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.

Lexical Analysis
Lexical Analysis

Author: Patrick Hanks

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2013-01-25

Total Pages: 479

ISBN-13: 0262312867

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A lexically based, corpus-driven theoretical approach to meaning in language that distinguishes between patterns of normal use and creative exploitations of norms. In Lexical Analysis, Patrick Hanks offers a wide-ranging empirical investigation of word use and meaning in language. The book fills the need for a lexically based, corpus-driven theoretical approach that will help people understand how words go together in collocational patterns and constructions to make meanings. Such an approach is now possible, Hanks writes, because of the availability of new forms of evidence (corpora, the Internet) and the development of new methods of statistical analysis and inferencing. Hanks offers a new theory of language, the Theory of Norms and Exploitations (TNE), which makes a systematic distinction between normal and abnormal usage—between rules for using words normally and rules for exploiting such norms in metaphor and other creative use of language. Using hundreds of carefully chosen citations from corpora and other texts, he shows how matching each use of a word against established contextual patterns plays a large part in determining the meaning of an utterance. His goal is to develop a coherent and practical lexically driven theory of language that takes into account the immense variability of everyday usage and that shows that this variability is rule governed rather than random. Such a theory will complement other theoretical approaches to language, including cognitive linguistics, construction grammar, generative lexicon theory, priming theory, and pattern grammar.

Lexical Meaning in Dialogic Language Use
Lexical Meaning in Dialogic Language Use

Author: Sebastian Feller

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing

Published: 2010

Total Pages: 195

ISBN-13: 9027210268

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"Lexical Meaning in Dialogic Language Use" addresses a number of central issues in the field of lexical semantics. Starting off from an action-theoretical view of communication meaning is defined as something that speakers do in dialogic language use. Meaning as meaning-in-use opens up a new perspective on a number of aspects: how can we define the lexical unit? What about the make-up of the meaning side? Does polysemy really exist? And is encyclopaedic information to be fully integrated into the lexicon?These questions are examined along the analyses of authentic lexical material from corpora. At the end exemplary lexical entries represent both the expression and meaning side of the analyzed material, providing incentive not only for theory but also for practical applications like foreign language teaching, lexicography, translational studies, and so forth.This book will appeal to anyone interested in language use and meaning and understanding especially."

Lexical Layers of Identity
Lexical Layers of Identity

Author: Danko Šipka

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2019-05-16

Total Pages: 285

ISBN-13: 1108492711

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Provides a systematic approach to lexical indicators of cultural identity using the material of Slavic languages.

Lexical and Syntactical Constructions and the Construction of Meaning
Lexical and Syntactical Constructions and the Construction of Meaning

Author: Marjolyn Verspoor

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing

Published: 1997-01-01

Total Pages: 473

ISBN-13: 9027236542

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The basic tenet of cognitive linguistics is that every linguistic expression is a construal relation. The first section of this volume focuses on issues of such construal and presentation of information, including figure-ground relations, image-schematic structures, and the role of syntactic constructions in information structure.In sections two and three papers are presented on cross-categorial polysemy between lexical and grammatical uses of a morpheme, and between different grammatical senses, and on the relationship between earlier lexical senses and later grammatical ones.The final section of the volume brings together studies which shed further light on transitivity and argument structure. The study of transitivity necessarily entails exploration of the relationship between syntactic constructions and the pragmatics and semantics conveyed by such constructions.As a whole, this collection of papers gives new evidence on the complexity and motivation of the mapping between linguistic form and function and offers a wealth of new directions for research on the construction of meaning at every level of the sentence.

A Course Book in English Grammar
A Course Book in English Grammar

Author: Dennis Freeborn

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 1995-07-05

Total Pages: 363

ISBN-13: 1349240796

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The study of language in written texts and transcripts of speech is greatly helped by a student's abilityBB to identify and describe those prominent features of the grammar which make one variety of English different from another. A Course Book in English Grammar looks at many of the problems encountered by students and encourages them to find their own answers and to assess hypotheses about grammatical description. There are activities at each step, using authentic written and spoken data. Using 'real' texts avoids the faking of evidence to be found in some traditional grammar books, and interesting problems of analysis that arise in such texts are a source of useful discussion. The book has been thoroughly revised and expanded for this second edition, which contains additional chapters and material. A new opening chapter discusses the concept of 'grammatically correct English' and the differences between descriptive, prescriptive and proscriptive approaches to the writing of grammar books. The book is a systematic description of Standard English, and examples of contemporary spoken dialectal grammar are introduced and analysed to illustrate the differences between standard and nonstandard usage. A Course Book in English Grammar will prove invaluable to all students of English Language.

Selected Lexical and Grammatical Issues in the Meaning-text Theory
Selected Lexical and Grammatical Issues in the Meaning-text Theory

Author: Leo Wanner

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing

Published: 2007-01-01

Total Pages: 396

ISBN-13: 9027230943

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The Meaning Text Theory (MTT) is a lexicon-centred and dependency-based theory for the description of language using a holistic model that incorporates semantics, syntax, morphology and lexis. This volume, prepared on the occasion of Igor Mel'cuk's 70th birthday, offers a cross-section of the current advances in MTT and its applications. The first part of the book focuses on lexical phenomena that are still largely neglected in mainstream linguistics: sound symbolism as manifested by ideophones, and idiosyncratic lexical relations as manifested by lexical functions (LFs). In particular, LFs are addressed from different angles (including the introduction of new “standard” LFs, the argument structure and semantic decomposition of lexical relations captured by LFs, automatic recognition of LF-instances in corpora, and the use of LFs in terminology and natural language processing). The second part of the book deals with such prominent model-oriented issues as semantic paraphrasing in MTT, the role of phrase structure in MTT and syntactic analysis within MTT.

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.

Lexical meaning as a testable hypothesis
Lexical meaning as a testable hypothesis

Author: Nadav Sabar

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company

Published: 2018-04-15

Total Pages: 162

ISBN-13: 9027264341

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This book offers an original treatment of the lexical form look. The work is innovative in that it establishes that the Columbia School conception of an invariant meaning – hitherto found primarily in grammar – is equally operative in core vocabulary items like look and see. The upshot is that grammar and lexicon are both amenable to synchronic monosemic analysis. The invariant meaning proposed for look explains the full range of its distribution, without the need to posit as linguistic units ‘look-noun’ and ‘look-verb’, ‘look-visual’ and ‘look-intellectual’, or constructions such as have-a-look, look-like, etc. The analysis places look in opposition with see, seem and appear for which tentative meanings are posited as well. The hypotheses are supported through qualitative analyses of attested examples and quantitative predictions tested in a massive corpus. These predictions offer new knowledge about the distribution of look, see and other forms that may provide useful for other scholars.