Semantic categories in the world's languages often reflect a historical process of chaining: A name for one referent is extended to a conceptually related referent, and from there on to other referents, producing a chain of exemplars that all bear the same name. The beginning and end points of such a chain might in principle be rather dissimilar. There is also evidence supporting a contrasting picture: Languages tend to support efficient, informative communication, often through semantic categories in which all (...) exemplars are similar. Here, we explore this tension through computational analyses of existing cross-language naming and sorting data from the domain of household containers. We find formal evidence for historical semantic chaining, and evidence that systems of categories in this domain nonetheless support near-optimally efficient communication. Our results demonstrate that semantic chaining is compatible with efficient communication, and they suggest that chaining may be constrained by the functional need for efficient communication. (shrink)

In his latest book, Frank Ankersmit proposes an original theory of historical representation. In this review I focus on what I take to be his most important semantic points with respect to representation, meaning, truth, and reference. First, I provide a short summary of the book. Second, I explore his semantics in terms of aspects and compare it with a different account inspired by the Fregean notion of mode of presentation. As my examination shows, Ankersmit’s analysis faces the problem (...) of “loosing indirectness” and, moreover, there seems to exist an alternative and plausible view that does not suffer from this problem. Finally, I conclude with a couple of comments on the Copernican Revolution advocated in the book. (shrink)

The book presents two fundamental theories that characterize the cultural-historical perspective in cognitive semantics: the Four-Level Theory of Cognitive Development (FLTCD) and the Sociocultural Theory of Lexical Complexes (STLC) as well as their application to the analysis of specific material. In particular, the book analyzes the sociocultural history of the machine metaphor, specifically its use in the texts of René Descartes and Francis Bacon. The practical embodiment of STLC is demonstrated through the analysis of lexical complexes such as otkryvat' (...) 'to open,' kamen' 'stone,' and intelligencija 'intelligentsia.' In the final chapter of the monograph, FLTCD and STLC are used for the diachronic analysis of semantic change. The monograph will be of interest to a wide range of linguists, psychologists, cultural anthropologists, and philosophers who consider language as a sociocultural phenomenon. (shrink)

Contains revised papers from a September 1996 symposium which provided a forum for synchronically and diachronically oriented scholars to exchange ideas and for ...

This new and important study of semantic change examines how new meanings arise through language use, especially the various ways in which speakers and writers experiment with uses of words and constructions in the flow of strategic interaction with addressees. In the last few decades there has been growing interest in exploring systemicities in semantic change from a number of perspectives including theories of metaphor, pragmatic inferencing, and grammaticalization. Like earlier studies, these have for the most part been based on (...) data taken out of context. This book is the first detailed examination of semantic change from the perspective of historical pragmatics and discourse analysis. Drawing on extensive corpus data from over a thousand years of English and Japanese textual history, Traugott and Dasher show that most changes in meaning originate in and are motivated by the associative flow of speech and conceptual metonymy. (shrink)

Prototype theory makes a crucial distinction between central and peripheral sense of words. Geeraerts explores the implications of this model for a theory of semantic change, in the first full-scale treatment of the impact of the most recent developments in lexicological theory on the study of meaning change. He identifies structural features of the development of word meanings which follow from a prototype-theoretical model of semantic structure, and incorporates these diachronic prototypicality effects into a theory of meaning change.

Innovative, data-driven methods provide more rigorous and systematic evidence for the description and explanation of diachronic semantic processes. The volume systematises, reviews, and promotes a range of empirical research techniques and theoretical perspectives that currently inform work across the discipline of historical semantics. In addition to emphasising the use of new technology, the potential of current theoretical models (e.g. within variationist, sociolinguistic or cognitive frameworks) is explored along the way.

This article is currently available as a free download on Ingenta Connect.

In these fifteen essays, one Of Germany's most distinguished philosophers of history invokes an extraordinary array of witnesses and texts to explore the concept of historical time. The witnesses include politicians, philosophers, theologians, and poets, and the texts range from Renaissance paintings to the dreams of German citizens in the 1930s. Using these remarkable materials, Koselleck investigates the relationship of history to language, and of language to the deeper movements of human understanding.Reinhart Koselleck is Professor of the Theory of (...) History at the University of Bielefeld. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Der Islam Jahrgang: 92 Heft: 1 Seiten: 85-123.

