Introducing Semantics
Author: Nick Riemer
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2010-03-25
Total Pages: 477
ISBN-13: 0521851920
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAn introduction to the study of meaning in language for undergraduate students.
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Syntactic and Semantic Variation in Copular Sentences
Author: Daniel J. Wilson
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
Published: 2020-07-16
Total Pages: 177
ISBN-13: 9027260966
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis book presents a novel account of syntactic and semantic variation in copular and existential sentences in Classical Hebrew. Like many languages, the system of Classical Hebrew copular sentences is quite complex, containing zero, pronominal, and verbal forms as well as eventive and inchoative semantics. Approaching this subject from the framework of Distributed Morphology provides an elegant and comprehensive explanation for both the syntactic and semantic variation in these sentences. This book also presents a theoretical model for analyzing copular sentences in other languages included related phenomena– such as pseudo-copulas. It is also a demonstration of what can be gained by applying modern linguistic analyses to dead languages. Citing and building off previous studies on this topic, this book will be of interest to those interested in the theoretical examination of copular and existential sentences and to those interested in Classical Hebrew more specifically.
The Cognitive Variation of Semantic Structures
Author: Prakash Mondal
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2024-03-12
Total Pages: 202
ISBN-13: 1003862594
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis book explores the cognitive constraints and principles of variation in structures of linguistic meaning across languages. It unifies cognitive-semantic representations with formal-semantic representations to make a unique contribution to the study of typological generalizations and universals in natural language semantics. This unified approach not only helps reveal why semantic structures have the observed variation they have but also sheds light on the compelling cognitive and formal regularities and patterns in the variation of linguistic semantics. The book also advances the general principles of a cognitively oriented semantic typology. Lucid and topical, the book will be an indispensable resource for students and researchers of language typology, linguistics, cognitive linguistics and semantics. It will also be of interest to theoretical linguists of both cognitivist and formalist schools.
Semantic Variation
Author: Ruqaiya Hasan
Publisher: Equinox Publishing (Indonesia)
Published: 2009
Total Pages: 484
ISBN-13: 9781904768357
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe sociolinguistic turn of the 1960's has been remarkably successful: variability of language is no longer an issue open to debate. But studies of variation have by and large been restricted to the level of expression. This volume makes a contribution to a neglected area in sociolinguistics, namely variation at the level of meaning, i.e., semantic variation. The chapters in this volume discuss the results of an empirical research strongly supporting the view that systematic variation in the choice of semantic elements occurs across different social strata: mothers and their young children less than four years old showed a highly consistent, statistically significant, orientation to distinct styles of meaning, which correlated with their social positioning. The comparison of kindergarten teachers' ways of meaning with those of mothers', not surprisingly, reveal that teacher talk is an exaggerated version of middle class mothers' talk. Findings of this research are relevant to any serious discourse about equitable education.
Semantics and Morphosyntactic Variation
Author: Itamar Francez
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2017
Total Pages: 188
ISBN-13: 0198744587
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. This book explores a key issue in linguistic theory, the systematic variation in form between semantic equivalents across languages. Two contrasting views of the role of lexical meaning in the analysis of such variation can be found in the literature: (i) uniformity, whereby lexical meaning is universal, and variation arises from idiosyncratic differences in the inventory and phonological shape of language-particular functional material, and (ii) transparency, whereby systematic variation in form arises from systematic variation in the meaning of basic lexical items. In this volume, Itamar Francez and Andrew Koontz-Garboden contrast these views as applied to the empirical domain of property concept sentences - sentences expressing adjectival predication and their translational equivalents across languages. They demonstrate that property concept sentences vary systematically between possessive and predicative form, and propose a transparentist analysis of this variation that links it to the lexical denotations of basic property concept lexemes. At the heart of the analysis are qualities: mass-like model theoretic objects that closely resemble scales. The authors contrast their transparentist analysis with uniformitarian alternatives, demonstrating its theoretical and empirical advantages. They then show that the proposed theory of qualities can account for interesting and novel observations in two central domains of grammatical theory: the theory of syntactic categories, and the theory of mass nouns. The overall results highlight the importance of the lexicon as a locus of generalizations about the limits of crosslinguistic variation.
