Lexical Meaning in Context

Lexical Meaning in Context

Author: Nicholas Asher

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2011-03-17

Total Pages: 345

ISBN-13: 1139501313

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This is a book about the meanings of words and how they can combine to form larger meaningful units, as well as how they can fail to combine when the amalgamation of a predicate and argument would produce what the philosopher Gilbert Ryle called a 'category mistake'. It argues for a theory in which words get assigned both an intension and a type. The book develops a rich system of types and investigates its philosophical and formal implications, for example the abandonment of the classic Church analysis of types that has been used by linguists since Montague. The author integrates fascinating and puzzling observations about lexical meaning into a compositional semantic framework. Adjustments in types are a feature of the compositional process and account for various phenomena including coercion and copredication. This book will be of interest to semanticists, philosophers, logicians and computer scientists alike.


Lexical Meaning

Lexical Meaning

Author: M. Lynne Murphy

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2010-10-28

Total Pages: 275

ISBN-13: 113949337X

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The ideal introduction for students of semantics, Lexical Meaning fills the gap left by more general semantics textbooks, providing the teacher and the student with insights into word meaning beyond the traditional overviews of lexical relations. The book explores the relationship between word meanings and syntax and semantics more generally. It provides a balanced overview of the main theoretical approaches, along with a lucid explanation of their relative strengths and weaknesses. After covering the main topics in lexical meaning, such as polysemy and sense relations, the textbook surveys the types of meanings represented by different word classes. It explains abstract concepts in clear language, using a wide range of examples, and includes linguistic puzzles in each chapter to encourage the student to practise using the concepts. 'Adopt-a-Word' exercises give students the chance to research a particular word, building a portfolio of specialist work on a single word.


How Words Mean

How Words Mean

Author: Vyvyan Evans

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2009-09-10

Total Pages: 396

ISBN-13: 0199234663

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How Words Mean introduces a new approach to the role of words and other linguistic units in the construction of meaning. It does so by addressing the interaction between non-linguistic concepts and the meanings encoded in language. It develops an account of how words are understood when we produce and hear language in situated contexts of use. It proposes two theoretical constructs, the lexical concept and the cognitive model. These are central to the accounts of lexicalrepresentation and meaning construction developed, giving rise to the Theory of Lexical Concepts and Cognitive Models (or LCCM Theory).Vyvyan Evans integrates and advances recent developments in cognitive science, particularly in cognitive linguistics and cognitive psychology. He builds a framework for the understanding and analysis of meaning that is at once descriptively adequate and psychologically plausible. In so doing he also addresses current issues in lexical semantics and semantic compositionality, polysemy, figurative language, and the semantics of time and space, and writes in a way that will be accessible tostudents of linguistics and cognitive science at advanced undergraduate level and above.


Terms in Context

Terms in Context

Author: Jennifer Pearson

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing

Published: 1998-05-15

Total Pages: 259

ISBN-13: 9027298920

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Terms in Context applies the methodology that has been developed over the last two decades in corpus linguistics to the relatively new and still little developed field of corpus-based terminography. While corpora are already being used by some terminologists for the identification of terms and retrieval of contextual fragments, this book describes the first attempt to use corpora for terminography in much the same way as large general reference corpora are already being used for general language lexicography. The author goes beyond the standard problem of identifying terms as opposed to non-terminological lexical items in text and focuses on identifying metalanguage patterns which point to the presence in text of (parts of) reusable definitions of terms. The author examines these patterns and shows how the information which they contain can be retrieved and used as input for terminological entries. Terms in Context should be of interest to ‘traditional’ terminologists who have not previously considered adopting a corpus-based approach to their work or at least not on the scale proposed here; to ‘modern’ terminologists who use text primarily for the identification of terms and the retrieval of contextual examples; to those in the corpus linguistic community who have hitherto used general language corpora for the purposes of lexicography and have not previously considered using special purpose corpora for more specific lexicography studies; and to academics in the ESP/LSP community who are interested in showing students how to use text as a means of ascertaining the meaning of terms.