The article shows that in the Archaic period the Greeks did not possess a term equivalent to Classical ποιητής “poet-composer.” The principal meaning of the word άοιδός, often claimed to correspond to ποιητής and modern English poet, was “tuneful” or “singer” . The secondary meaning “poet working in the hexameter medium” is limited to the post-Iliadic hexameter corpus. It is furthermore possible to show that the simplex άοιδός was backderived from a compound. More specifically, following Hermann Koller, I propose that (...) the secondary meaning, being an epic innovation, developed from the compound *θεσπιαοιδός “singer of things divine,” whereas the primary meaning “singer” may go back to έπαοιδός, which later acquired the specialized meaning “singer of incantations.”. (shrink)

In these fifteen essays, one Of Germany's most distinguished philosophers of history invokes an extraordinary array of witnesses and texts to explore the concept of historical time. The witnesses include politicians, philosophers, theologians, and poets, and the texts range from Renaissance paintings to the dreams of German citizens in the 1930s. Using these remarkable materials, Koselleck investigates the relationship of history to language, and of language to the deeper movements of human understanding.Reinhart Koselleck is Professor of the Theory of (...) History at the University of Bielefeld. (shrink)

The collection focuses on meaning change as a topic of interdisciplinary research.

Theories of reference have been central to analytic philosophy, and two views, the descriptivist view of reference and the causal-historical view of reference, have dominated the field. In this research tradition, theories of reference are assessed by consulting one’s intuitions about the reference of terms in hypothetical situations. However, recent work in cultural psychology (e.g., Nisbett et al. 2001) has shown systematic cognitive differences between East Asians and Westerners, and some work indicates that this extends to intuitions about philosophical (...) cases (Weinberg et al. 2001). In light of these findings on cultural differences, two experiments were conducted which explored intuitions about reference in Westerners and East Asians. Both experiments indicate that, for certain central cases, Westerners are more likely than East Asians to report intuitions that are consistent with the causal-historical view. These results constitute prima facie evidence that semantic intuitions vary from culture to culture, and the paper argues that this fact raises questions about the nature of the philosophical enterprise of developing a theory of reference. (shrink)

Semantic roles have continued to intrigue linguists for more than four decades now, starting with determining their kind and number, with their morphological expression, and with their interaction with argument structure and syntax. The focus in this volume is on typological and historical issues. The papers focus on the cross-linguistic identification of semantic-role equivalents, on the regularity of, and exceptions concerning change and grammaticalization in semantic roles, the variation of encoding the roles of direction and experiencer in specific languages, (...) presenting evidence for identifying a new semantic role of speech addressee in Caucasian languages, on semantic roles in word formation, and finally a cross-linguistic comparison of the functions and the grammaticalization of the ethical dative in some Indo-European languages. The book will be of interest to anyone involved with case and semantic roles, with the syntax-semantics interface, and with semantic change and grammaticalization. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Appendix: Necessary Truths.

In this article, I offer a provisional analysis of the philosophical semantics of "wisdom" in the thought of the New Confucian thinker Tang Junyi. I begin by providing some pointers concerning the concept of wisdom in general and situating the discourse on wisdom in comparative philosophy in the context of the later Foucault's and Pierre Hadot's historical investigations into ancient Graeco-Roman philosophy as a mode of spiritual self-cultivation and self-transformation. In the remainder of the paper, I try to describe (...) and think through what Foucault identifies as a "Cartesian moment," in which self-knowledge becomes the ultimate precondition for the ethico-spiritual project of "caring for the self," in Tang's approach of wisdom. In the course of my argument, I outline the complex relation between his vision of a renewed Confucian mode of religious practice on the one hand and his philosophical presuppositions concerning the transcendental status of subjectivity and the reflexivity of consciousness on the other. (shrink)

A recent innovation in the study of methods in the history of ideas is the introduction of elements of semantic externalism from the philosophy of language. Studies that rely on semantic externalism have done so to address particular questions of method in political theorising, including the interpretation of ‘essentially contested concepts’, and the issue of relativism in historical contextualism. In this paper, I critically review the use of semantic externalism, and associated methods such as Kripke’s causal theory of reference, (...) in the history of ideas. I explore the barriers that might prevent the use of externalism, and how studies relying on externalism seek to overcome such barriers. I then assess both the implications of relying on externalism, as well as a set of limitations. (shrink)

