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Cross-linguistic semantics investigating how languages package and express meanings differently is central to the linguistic quest to understand the nature of human language. This set of studies explores and demonstrates cross-linguistic semantics as practised in the natural semantic metalanguage (NSM) framework, originated by Anna Wierzbicka. The opening chapters give a state-of-the-art overview of the NSM model, propose several theoretical innovations and advance a number of original analyses in connection with names and naming, clefts and other specificational sentences, and discourse anaphora. Subsequent chapters describe and analyse diverse phenomena in ten languages from multiple families, geographical locations, and cultural settings around the globe. Three substantial studies document how the metalanguage of NSM semantic primes can be realised in languages of widely differing types: Amharic (Ethiopia), Korean, and East Cree. Each constitutes a lexicogrammatical portrait in miniature of the language concerned. Other chapters probe topics such as inalienable possession in Koromu (Papua New Guinea), epistemic verbs in Swedish, hyperpolysemy in Bunuba (Australia), the expression of "momentariness" in Berber, ethnogeometry in Makasai (East Timor), value concepts in Russian, and virtuous emotions in Japanese. This book will be valuable for linguists working on language description, lexical semantics, or the semantics of grammar, for advanced students of linguistics, and for others interested in language universals and language diversity.
This volume is a comprehensive, up-to-date, and readable introduction to linguistic meaning. While partial to conceptual and typological approaches, the book also presents results from formal approaches. Throughout, the focus is on grammatical meaning -- the way languages delineate universal semantic space and encode it in grammatical form. Subjects covered by the author include: the domain of linguistic semantics and the basic tools, assumptions, and issues of semantic analysis; semantic properties of entities, events, and thematic roles; language and space; tense, aspect, and the internal structure and temporal ordering of events; modality, negation, and the epistemology of the speaker; and modification and attribution. In contrast to most current treatments of semantics, this book is accessible to the beginning student of semantics and linguistics and also useful to the advanced practitioner. A textbook and reference work in a single volume, it can be used in a number of disciplines: psychology, computer science, and anthropology as well as linguistics.
Until recently, most linguistic theories as well as theories of cognition have avoided use of the notion of continuity. At the moment, however, several linguistic trends, sharing a preoccupation with semantico-cognitive problems (e.g. cognitive grammars, 'psychomechanics', 'enunciative theories'), are trying to go beyond the constraints imposed by discrete approaches. At the same time, mathematical (e.g. differential geometry and dynamical systems) and computer science tools (e.g. connectionism) have been proposed that can be used for modelling of continuous linguistic phenomena. In this volume, linguists, philosophers, mathematicians and computer scientists discuss which semantic phenomena (linked to the lexicon, to grammatical theories or to syntactic structures) call for continuous models and which formalisation tools can contribute to the development of such models. The first part of the book is devoted to linguistic issues, the second part deals with modelling issues. Many important questions are raised in the discussion, for instance: Is continuity just a convenient representation of gradual yet discrete facts, or is it an intrinsic characteristic of semantic phenomena? How can the introduction of continuity be reconciled with a methodology based on the falsifiability of theories? What is the link between continuity and Gestalt theory? Can linguistic continuity be accounted for by mathematical models? What about statistical models? How can continuity be implemented on a digital and therefore discrete machine?
Preface -- 1. The semantics of tense, aspect and modality in the languages of the world / Lotte Hogeweg, Helen de Hoop & Andrej Malchukov -- 2. Incompatible categories: Resolving the 'present perfective paradox' / Andrej L. Malchukov -- 3. The perfective/imperfective distinction: Coercion or aspectual operators? / Corien Bary -- 4. Lexical and compositional factors in the aspectual system of Adyghe / Peter M. Arkadiev -- 5. Event structure of non-culminating accomplishments / Sergei Tatevosov & Mikhail Ivanov -- 6. The grammaticalised use of the Burmese verbs la 'come' and .wà 'go' / Nicoletta Romeo -- 7. Irrealis in Yurakaré and other languages: On the cross-linguistic consistency of an elusive category / Rik van Gijn & Sonja Gipper -- 8. On the selection of mood in complement clauses / Rui Marques -- 9. 'Out of control' marking as circumstantial modality in St'át'imcets / Henry Davis, Lisa Matthewson & Hotze Rullmann -- 10. Modal geometry: Remarks on the structure of a modal map / Kees de Schepper & Joost Zwarts -- 11. Acquisitive modals / Johan van der Auwera, Petar Kehayov & Alice Vittrant -- 12. Conflicting constraints on the interpretation of modal auxiliaries / Ad Foolen & Helen de Hoop -- 13. Modality and context dependence / Fabrice Nauze -- 14. Verbal semantic shifts under negation, intensionality, and imperfectivity: Russian genitive objects / Barbara H. Partee & Vladimir Borschev -- 15. The Estonian partitive evidential: Some notes on the semantic parallels between aspect and evidential categories / Anne Tamm -- Index.
