Where Words Get their Meaning
Where Words Get their Meaning

Author: Marianna Bolognesi

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company

Published: 2020-11-15

Total Pages: 222

ISBN-13: 9027260427

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Words are not just labels for conceptual categories. Words construct conceptual categories, frame situations and influence behavior. Where do they get their meaning? This book describes how words acquire their meaning. The author argues that mechanisms based on associations, pattern detection, and feature matching processes explain how words acquire their meaning from experience and from language alike. Such mechanisms are summarized by the distributional hypothesis, a computational theory of meaning originally applied to word occurrences only, and hereby extended to extra-linguistic contexts. By arguing in favor of the cognitive foundations of the distributional hypothesis, which suggests that words that appear in similar contexts have similar meaning, this book offers a theoretical account for word meaning construction and extension in first and second language that bridges empirical findings from cognitive and computer sciences. Plain language and illustrations accompany the text, making this book accessible to a multidisciplinary academic audience.

On the Definition of Word
On the Definition of Word

Author: Anne-Marie Di Sciullo

Publisher: MIT Press (MA)

Published: 1987-01

Total Pages: 118

ISBN-13: 9780262540476

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On The Definition of Word develops a consistent and coherent approach to central questions about morphology and its relation to syntax. In sorting out the various senses in which the word word is used, it asserts that three concepts which have often been identified with each other are in fact distinct and not coextensive: listemes (linguistic objects permanently stored by the speaker); morphological objects (objects whose shape can be characterized in morphological terms of affixation and compounding); and syntactic atoms (objects that are unanalyzable units with respect to syntax). The first chapter defends the idea that listemes are distinct from the other two notions, and that all one can and should say about them is that they exist. A theory of morphological objects is developed in chapter two. Chapter three defends the claim that the morphological objects are a proper subset of the syntactic atoms, presenting the authors' reconstruction of the important and much-debated Lexical Integrity Hypothesis. A final chapter shows that there are syntactic atoms which are not morphological objects. Anne Marie Di Sciullo is in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Quebec. Edwin Williams is in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Massachusetts. On The Definition of Word is Linguistic Inquiry Monograph 14.

Word Meaning
Word Meaning

Author: Richard Hudson

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2003-09-02

Total Pages: 116

ISBN-13: 1134885601

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In Word Meaning, Richard Hudson introduces readers to the techniques of lexical semantic analysis. Word Meaning: * is based on a problem-solving approach to language * introduces readers to the technical terminology and basic principles associated with the analysis of word meaning * shows students how to apply these terms and principles to English * includes suggestions for further work

What Is a Word? about the Notion of Word
What Is a Word? about the Notion of Word

Author: Anonym

Publisher: Grin Publishing

Published: 2017-07-25

Total Pages: 20

ISBN-13: 9783668491298

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Seminar paper from the year 2015 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 14 Punkte, Justus-Liebig-University Giessen, language: English, abstract: The work at hand deals with one of the most important issues in lexicology, namely the question how the notion of word can be properly described and how it can be demarcated from other notions like phrase or morpheme, which are bigger and smaller units than the word respectively. For this purpose, various ways to look at and define the notion of word are examined. As a conclusion, a viable definition of the notion of word (for linguistic purposes) will be provided. The first chapter offers some general remarks concerning the importance of the word on the one hand, and the difficulties involved in finding a proper definition on the other hand. In the second chapter, the word will be examined from various points of view. Thus, words in writing (orthographic words), words in speech (phonological words), words as abstracts units of thought and, finally, grammatical words, will be dealt with. Moreover, important formal features of words will be looked at.

English Words
English Words

Author: Heidi Harley

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2017-11-01

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 1119485673

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English Words is a comprehensive and accessible introduction to the study of English words from a theoretically informed linguistic perspective. accessibly written to give students a command of basic theory, skills in analyzing English words, and the foundation needed for more advanced study in linguistic theory or lexicology covers basic introductory material and investigates the structure of English vocabulary introduces students to the technical study of words from relevant areas of linguistics: phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, historical linguistics and psycholinguistics