Paleolinguistics (or linguistic paleontology) is a scientific discipline that combines the methodology of historical linguistics with archaeological insights. Specifically, paleolinguists aim to reconstruct the linguistic expression of a particular archeological culture. In this paper I deal with the methodology of paleolinguistics since this has recently come under the scrutiny of philosophersfor instance, Mallory (2020) has argued that tools of the philosophy of language can be employed for charting the space of legitimate use of paleolinguistics, most notably the position of (...) semantic internalism. Specifically, in his view, linguistic reconstructions of the Proto-Indo-European lexicon express Sinn or sense, whereas the proto-lexicon is best understood as a model of conceptual capabilities of a particular historical community. I want to show that one can consider semantic externalism as a more fruitful alternative. In other words, I propose to see the proto lexicon as a model that shows a feedback loop between speakers’ conceptual capabilities and scaffolding of these capabilities through speakers’ interaction with the environment. I show that the process of scaffolding can be mediated by cognitive fossils which, in turn, forges a tighter methodological link between paleolinguistics, archaeology, and the study of human cognition. (shrink)

According to a common opinion, the word ‘semantics’ , derived from the Greek word semantikos , appeared for the first time, at least in modern times, in the book Essai de semantique, science de significations by M. J. A. Bréal . However, Quine says in his lectures on Carnap:As used by C. S. Peirce, “semantic” is the study of the modes of denotation of signs: whether a sign denotes its object through causal or symptomatic connection, or through imagery, or through (...) arbitrary convention and so on. This sense of semantic, namely a theory of meaning, is used also in empirical philology: empirical semantic is the study of historical changes of meanings of words.1For Bréal, semantics was a branch of general linguistics. In particular, semantics was occupied with so-called lexical meaning and its changes through time. Thus, semantics in this sense belonged to what was called “the diachronic treatment of language”. This tradition is fairly alive in contemporary linguistic theory. Quine’s description of the word ‘semantic’ in Peirce corresponds, which Quine explicitly states, to its use in philology. However, some linguists ascribe a more theoretical role to lingustic semantics. Karl Bühler is an example. In his Sprachtheorie he says that a theory of semantic functions of language is a part of theory of language.2 This account is to be found also among philosophers. It is also rather obvious that Peirce did not limit his semantic only to empirical studies. Linguists also use the word ‘semasiology’ instead of ‘semantics’; Bühler proposed the term ‘sematology’ for a general theory of symbols. (shrink)

Here, we discuss historical, philosophical and technical problems associated with relating logic and relating semantics. To do so, we proceed in three steps. First, Section 1 is devoted to providing an introduction to both relating logic and relating semantics. Second, we address the history of relating semantics and some of the main research directions and their philosophical applications. Third, we discuss some technical problems related to relating semantics, particularly whether the direct incorporation of the relation into the language of (...) relating logic is needed. The starting point for our considerations presented here is the 1st Workshop On Relating Logic and the selected papers for this issue. (shrink)

Published with the aid of a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Contains the only complete English-language text of The Concept of Truth in Formalized Languages. Tarski made extensive corrections and revisions of the original translations for this edition, along with new historical remarks. It includes a new preface and a new analytical index for use by philosophers and linguists as well as by historians of mathematics and philosophy.

In Historical Representation Frank Ankersmit seeks a juste milieu between postmodern theory and historical practice. But he still insists that the meaning of a historical representation “is not found, but made in and by [the] text.” Thus “there will be nothing, outside the text itself, that can govern or check [the conceptualization].” Accordingly, “a representation itself cannot be interpreted as one large description. I would not hesitate to say that this—and nothing else—is the central problem in the (...) philosophy of history.” On the other hand, he affirms that “a historical representation ‘is about’ a certain part of the past,” that historical debate is a “semantic quarrel not about the exact meaning of words, but about the past.” Everything hinges on how to grasp this idea of “aboutness.” I propose an alternative reading of post-positivist philosophy of science in hopes of reaching the juste milieu. The issue is whether colligatory concepts in history have a more radically constructed character than theoretical terms in natural-scientific theory, and whether, as with the latter, they can make intersubjective claims to warrant. My view is that colligatory concepts in historical representations can be conceived to refer in roughly the same way that theoretical terms do in natural-scientific theories. All the problems I find in Ankersmit’s approach come to the fore in his fruitful analogy to portrait painting. First, the personality the portrait evokes is not restricted to the representation, but is of the sitter. We are offered insight not into painting but into an actual character. That is, there is a cognitive, not simply an aesthetic, dimension to representation. Historical terms pick out something intersubjectively affirmable in reality, and discrimination is possible among rival versions. The question is how to regard—to explain and to evaluate—these underdetermined objects of consideration, not to preclude them by stipulation. (shrink)