In 1973 a workshop was held at The University of Western Ontario on topics of common interest to philosophers and linguists. This volume con tains most of the papers presented at the workshop. Also included are previously unpublished essays by R. Dougherty and H. Lasnik as well as a comment on G. Lakoff's paper by B. van Fraassen. K. Donnellan's paper was presented at the workshop and subsequently appeared in The Philosophical Review. We thank the editors of this journal for permission to publish the paper here. The papers by D. Lewis, R. Stalnaker, G. Lakoff, B. Partee and H. Herzberger appeared earlier in Journal of Philosophical Logic by arrangement of the editors with B. van Fraassen and D. Reidel Publishing Company. The editors thank the officers of The University of Western Ontario for making the workshop possible and Pauline Campbell for making the workshop work. THE EDITORS DAVID LEWIS COUNTERFACTUALS AND COMPARATIVE POSSIBILITY* In the last dozen years or so, our understanding of modality has been much improved by means of possible-world semantics: the project of analyzing modal language by systematically specifying the conditions under which a modal sentence is true at a possible world. I hope to do the same for counterfactual conditionals. I write A 0-C for the counter factual conditional with antecedent A and consequent C. It may be read as 'H it were the case that A, then it would be the case that C' or some more idiomatic paraphrase thereof.
In opposition to the classical set theory of natural language, Novák's highly original monograph offers a theory based on alternative and fuzzy sets. This new approach is firmly grounded in semantics and pragmatics, and accounts for the vagueness inherent in natural language-filling a large gap in our current knowledge. The theory will foster fruitful debate among researchers in linguistics and artificial intellegence.
This book presents an innovative and novel approach to linguistic semantics, beginning with the idea that language can be described as a system for the expression of linguistic Meanings as particular surface forms or Texts. Semantics is specifically that system of rules that ensures a correct transition from a Semantic Representation of the Meaning of a family of synonymous sentences to the Deep Syntactic Representation of a particular sentence. Framed in the terms of Meaning-Text linguistics, this volume discusses in detail the problems of Semantic Representation including the semantic structure of utterances, the semantics of Causation in English, and communicative, or information, structure. Based on the author's life-long dedication to the study of the semantics and syntax of natural language, this book is a paradigm-shifting contribution to the language sciences whose originality and daring will make it essential reading for linguists, anthropologists, semioticians, and computational linguists.
This book presents an innovative and novel approach to linguistic semantics, starting from the idea that language can be described as a mechanism for the expression of linguistic Meanings as particular surface forms, or Texts. Semantics is specifically that system of rules that ensures a transition from a Semantic Representation of the Meaning of a family of synonymous sentences to the Deep-Syntactic Representation of a particular sentence. Framed in the terms of Meaning-Text linguistics, the present volume closes the publication of the three volume series. It discusses in detail several linguistic notions crucial to the development of Meaning-Text models of natural languages: semantic and syntactic actants, government pattern, lexical functions, linguistic connotations, phrasemes, the meaning of grammatical cases, and linguistic dependencies. The notions under analysis are illustrated from a variety of languages. Reflecting the author’s life-long dedication to the study of the semantics and syntax of natural language, this book is a paradigm-shifting contribution to the language sciences, whose originality and daring will make it essential reading for linguists, anthropologists, semioticians, and computational linguists.
This collection of papers addresses context-dependence and methods for dealing with it. The book also records comments to the papers and the authors' replies to the comments. In this way, the contributions themselves are contextually dependent. It represents an inquiry into the activities on the semantics side of the pragmatics boundary.