Words and the Grammar of Context

Words and the Grammar of Context

Author: Paul Kay

Publisher: Center for the Study of Language and Information Publications

Published: 1997-02-13

Total Pages: 281

ISBN-13: 9781881526186

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Research in linguistic semantics may be roughly divided into two broad traditions. Students concerned with lexical fields and lexical domains ('lexical semanticists') have interested themselves in the paradigmatic relations of contrast that obtain among related lexical items and the substantive detail of how particular lexical items map to the nonlinguistic objects they stand for. 'Formal semanticists' (those who study the combinatorial properties of word meanings) have been mostly unconcerned with these issues, concentrating rather on how the meanings of individual words, whatever their internal structure may be and however they may be paradigmatically related to one another, combine into the meanings of phrases and sentences (and recently, to some extent, texts).


Understanding Semantics

Understanding Semantics

Author: Sebastian Loebner

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-04-23

Total Pages: 275

ISBN-13: 1134647158

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This series provides approachable, yet authoritative, introductions to all the major topics in linguistics. Ideal for students with little or no prior knowledge of linguistics, each book carefully explains the basics, emphasising understanding of the essential notions rather than arguing for a particular theoretical position. Understanding Semantics offers a complete introduction to linguistic semantics. The book takes a step-by-step approach, starting with the basic concepts and moving through the central questions to examine the methods and results of the science of linguistic meaning. Understanding Semantics unites the treatment of a broad scale of phenomena using data from different languages with a thorough investigation of major theoretical perspectives. It leads the reader from their intuitive knowledge of meaning to a deeper understanding of the use of scientific reasoning in the study of language as a communicative tool, of the nature of linguistic meaning, and of the scope and limitations of linguistic semantics. Ideal as a first textbook in semantics for undergraduate students of linguistics, this book is also recommended for students of literature, philosophy, psychology and cognitive science.


Lexical Ambiguity Resolution

Lexical Ambiguity Resolution

Author: Steven L. Small

Publisher: Elsevier

Published: 2013-10-22

Total Pages: 529

ISBN-13: 0080510132

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The most frequently used words in English are highly ambiguous; for example, Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary lists 94 meanings for the word "run" as a verb alone. Yet people rarely notice this ambiguity. Solving this puzzle has commanded the efforts of cognitive scientists for many years. The solution most often identified is "context": we use the context of utterance to determine the proper meanings of words and sentences. The problem then becomes specifying the nature of context and how it interacts with the rest of an understanding system. The difficulty becomes especially apparent in the attempt to write a computer program to understand natural language. Lexical ambiguity resolution (LAR), then, is one of the central problems in natural language and computational semantics research. A collection of the best research on LAR available, this volume offers eighteen original papers by leading scientists. Part I, Computer Models, describes nine attempts to discover the processes necessary for disambiguation by implementing programs to do the job. Part II, Empirical Studies, goes into the laboratory setting to examine the nature of the human disambiguation mechanism and the structure of ambiguity itself. A primary goal of this volume is to propose a cognitive science perspective arising out of the conjunction of work and approaches from neuropsychology, psycholinguistics, and artificial intelligence--thereby encouraging a closer cooperation and collaboration among these fields. Lexical Ambiguity Resolution is a valuable and accessible source book for students and cognitive scientists in AI, psycholinguistics, neuropsychology, or theoretical linguistics.


Applied Linguistics for Teachers of Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Learners

Applied Linguistics for Teachers of Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Learners

Author: Erdogan, Nabat

Publisher: IGI Global

Published: 2019-06-30

Total Pages: 529

ISBN-13: 1522584684

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Irrespective of the language (first, second, or foreign) taught, knowledge of linguistics and its application is a must for language teachers. However, most TESOL programs use general linguistics textbooks that deal with the science of linguistics (as theory), disregarding its implications (practice) for teaching English language learners. Applied Linguistics for Teachers of Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Learners is an essential scholarly publication that seeks to contribute to TESOL and language teacher education programs in order to assist educators to apply their knowledge to help linguistically and culturally diverse learners succeed in school and life. Highlighting an array of topics such as bilingualism, morphology, and sociolinguistics, this book is ideal for educators, educational programs, professionals, academicians, professors, linguists, and students.