In his development of an ontology for mathematics in line with Fregean abstractionism, Øystein Linnebo proposes criteria of identity as a mechanism for reference. This proposed mechanism appears to conflict with Saul Kripke's historical theory of names. However, Linnebo, distinguishing between semantic and metasemantic domains, asserts that no real conflict exists; while Kripke's theory is semantic, his is metasemantic. This paper posits a counter-argument, contending that Linnebo's account, contrary to his claim, indeed conflicts with Kripke's historical theory of (...) names. The paper underscores that, in Kripke's framework, the reference relation transcends the individual, inhabiting a social domain. (shrink)

From her first chapter giving a historical sketch of the main ideas to her final chapter surveying the ways in which they have influenced education in America, ...

SEMANTIC ARITHMETIC: A PREFACE John Corcoran Abstract Number theory, or pure arithmetic, concerns the natural numbers themselves, not the notation used, and in particular not the numerals. String theory, or pure syntax, concems the numerals as strings of «uninterpreted» characters without regard to the numbe~s they may be used to denote. Number theory is purely arithmetic; string theory is purely syntactical... in so far as the universe of discourse alone is considered. Semantic arithmetic is a broad subject which begins when (...) numerals are mentioned (not just used) and mentioned as names of numbers (not just as syntactic objects). Semantic arithmetic leads to many fascinating and surprising algorithms and decision procedures; it reveals in a vivid way the experiential import of mathematical propositions and the predictive power of mathematical knowledge; it provides an interesting perspective for philosophical, historical, and pedagogical studies of the growth of scientific knowledge and of the role metalinguistic discourse in scientific thought. (shrink)

The book provides a historical and systematic exposition of the semantic theory of truth formulated by Alfred Tarski in the 1930s. This theory became famous very soon and inspired logicians and philosophers. It has two different, but interconnected aspects: formal-logical and philosophical. The book deals with both, but it is intended mostly as a philosophical monograph. It explains Tarski’s motivation and presents discussions about his ideas as well as points out various applications of the semantic theory of truth to (...) philosophical problems. (shrink)

Despite a proliferation of research on Islam and Muslims in the media, very little work has focused on Muslim women, a much-debated social group that merits special consideration. This article aims to investigate how Muslim women are represented in BBC News website texts using a purpose-built corpus. The research employs analytical tools from the discourse-historical, socio-cognitive, and sociosemantic approaches to critical discourse studies. These are combined with corpus-based methodologies to investigate the semantic macrostructures that tend to be associated with (...) Muslim women and the discursive strategies employed in the representation of the hijab. The study is novel in its exhaustive approach to identifying salient and underreported issues related to Muslim women in news discourse. It also introduces a more integrated analysis that combines manual and automated techniques and tackles the quantification of qualitative results where possible. Findings suggest that Muslim women’s representations are largely restricted in terms of regional coverage. Semantic macrostructures related to conflict and crime are prevalent. The hijab remains a nodal discourse surrounding Muslim women whose function as a descriptive feature is often unclear, raising serious questions about its relevance. A number of recommendations are made for journalists to become cognizant of their own context models when reporting on Muslim women. (shrink)

In their delightfully provocative paper, “Semantics, Cross-Cultural Style,” Edouard Machery, Ron Mallon, Shaun Nichols, and Stephen Stich (2004),[1] make several striking claims about theories of reference. First, they claim: (I) Philosophical views about reference “are assessed by consulting one’s intuitions about the reference of terms in hypothetical situations” (p. B1). This claim is prompted by their observations of the role of intuitions in Saul Kripke’s refutation of the descriptivist view of proper names in favor of a causal-historical view (1980). (...) The particular intuitions they attend to are those aired in discussing Kripke’s cases of Gödel and Jonah. This prompts the next claim: (II) Those particular cases are “central” to Kripke’s refutation (p. B1). Indeed, Machery et al describe these cases as “some of the most influential thought experiments in the philosophy of reference” (p. B8). Inspired by recent work in psychology (e.g., Nisbett et al 2001) that shows “systematic cognitive differences between East Asians and Westerners” (p. B1), Machery et al predicted that there would be cultural differences in referential intuitions. They conducted some ingenious experiments on Gödel and Jonah cases to test this predication. The results in the Gödel cases, although not in the Jonah cases, confirmed their prediction, leading them to conclude: “Westerners are more likely than East Asians to report intuitions that are consistent with the causal-historical view” (p. B1). And, implicitly, they claim: (III) These results raise serious doubts about Kripke’s refutation, which relies solely on the intuitions of Westerners. They are explicit about the following bolder claim: (IV) The fact of these cultural differences “raises questions about the nature of the philosophical enterprise of developing a theory of reference” (p. B1); it points to “significant philosophical conclusions” (p.. (shrink)

