_, UN Document E/CN.4/Sub.2/384/Add.1–7. p. 96] and Deschênes’ [Deschênes, Jules. 1985. _Proposal Concerning a Definition of the Term Minority_. UN Document E/CN.4/Sub.2/1985/31. paragraph 181] definitions. However, the Czech Minority Act makes a distinction between ‘minorities that have traditionally and for a long time resided in the territory of the Czech Republic’ (§§ 8–12) and other minority groups, while there is no explicit criterion for differentiating among these groups objectively. Such absence of clearcut criteria is often relevant when certain minority groups claim unfavourable treatment due to the authorities’ perception of such national groups as being ‘immigrant’ as opposed to ‘autochthonous’. Additionally, recent case-law has shown that the most ‘traditional’ groups residing in the Czech territory, such as Moravians or Silesians, can equally lack state support, while it is typically argued by Courts that such groups lack ‘distinct features’, be it ethnic, linguistic and cultural, from the majority population and thus do not fall under the legal definition of national minorities (Verdict of the Supreme Administrative Court of the Czech Republic, Ref No 7 As 324/2020-42, of 17 August 2021; Verdict of the Regional Court in Brno, Ref No 62 A 35/2020 − 186, of 8 October 2020). This paper combines doctrinal legal analysis with a socio-legal approach. The language of legislative acts and court verdicts is assessed with the methodology of critical discourse analysis, specifically the discourse-historical approach [Reisigl, Martin, and Ruth Wodak. 2015. The Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA). In _Methods of Critical Discourse Studies_, 3rd edition, eds. Ruth Wodak and Michael Meyer, 23–61. London: Sage]. I focus on nomination, predication and argumentation strategies [Wodak, Ruth. 2009. The semiotics of racism: A critical discourse-historical analysis. In _Discourse, of Course: An overview of Research in Discourse studies_, ed. Jan Renkema. 311–326. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company] used by the judges in court verdicts and on the role of perceived ‘tradition’ of certain groups’ residence in the territory of the Czech Republic on their access to state support or, on the contrary, their marginalization. It is concluded that the current state of the Czech law does not allow for the spatial dynamics of minority groups, which are mostly apprehended as fixed categories based on the 19th century idea of nation states and on the 1920s perception of the Czechoslovak nation after the breakdown of the Austro-Hungarian empire. Such approach does not allow for accommodating the rights for more up-to-date categories or for critical revisiting of the catalogue of minority groups as it was defined in the early 20th century. (shrink)