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Conjoining Meanings
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Book Synopsis Conjoining Meanings by : Paul M. Pietroski
Download or read book Conjoining Meanings written by Paul M. Pietroski and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Paul M. Pietroski presents an ambitious new account of human languages as generative procedures that respect substantive constraints. He argues that meanings are neither concepts nor extensions, and sentences do not have truth conditions; meanings are composable instructions for how to access and assemble concepts of a special sort.
Book Synopsis The Semantics of Coordination by : Ewald Lang
Download or read book The Semantics of Coordination written by Ewald Lang and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 1984-01-01 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study is an attempt to explain coordinate conjoining as a rule-governed process of establishing specific semantic relations within and between sentences. Coordination is thus conceived of both as a basic device of linguistic complex formation and as a rather fundamental principle underlying the creation of the text. From the point of view of achieving coherence, coordinate conjoining is described in this monograph as an integrative process. Described are the conditions governing this process, the rules according to which take place, in short: the complex interaction of various linguistically identifiable features displayed by coordinate structures. Coordinate conjoining is regarded here as the result of the interplay of three factors which belong to distinct levels of semantic description: the meaning of the conjuncts, the relation between the meaning of the conjuncts and the meaning of the connectors. The step-by-step explication of the interaction of these levels in determining the semantic interpretation of coordinate structures forms the core of the present study.
Download or read book Enriched Meanings written by Ash Asudeh and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-09-15 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book develops a theory of enriched meanings for natural language interpretation that uses the concept of monads and related ideas from category theory, a branch of mathematics that has been influential in theoretical computer science and elsewhere. Certain expressions that exhibit complex effects at the semantics/pragmatics boundary live in an enriched meaning space, while others live in a more basic meaning space. These basic meanings are mapped to enriched meanings only when required compositionally, which avoids generalizing meanings to the worst case. Ash Asudeh and Gianluca Giorgolo show that the monadic theory of enriched meanings offers a formally and computationally well-defined way to tackle important challenges at the semantics/pragmatics boundary. In particular, they develop innovative monadic analyses of three phenomena - conventional implicature, substitution puzzles, and conjunction fallacies - and demonstrate that the compositional properties of monads model linguistic intuitions about these cases particularly well. The analyses are accompanied by exercises to aid understanding, and the computational tools used are available on the book's companion website. The book also contains background chapters on enriched meanings and category theory. The volume is interdisciplinary in nature, with insights from semantics, pragmatics, philosophy of language, psychology, and computer science, and will appeal to graduate students and researchers from a wide range of disciplines with an interest in natural language understanding and representation.
Book Synopsis The Science of Meaning by : Derek Ball
Download or read book The Science of Meaning written by Derek Ball and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-07-11 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By creating certain marks on paper, or by making certain sounds-breathing past a moving tongue-or by articulation of hands and bodies, language users can give expression to their mental lives. With language we command, assert, query, emote, insult, and inspire. Language has meaning. This fact can be quite mystifying, yet a science of linguistic meaning-semantics-has emerged at the intersection of a variety of disciplines: philosophy, linguistics, computer science, and psychology. Semantics is the study of meaning. But what exactly is "meaning"? What is the exact target of semantic theory? Much of the early work in natural language semantics was accompanied by extensive reflection on the aims of semantic theory, and the form a theory must take to meet those aims. But this meta-theoretical reflection has not kept pace with recent theoretical innovations. This volume re-addresses these questions concerning the foundations of natural language semantics in light of the current state-of-the-art in semantic theorising.
Book Synopsis Beyond Meaning: A Journey Across Language, Perception and Experience by : Gaetano Fiorin
Download or read book Beyond Meaning: A Journey Across Language, Perception and Experience written by Gaetano Fiorin and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-06-17 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Natural languages – idioms such as English and Cantonese, Zulu and Amharic, Basque and Nicaraguan Sign Language – allow their speakers to convey meaning and transmit meaning to one another. But what is meaning exactly? What is this thing that words convey and speakers communicate? Few questions are as elusive as this. Yet, few features are as essential to who we are and what we do as human beings as the capacity to convey meaning through language. In this book, Gaetano Fiorin and Denis Delfitto disclose a notion of linguistic meaning that is structured around three distinct, yet interconnected dimensions: a linguistic dimension, relating meaning to the linguistic forms that convey it; a material dimension, relating meaning to the material and social conditions of its environment; and a psychological dimension, relating meaning to the cognitive lives of its users. By paying special attention to the puzzle surrounding first-person reference – the way speakers exploit language to refer to themselves – and by capitalizing on a number of recent findings in the cognitive sciences, Fiorin and Delfitto develop the original hypothesis that meaningful language shares the same underlying logical and metaphysical structure of sense perception, effectively acting as a system of classification and discrimination at the interface between cognitive agents and their ecologies.
