From Polysemy to Semantic Change

From Polysemy to Semantic Change PDF Author: Martine Vanhove
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027205736
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 422

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Book Description
This book is the result of a joint project on lexical and semantic typology which gathered together field linguists, semanticists, cognitivists, typologists, and an NLP specialist. These cross-linguistic studies concern semantic shifts at large, both synchronic and diachronic: the outcome of polysemy, heterosemy, or semantic change at the lexical level. The first part presents a comprehensive state of the art of a domain typologists have long been reluctant to deal with. Part two focuses on theoretical and methodological approaches: cognition, construction grammar, graph theory, semantic maps, and data bases. These studies deal with universals and variation across languages, illustrated with numerous examples from different semantic domains and different languages. Part three is dedicated to detailed empirical studies of a large sample of languages in a limited set of semantic fields. It reveals possible universals of semantic association, as well as areal and cultural tendencies.

From Polysemy to Semantic Change

From Polysemy to Semantic Change PDF Author: Martine Vanhove
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027205736
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 422

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book is the result of a joint project on lexical and semantic typology which gathered together field linguists, semanticists, cognitivists, typologists, and an NLP specialist. These cross-linguistic studies concern semantic shifts at large, both synchronic and diachronic: the outcome of polysemy, heterosemy, or semantic change at the lexical level. The first part presents a comprehensive state of the art of a domain typologists have long been reluctant to deal with. Part two focuses on theoretical and methodological approaches: cognition, construction grammar, graph theory, semantic maps, and data bases. These studies deal with universals and variation across languages, illustrated with numerous examples from different semantic domains and different languages. Part three is dedicated to detailed empirical studies of a large sample of languages in a limited set of semantic fields. It reveals possible universals of semantic association, as well as areal and cultural tendencies.

From Polysemy to Semantic Change

From Polysemy to Semantic Change PDF Author: Martine Vanhove
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027290326
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 424

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Book Description
This book is the result of a joint project on lexical and semantic typology which gathered together field linguists, semanticists, cognitivists, typologists, and an NLP specialist. These cross-linguistic studies concern semantic shifts at large, both synchronic and diachronic: the outcome of polysemy, heterosemy, or semantic change at the lexical level. The first part presents a comprehensive state of the art of a domain typologists have long been reluctant to deal with. Part two focuses on theoretical and methodological approaches: cognition, construction grammar, graph theory, semantic maps, and data bases. These studies deal with universals and variation across languages, illustrated with numerous examples from different semantic domains and different languages. Part three is dedicated to detailed empirical studies of a large sample of languages in a limited set of semantic fields. It reveals possible universals of semantic association, as well as areal and cultural tendencies.

Historical Semantics and Cognition

Historical Semantics and Cognition PDF Author: Andreas Blank
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 3110804190
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
Contains revised papers from a September 1996 symposium which provided a forum for synchronically and diachronically oriented scholars to exchange ideas and for American and European cognitive linguists to confront representatives of different directions in European structural semantics. Papers are in sections on theories and models, descriptive categories, and case studies, and examine areas such as cognitive and structural semantics, diachronic prototype semantics, synecdoche as a cognitive and communicative strategy, and intensifiers as targets and sources of semantic change.

Polysemy

Polysemy PDF Author: Brigitte Nerlich
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 3110895692
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 437

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Book Description
About fifty years ago, Stephen Ullmann wrote that polysemy is 'the pivot of semantic analysis'. Fifty years on, polysemy has become one of the hottest topics in linguistics and in the cognitive sciences at large. The book deals with the topic from a wide variety of viewpoints. The cognitive approach is supplemented and supported by diachronic, psycholinguistic, developmental, comparative, and computational perspectives. The chapters, written by some of the most eminent specialists in the field, are all underpinned by detailed discussions of methodology and theory.

The Semantics of Polysemy

The Semantics of Polysemy PDF Author: Nick Riemer
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 3110197553
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 504

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Book Description
This book, addressed primarily to students and researchers in semantics, cognitive linguistics, English, and Australian languages, is a comparative study of the polysemy patterns displayed by percussion/impact ('hitting') verbs in English and Warlpiri (Pama-Nyungan, Central Australia). The opening chapters develop a novel theoretical orientation for the study of polysemy via a close examination of two theoretical traditions under the broader cognitivist umbrella: Langackerian and Lakovian Cognitive Semantics and Wierzbickian Natural Semantic Metalanguage. Arguments are offered which problematize attempts in these traditions to ground the analysis of meaning either in cognitive or neurological reality, or in the existence of universal synonymy relations within the lexicon. Instead, an interpretative rather than a scientific construal of linguistic theorizing is sketched, in the context of a close examination of certain key issues in the contemporary study of polysemy such as sense individuation, the role of reference in linguistic categorization, and the demarcation between metaphor and metonymy. The later chapters present a detailed typology of the polysemous senses of English and Warlpiri percussion/impact (or P/I) verbs based on a diachronically deep corpus of dictionary citations from Middle to contemporary English, and on a large corpus of Warlpiri citations. Limited to the operations of metaphor and of three categories of metonymy, this typology posits just four types of basic relation between extended and core meanings. As a result, the phenomenon of polysemy and semantic extension emerges as amenable to strikingly concise description.