To be or not to be a Word
To be or not to be a Word

Author: Iraide Ibarretxe-Antuñano

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2014-10-02

Total Pages: 260

ISBN-13: 1443868655

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This book discusses the nature and definition of what a word is in Linguistics. This is not an easy task since the term subsumes a wide range of phenomena explored from an even wider array of perspectives. Although words are the most accessible linguistic units from the speaker’s introspection viewpoint, they are, at the same time, an incredibly elusive reality for the linguist. Issues such as their definition, theoretical status, limits, characteristics, and psycholinguistic reality are still controversial and open for debate. This book offers an up-to-date overview of the latest discussions on the nature of word in Modern Linguistics. It gathers together under a single collective volume different views of what a word is from a wide range of diverse methodological and theoretical linguistic frameworks, such as phonological theory, linguistic typology, lexical generative morphology, generative syntax, cognitive grammar, and construction grammar. Despite their different backgrounds, all these papers are geared towards the same goal: to offer a detailed account of what a word is in their respective fields. All in all, this collection of papers offers different perspectives that will contribute to provide some answers to the myriad of questions that a simple phrase such as to be or not to be a Word brings to the fore.

Word Meaning and Montague Grammar
Word Meaning and Montague Grammar

Author: D. R. Dowty

Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media

Published: 2012-12-06

Total Pages: 441

ISBN-13: 9400994737

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The most general goal of this book is to propose and illustrate a program of research in word semantics that combines some of the methodology and results in linguistic semantics, primarily that of the generative semantics school, with the rigorously formalized syntactic and semantic framework for the analysis of natural languages developed by Richard Montague and his associates, a framework in which truth and denotation with respect to a model are taken as the fundamental semantic notions. I hope to show, both from the linguist's and the philosopher's point of view, not only why this synthesis can be undertaken but also why it will be useful to pursue it. On the one hand, the linguists' decompositions of word meanings into more primitive parts are by themselves inherently incomplete, in that they deal only in distinctions in meaning without providing an account of what mean ings really are. Not only can these analyses be made complete by a model theoretic semantics, but also such an account of these analyses renders them more exact and more readily testable than they could ever be otherwise.

Word Meaning
Word Meaning

Author: Richard A. Hudson

Publisher: Psychology Press

Published: 1995

Total Pages: 86

ISBN-13: 9780415085656

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Introduction to the techniques of lexical semantic analysis

Meaning Predictability in Word Formation
Meaning Predictability in Word Formation

Author: Pavol Štekauer

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing

Published: 2005-03-18

Total Pages: 313

ISBN-13: 9027294569

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This book aims to contribute to a growing interest amongst psycholinguists and morphologists in the mechanisms of meaning predictability. It presents a brand-new model of the meaning-prediction of novel, context-free naming units, relating the wordformation and wordinterpretation processes. Unlike previous studies, mostly focussed on N+N compounds, the scope of this book is much wider. It not only covers all types of complex words, but also discusses a whole range of predictability-boosting and -reducing conditions. Two measures are introduced, the Predictability Rate and the Objectified Predictability Rate, in order to compare the strength of predictable readings both within a word and relative to the most predictable readings of other coinages. Four extensive experiments indicate inter alia the equal predicting capacity of native and non-native speakers, the close interconnection between linguistic and extra-linguistic factors, the important role of prototypical semes, and the usual dominance of a single central reading.

Oxford English Dictionary
Oxford English Dictionary

Author: John A. Simpson

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2002-04-18

Total Pages:

ISBN-13: 9780195218893

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The Oxford English Dictionary is the internationally recognized authority on the evolution of the English language from 1150 to the present day. The Dictionary defines over 500,000 words, making it an unsurpassed guide to the meaning, pronunciation, and history of the English language. This new upgrade version of The Oxford English Dictionary Second Edition on CD-ROM offers unparalleled access to the world's most important reference work for the English language. The text of this version has been augmented with the inclusion of the Oxford English Dictionary Additions Series (Volumes 1-3), published in 1993 and 1997, the Bibliography to the Second Edition, and other ancillary material. System requirements: PC with minimum 200 MHz Pentium-class processor; 32 MB RAM (64 MB recommended); 16-speed CD-ROM drive (32-speed recommended); Windows 95, 98, Me, NT, 200, or XP (Local administrator rights are required to install and open the OED for the first time on a PC running Windows NT 4 and to install and run the OED on Windows 2000 and XP); 1.1 GB hard disk space to run the OED from the CD-ROM and 1.7 GB to install the CD-ROM to the hard disk: SVGA monitor: 800 x 600 pixels: 16-bit (64k, high color) setting recommended. Please note: for the upgrade, installation requires the use of the OED CD-ROM v2.0.