Computational approaches to semantic change
Author: Nina Tahmasebi
Publisher: Language Science Press
Published: 2021-08-30
Total Pages: 396
ISBN-13: 3961103127
DOWNLOAD EBOOKSemantic change — how the meanings of words change over time — has preoccupied scholars since well before modern linguistics emerged in the late 19th and early 20th century, ushering in a new methodological turn in the study of language change. Compared to changes in sound and grammar, semantic change is the least understood. Ever since, the study of semantic change has progressed steadily, accumulating a vast store of knowledge for over a century, encompassing many languages and language families. Historical linguists also early on realized the potential of computers as research tools, with papers at the very first international conferences in computational linguistics in the 1960s. Such computational studies still tended to be small-scale, method-oriented, and qualitative. However, recent years have witnessed a sea-change in this regard. Big-data empirical quantitative investigations are now coming to the forefront, enabled by enormous advances in storage capability and processing power. Diachronic corpora have grown beyond imagination, defying exploration by traditional manual qualitative methods, and language technology has become increasingly data-driven and semantics-oriented. These developments present a golden opportunity for the empirical study of semantic change over both long and short time spans. A major challenge presently is to integrate the hard-earned knowledge and expertise of traditional historical linguistics with cutting-edge methodology explored primarily in computational linguistics. The idea for the present volume came out of a concrete response to this challenge. The 1st International Workshop on Computational Approaches to Historical Language Change (LChange'19), at ACL 2019, brought together scholars from both fields. This volume offers a survey of this exciting new direction in the study of semantic change, a discussion of the many remaining challenges that we face in pursuing it, and considerably updated and extended versions of a selection of the contributions to the LChange'19 workshop, addressing both more theoretical problems — e.g., discovery of "laws of semantic change" — and practical applications, such as information retrieval in longitudinal text archives.
Studies in Language Variation
Author: Ralph W. Fasold
Publisher: Georgetown University Press
Published: 1977
Total Pages: 326
ISBN-13: 9780878402090
DOWNLOAD EBOOKMany linguists have moved beyond the study of language isolated from its use and have examined the interaction of linguistic rules with the pragmatics of language in context. At the same time, many scholars have taken a sociological approach to the structure of conversation and other communicative events. A number of anthropologists are adding language variation to their traditional interest in language in relation to cultural phenomena. Linguists who work in semantics, syntax, and phonology have also expanded their interests to include language variation.From the Preface
From Data to Evidence in English Language Research
Author: Carla Suhr
Publisher: BRILL
Published: 2019-01-07
Total Pages: 368
ISBN-13: 9004390650
DOWNLOAD EBOOKFrom Data to Evidence in English Language Research draws on diverse digital data sources alongside more traditional linguistic corpora to offer new insights into the ways in which they can be used to extend and re-evaluate research questions in English linguistics. This is achieved, for example, by increasing data size, adding multi-layered contextual analyses, applying methods from adjacent fields, and adapting existing data sets to new uses. Making innovative contributions to digital linguistics, the chapters in the volume apply a combination of methods to the increasing amount of digital data available to researchers to show how this data – both established and newly available - can be utilized, enriched and rethought to provide new evidence for developments in the English language.
The Collected Works of Ruqaiya Hasan
Author: Ruqaiya Hasan
Publisher: Equinox
Published: 2005
Total Pages: 371
ISBN-13: 9781904768340
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe development of society, language & mind are co-genetic: each depends upon the other two elements. This book explores the intimate relationships that bind these essential parts of our experiential existence.
Aspects of Linguistic Variation
Author: Daniël Olmen
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Published: 2018-12-03
Total Pages: 255
ISBN-13: 3110609878
DOWNLOAD EBOOKLinguistic variation is a topic of ongoing interest to the field. Its description and its explanations continue to intrigue scholars from many different backgrounds. By taking a deliberately broad perspective on the matter, covering not only crosslinguistic and diachronic but also intralinguistic and interspeaker variation and examining phenomena ranging from negation over connectives to definite articles in well- and lesser-known languages, the volume furthers our understanding of variation in general. The papers offer new insights into, among other things, the theoretical notion of comparative concepts, the social or mental nature of language structure, the areal factor in lexical typology and the diachronic implications of semantic maps. The collection will thus be of relevance to typologists and historical linguists, as well as to people studying variation within the areas of cognitive and functional linguistics.