Book Synopsis The Grammar of Chinese Characters by : James Myers
Download or read book The Grammar of Chinese Characters written by James Myers and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-04-16 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Anybody who reads or writes Chinese characters knows that they obey a grammar of sorts: though numerous, they are built out of a much smaller set of constituents, often interpretable in meaning or pronunciation, that are themselves built out of an even smaller set of strokes. This book goes far beyond these basic facts to show that Chinese characters truly have a productive and psychologically real lexical grammar of the same sort seen in spoken and signed languages, with non-trivial analogs of morphology (the combination of potentially interpretable constituents), phonology (formal regularities without implications for interpretation), and phonetics (articulatory and perceptual constraints). Evidence comes from a wide variety of sources, from quantitative corpus analyses to experiments on character reading, writing, and learning. The grammatical approach helps capture how character constituents combine as they do, how strokes systematically vary in different environments, how character form evolved from ancient times to the modern simplified system, and how readers and writers are able to process or learn even entirely novel characters. This book not only provides tools for exploring the full richness of Chinese orthography, but also offers new ways of thinking about the most fundamental question in linguistic theory: what is grammar?
Book Synopsis A Companion to Chomsky by : Nicholas Allott
Download or read book A Companion to Chomsky written by Nicholas Allott and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2021-04-30 with total page 644 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A COMPANION TO CHOMSKY Widely considered to be one of the most important public intellectuals of our time, Noam Chomsky has revolutionized modern linguistics. His thought has had a profound impact upon the philosophy of language, mind, and science, as well as the interdisciplinary field of cognitive science which his work helped to establish. Now, in this new Companion dedicated to his substantial body of work and the range of its influence, an international assembly of prominent linguists, philosophers, and cognitive scientists reflect upon the interdisciplinary reach of Chomsky's intellectual contributions. Balancing theoretical rigor with accessibility to the non-specialist, the Companion is organized into eight sections—including the historical development of Chomsky's theories and the current state of the art, comparison with rival usage-based approaches, and the relation of his generative approach to work on linguistic processing, acquisition, semantics, pragmatics, and philosophy of language. Later chapters address Chomsky's rationalist critique of behaviorism and related empiricist approaches to psychology, as well as his insistence upon a "Galilean" methodology in cognitive science. Following a brief discussion of the relation of his work in linguistics to his work on political issues, the book concludes with an essay written by Chomsky himself, reflecting on the history and character of his work in his own words. A significant contribution to the study of Chomsky's thought, A Companion to Chomsky is an indispensable resource for philosophers, linguists, psychologists, advanced undergraduate and graduate students, and general readers with interest in Noam Chomsky's intellectual legacy as one of the great thinkers of the twentieth century.
Book Synopsis Language and scientific explanation by : Eran Asoulin
Download or read book Language and scientific explanation written by Eran Asoulin and published by Language Science Press. This book was released on 2020 with total page 96 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book discusses the two main construals of the explanatory goals of semantic theories. The first, externalist conception, understands semantic theories in terms of a hermeneutic and interpretive explanatory project. The second, internalist conception, understands semantic theories in terms of the psychological mechanisms in virtue of which meanings are generated. It is argued that a fruitful scientific explanation is one that aims to uncover the underlying mechanisms in virtue of which the observable phenomena are made possible, and that a scientific semantics should be doing just that. If this is the case, then a scientific semantics is unlikely to be externalist, for reasons having to do with the subject matter and form of externalist theories. It is argued that semantics construed hermeneutically is nevertheless a valuable explanatory project.