From Etymology to Pragmatics

From Etymology to Pragmatics PDF Author: Eve Sweetser
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316582337
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 188

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Book Description
This book offers a distinct approach to the analysis of the multiple meanings of English modals, conjunctions, conditionals and perception verbs. Although such ambiguities cannot easily be accounted for by feature-analyses of word meaning, Eve Sweetser's argument shows that they can be analysed both readily and systematically. Meaning relationships in general cannot be understood independently of human cognitive structure, including the metaphorical and cultural aspects of that structure. Sweetser shows that both lexical polysemy and pragmatic ambiguity are shaped by our metaphorical folk understanding of epistemic processes and of speech interaction. Similar regularities can be shown to structure the contrast between root, epistemic and 'speech-act' uses of modal verbs, multiple uses of conjunctions and conditionals, and certain processes of historical change observed in Indo-European languages. Since polysemy is typically the intermediate step in semantic change, the same regularities observable in polysemy can be extended to an analysis of semantic change. This book will attract students and researchers in linguistics, philosophy, the cognitive sciences, and all those interested in metaphor.

Ten Lectures on Event Structure in a Network Theory of Language

Ten Lectures on Event Structure in a Network Theory of Language PDF Author: Nikolas Gisborne
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004375295
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 319

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Book Description
In Ten Lectures on Event Structure in a Network Theory of Language, Nikolas Gisborne explores verb meaning. He discusses theories of events and how a network model of language-in-the-mind should be theorized; what the lexicon is; how to probe word meaning; evidence for structure in word meaning; polysemy; the lexical semantics of causation; a type hierarchy of events; and event types cross-linguistically. He also looks at the relationship between different classes of events or event types and aktionsarten; transitivity alternations and argument linking. Gisborne argues that the social and cognitive embedding of language, requires a view of linguistic structure as a network where even the analysis of verb meaning can require an understanding of the role of speaker and hearer.

Corpus Methods for Semantics

Corpus Methods for Semantics PDF Author: Dylan Glynn
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN: 9027270333
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 555

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Book Description
This volume seeks to advance and popularise the use of corpus-driven quantitative methods in the study of semantics. The first part presents state-of-the-art research in polysemy and synonymy from a Cognitive Linguistic perspective. The second part presents and explains in a didactic manner each of the statistical techniques used in the first part of the volume. A handbook both for linguists working with statistics in corpus research and for linguists in the fields of polysemy and synonymy.

Greek and Latin Expressions of Meaning

Greek and Latin Expressions of Meaning PDF Author: Andreas T. Zanker
Publisher:
ISBN: 9782821897106
Category : Greek language
Languages : de
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Verbs and nouns of meaning in ancient Greek and Latin are polysemous, just as in the case of the English verb “to mean". Andreas T. Zanker considers how the ancient vocabulary could be used in different ways and investigates its development over time. In the first part of the book, Zanker argues for the role of metaphorical and metonymical transference in the creation of expressions of meaning; Greek and Roman authors used the same verbs to describe what inanimate things, including words and texts, meant/signified as they did of human beings in the act of meaning/signifying something. In the second part of the book, the author focuses on certain metaphorical extensions of this vocabulary and argues that they have implications for modern discussions of meaning, particularly in literary criticism.

The Oxford Handbook of Derivational Morphology

The Oxford Handbook of Derivational Morphology PDF Author: Rochelle Lieber
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 019165177X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 768

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Book Description
The Oxford Handbook of Derivational Morphology is intended as a companion volume to The Oxford Handbook of Compounding (OUP 2009) Written by distinguished scholars, its 41 chapters aim to provide a comprehensive and thorough overview of the study of derivational morphology. The handbook begins with an overview and a consideration of definitional matters, distinguishing derivation from inflection on the one hand and compounding on the other. From a formal perspective, the handbook treats affixation (prefixation, suffixation, infixation, circumfixation, etc.), conversion, reduplication, root and pattern and other templatic processes, as well as prosodic and subtractive means of forming new words. From a semantic perspective, it looks at the processes that form various types of adjectives, adverbs, nouns, and verbs, as well as evaluatives and the rarer processes that form function words. The book also surveys derivation in fifteen language families that are widely dispersed in terms of both geographical location and typological characteristics.