The resemblance of the theory of formal consequence first offered by the fourteenth-century logician John Buridan to that later offered by Alfred Tarski has long been remarked upon. But it has not yet been subjected to sustained analysis. In this paper, I provide just such an analysis. I begin by reviewing today’s classical understanding of formal consequence, then highlighting its differences from Tarski’s 1936 account. Following this, I introduce Buridan’s account, detailing its philosophical underpinnings, then its content. This then allows (...) us to separate those aspects of Tarski’s account representing genuine historical advances, unavailable to Buridan, from others merely differing from—and occasionally explicitly rejected by—Buridan’s account. (shrink)

This paper offers a critical analysis of Ding and Liu’s (2022) contribution to the ongoing debate stemming from Machery et al.’s (2004) experimental investigation of Kripke’s Gödel Case. Machery et al. test referential intuitions on proper names among laypeople from American and Chinese backgrounds and contend that their results challenge Kripke’s refutation of descriptivism. Ding and Liu argue that descriptions in Gödel-style scenarios are ambiguous between a brute-fact and a social-fact interpretation, and Machery et al. overlook the latter. Building upon (...) this ambiguity, Ding and Liu conduct several studies, maintaining that the results reveal that Machery et al. misclassify some descriptivist answers as causal-historical. If that is the case, the challenge that experimental philosophy poses to Kripke’s refutation of descriptivism is even more substantial than Machery et al. claim. In this paper, I argue that, even granting some specific points that Ding and Liu endorse, their main experiment (Study 3) fails to provide the intended evidence. Despite the authors’ attempted rejoinders, the social-fact interpretation of the description in the Gödel Case is either circular or implicitly presupposes a referential role for the name’s causal-historical chain. Hence, in contrast to Ding and Liu’s interpretation, from their premises, they can only conclude that their main experiment’s results do not bolster Machery et al.’s (2004) challenge against Kripke’s refutation of descriptivism, but rather diminish it. (shrink)

This article aims to determine a close "polyphonic" connection between lyrics and music in choral music. The subject of this research is the synergism of literary-textual sources and polyphonic form. The object of this research is the consideration of polyphonic works for a cappella chorus by the contemporary Russian composers. Using the synthesis of research methods, which includes musicology, poetics and choral studies, the author reveals the parameters of a musical composition: literary-textual source and musical form. Detailed analysis is conducted (...) on the dialectical interaction of constructive and destructive formants of the architectonics of musical form of polyphonic compositions for chorus. Special attention is given to differentiation of the structure of the literary-textual source and attribution of the polyphonic forms of motet, madrigal, fugue, and fugato. The main conclusion lies in the paradigm of artistic correlations between the literary and musical text as paralinguistic means that are the bearers of heterogeneous information and add additional colors to the content of the composition. Emphasis is placed on the need to explore the problematic associated with the architectonics of modern choral composition, substantiated not only by the general artistic-historical potential of choral culture, but its crucial importance for modern musical art as well. The novelty lies in the analysis of polyphonic forms of a cappella choral works as multimodal texts, synthesizing the scientific achievements of linguistics and musicology. The author’s special contribution consists in examination of the compositions for a cappella chorus of A. Koroleva and Y. Evgrafov that have not previously been the object of special research, and their introduction to modern scientific discourse. (shrink)

This collection of new essays presents cutting-edge research on the semantic conception of logic, the invariance criteria of logicality, grammaticality, and logical truth. Contributors explore the history of the semantic tradition, starting with Tarski, and its historical applications, while central criticisms of the tradition, and especially the use of invariance criteria to explain logicality, are revisited by the original participants in that debate. Other essays discuss more recent criticism of the approach, and researchers from mathematics and linguistics weigh in (...) on the role of the semantic tradition in their disciplines. This book will be invaluable to philosophers and logicians alike. (shrink)