Book Synopsis The Meaning of More by : Alexis Wellwood
Download or read book The Meaning of More written by Alexis Wellwood and published by Oxford Studies in Semantics an. This book was released on 2019-08-28 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book reimagines the compositional semantics of comparative sentences using words such as more, as, too, and others. The book's central thesis entails a rejection of a fundamental assumption of degree semantic frameworks: that gradable adjectives like tall lexicalize functions from individuals to degrees, i.e., measure functions. Alexis Wellwood argues that comparative expressions in English themselves introduceÂmeasure functions; this is the case whether that morphology targets adjectives, as inÂtaller or more intelligent; nouns, as in more coffee, more coffees; verbs, such as run more, jump more; or expressions of other categories. Furthermore, she suggests that expressions that comfortably and meaningfully appear in the comparative form should be distinguished from those that do not in terms of a general notion of "measurability": a measurable predicate has a domain of application with non-trivial structure. This notion unifies the independently motivated distinctions between, for example, gradable and non-gradable adjectives, mass and count nouns, singular and plural noun phrases, and telic and atelic verb phrases. Based on careful examination of the distribution of dimensions for comparison within the class of measurable predicates, she ties the selection of measure functions to the specific nature and structure of the domain entities targeted for measurement. The book ultimately explores how, precisely, we should understand semantic theories that invoke the "nature" of domain entities: does the theory depend for its explanation on features of metaphysical reality, or something else? Such questions are especially pertinent in light of a growing body of research in cognitive science exploring the understanding and acquisition of comparative sentences.
Book Synopsis Significance in Language by : Jim Feist
Download or read book Significance in Language written by Jim Feist and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2022-01-19 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a unique perspective on meaning in language, broadening the scope of existing understanding of meaning by introducing a comprehensive and cohesive account of meaning that draws on a wide range of linguistic approaches. The volume seeks to build up a complete picture of what meaning is, different types of meaning, and different ways of structuring the same meaning across myriad forms and varieties of language across such domains, such as everyday speech, advertising, humour, and academic writing. Supported by data from psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic research, the book combines different approaches from scholarship in semantics, including formalist, structuralist, cognitive, functionalist, and semiotics to demonstrate the ways in which meaning is expressed in words but also in word order and intonation. The book argues for a revised conceptualisation of meaning toward presenting a new perspective on semantics and its wider study in language and linguistic research. This book will appeal to scholars interested in meaning in language in such fields as linguistics, semantics, and semiotics. The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.
Book Synopsis Realms of Meaning by : Thomas R. Hofmann
Download or read book Realms of Meaning written by Thomas R. Hofmann and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-05-12 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Realms of Meaning presents an accessible introduction to semantics. It provides an understanding of the way meaning works in natural languages, against a background of how we communicate with language. Avoiding theoretical terminology and linguistic theories it concentrates instead on the analysis of meaning, and looks in depth at such subjects as opposites and negatives, modal verbs, prepositions and word meanings. Examples are chosen mainly from English to provide material for the wider discussion of the principles of the subject, but European, East Asian and other languages also provide illuminating examples.
Book Synopsis Multimodality, Learning and Communication by : Jeff Bezemer
Download or read book Multimodality, Learning and Communication written by Jeff Bezemer and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-11-19 with total page 170 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This state-of-the-art account of research and theorizing brings together multimodality, learning and communication through detailed analyses of signmakers and their meaning-making in museums, hospitals, schools and the home environment. By analyzing video recordings, photographs, screenshots and print materials, Jeff Bezemer and Gunther Kress go well beyond the comfortable domains of traditional sites of (social) semiotic and multimodal research. They steer away from spurious invention and naming of ever more new and exciting domains, focusing instead on fundamentals in assembling a set of tools for current tasks: namely, describing and analyzing learning and communication in the contemporary world as one integrated field. The theory outlined in the book is grounded in the findings of the authors’ wide-ranging empirical investigations. Each chapter evaluates the work that is being done and has been done, challenging accepted wisdom and standing much of it on its head. With extensive illustrations and many examples presented to show the reach and applicability of the theory, this book is essential reading for all those working in multimodality, semiotics, applied linguistics and related areas. Images from the book are also available to view online at www.routledge.com/9780415709620/
Book Synopsis In Between Communication Theories Through One Hundred Questions by : Tomas Kačerauskas
Download or read book In Between Communication Theories Through One Hundred Questions written by Tomas Kačerauskas and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-03-02 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book takes the form of a dialogue. It presents two authors, specialized in the phenomenologу, posing questions to each other and offering complex answers for critical discussion. The book includes both presentation of different communication schools and philosophizing on the issues of communication. The authors debate numerous topics by providing the definition and etymology of communication, examining the limits of communication, and using a poli-logical base of communication. The issue which pervades all domains is that of mediation: how things, such as identities, styles, and bodies are mediated by culture, history, and tradition, and what the limits are of such mediation. This question leads to more complex issues of “mediated mediations” such that an explication of one medium is framed by another medium, leading to a question of meta-language as a fundamental, unmediated medium. This involves some fine points of mediation: perspectivity, discursivity, ethics of communication, ideology, private and public. Throughout the mutual, interrogative dialogue, the authors touch upon, but avoid the daunting commitment to, a theory of metacommunication, as well as the “transcendental” problematic of accessing the numerous theoretical, thematic, and historical aspects of communication.
Book Synopsis Linguistic Pragmatism and Weather Reporting by : John Collins
Download or read book Linguistic Pragmatism and Weather Reporting written by John Collins and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-03-26 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Linguistic pragmatism claims that what we literally say goes characteristically beyond what the linguistic properties themselves mandate. In this book, John Collins provides a novel defence of this doctrine, arguing that linguistic meaning alone fails to fix truth conditions. While this position is supported by a range of theorists, Collins shows that it naturally follows from a syntactic thesis concerning the relative sparseness of what language alone can provide to semantic interpretation. Language-and by extension meaning-provides constraints upon what a speaker can literally say, but does not characteristically encode any definite thing to say. Collins then defends this doctrine against a range of alternatives and objections, focusing in particular on an analysis of weather reports: 'it is raining/snowing/sunny'. Such reporting is mostly location-sensitive in the sense that the utterance is true or not depending upon whether it is raining/snowing/sunny at the location of the utterance, rather than some other location. Collins offers a full analysis of the syntax, semantics, and pragmatics of weather reports, including many novel data. He shows that the constructions lack the linguistic resources to support the common literal locative readings. Other related phenomena are discussed such as the Saxon genitive, colour predication, quantifier domain restriction, and object deletion.
Book Synopsis Reflections on the Liar by : Bradley Armour-Garb
Download or read book Reflections on the Liar written by Bradley Armour-Garb and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017-06-23 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In recent years there have been a number of books-both anthologies and monographs-that have focused on the Liar Paradox and, more generally, on the semantic paradoxes, either offering proposed treatments to those paradoxes or critically evaluating ones that occupy logical space. At the same time, there are a number of people who do great work in philosophy, who have various semantic, logical, metaphysical and/or epistemological commitments that suggest that they should say something about the Liar Paradox, yet who have said very little, if anything, about that paradox or about the extant projects involving it. The purpose of this volume is to afford those philosophers the opportunity to address what might be described as reflections on the Liar.
Book Synopsis The Semantics of Coordination by : Ewald Lang
Download or read book The Semantics of Coordination written by Ewald Lang and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 1984-01-01 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study is an attempt to explain coordinate conjoining as a rule-governed process of establishing specific semantic relations within and between sentences. Coordination is thus conceived of both as a basic device of linguistic complex formation and as a rather fundamental principle underlying the creation of the text. From the point of view of achieving coherence, coordinate conjoining is described in this monograph as an integrative process. Described are the conditions governing this process, the rules according to which take place, in short: the complex interaction of various linguistically identifiable features displayed by coordinate structures. Coordinate conjoining is regarded here as the result of the interplay of three factors which belong to distinct levels of semantic description: the meaning of the conjuncts, the relation between the meaning of the conjuncts and the meaning of the connectors. The step-by-step explication of the interaction of these levels in determining the semantic interpretation of coordinate structures forms the core of the present study.
Book Synopsis What are (Un)Acceptability and (Un)Grammaticality? How do They Relate to One Another and to Interpretation? by : Susagna Tubau
Download or read book What are (Un)Acceptability and (Un)Grammaticality? How do They Relate to One Another and to Interpretation? written by Susagna Tubau and published by Frontiers Media SA. This book was released on 2021-01-11 with total page 152 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
