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Author: Marianna Bolognesi
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN: 9027260427
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 222
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Book Description
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.
Author: Marianna Bolognesi
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN: 9027260427
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 222
Get Book Here
Book Description
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.
Author: James Boyd White
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022605604X
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 395
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Book Description
Through fresh readings of texts ranging from Homer's Iliad, Swift's Tale of a Tub, and Austen's Emma through the United States Constitution and McCulloch v. Maryland, James Boyd White examines the relationship between an individual mind and its language and culture as well as the "textual community" established between writer and audience. These striking textual analyses develop a rhetoric—a "way of reading" that can be brought to any text but that, in broader terms, becomes a way of learning that can shape the reader's life. "In this ambitious and demanding work of literary criticism, James Boyd White seeks to communicate 'a sense of reading in a new and different way.' . . . [White's] marriage of lawyerly acumen and classically trained literary sensibility—equally evident in his earlier work, The Legal Imagination—gives the best parts of When Words Lose Their Meaning a gravity and moral earnestness rare in the pages of contemporary literary criticism."—Roger Kimball, American Scholar "James Boyd White makes a state-of-the-art attempt to enrich legal theory with the insights of modern literary theory. Of its kind, it is a singular and standout achievement. . . . [White's] selections span the whole range of legal, literary, and political offerings, and his writing evidences a sustained and intimate experience with these texts. Writing with natural elegance, White manages to be insightful and inciteful. Throughout, his timely book is energized by an urgent love of literature and law and their liberating potential. His passion and sincerity are palpable."—Allan C. Hutchinson, Yale Law Journal "Undeniably a unique and significant work. . . . When Words Lose Their Meaning is a rewarding book by a distinguished legal scholar. It is a showcase for the most interesting sort of inter-disciplinary work: the kind that brings together from traditionally separate fields not so much information as ideas and approaches."—R. B. Kershner, Jr., Georgia Review
Author: Christopher Gauker
Publisher: Christopher Gauker
ISBN: 0262072424
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 312
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Book Description
A critique of, and alternative to, the received view of linguistic communication.
Author: Howard Jackson
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317887573
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 288
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Book Description
In this book, the development of the English dictionary is examined, along with the kinds of dictionary available, the range of information they contain, factors affecting their usage, and public attitudes towards them. As well as an descriptive analysis of word meaning, the author considers whether a thematic, thesaurus-like presentation might be more suited than the traditional alphabetical format to the description of words and their meaning.
Author: Sol Steinmetz
Publisher: Random House Reference
ISBN: 030749778X
Category : Reference
Languages : en
Pages : 290
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Book Description
"My favorite popular word book of the year" -William Safire, NY Times 6/22/2008 A fun, new approach to examining etymology! Many common English words started out with an entirely different meaning than the one we know today. For example: The word adamant came into English around 855 C.E. as a synonym for 'diamond,' very different from today's meaning of the word: "utterly unyielding in attitude or opinion." Before the year 1200, the word silly meant "blessed," and was derived from Old English saelig, meaning "happy." This word went through several incarnations before adopting today's meaning: "stupid or foolish." In Semantic Antics, lexicographer Sol Steinmetz takes readers on an in-depth, fascinating journey to learn how hundreds of words have evolved from their first meaning to the meanings used today.
Author: Moisés Silva
Publisher: Zondervan
ISBN: 9780310479819
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 238
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Book Description
This revised and expanded edition presents a comprehensive exposition of biblical lexicology. .
Author: Alexander Stern
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674240634
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 401
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Book Description
In the most comprehensive account to date of Walter Benjamin’s philosophy of language, Alexander Stern explores the nature of meaning by putting Benjamin in dialogue with Wittgenstein. Known largely for his essays on culture, aesthetics, and literature, Walter Benjamin also wrote on the philosophy of language. This early work is famously obscure and considered hopelessly mystical by some. But for Alexander Stern, it contains important insights and anticipates—in some respects surpasses—the later thought of a central figure in the philosophy of language, Ludwig Wittgenstein. As described in The Fall of Language, Benjamin argues that “language as such” is not a means for communicating an extra-linguistic reality but an all-encompassing medium of expression in which everything shares. Borrowing from Johann Georg Hamann’s understanding of God’s creation as communication to humankind, Benjamin writes that all things express meanings, and that human language does not impose meaning on the objective world but translates meanings already extant in it. He describes the transformations that language as such undergoes while making its way into human language as the “fall of language.” This is a fall from “names”—language that responds mimetically to reality—to signs that designate reality arbitrarily. While Benjamin’s approach initially seems alien to Wittgenstein’s, both reject a designative understanding of language; both are preoccupied with Russell’s paradox; and both try to treat what Wittgenstein calls “the bewitchment of our understanding by means of language.” Putting Wittgenstein’s work in dialogue with Benjamin’s sheds light on its historical provenance and on the turn in Wittgenstein’s thought. Although the two philosophies diverge in crucial ways, in their comparison Stern finds paths for understanding what language is and what it does.
Author: Charles Kay Ogden
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Language and languages
Languages : en
Pages : 363
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Book Description
Author: Deirdre Wilson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 052176677X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 397
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Book Description
When people speak, their words never fully encode what they mean, and the context is always compatible with a variety of interpretations. How can comprehension ever be achieved? Wilson and Sperber argue that comprehension is a process of inference guided by precise expectations of relevance. What are the relations between the linguistically encoded meanings studied in semantics and the thoughts that humans are capable of entertaining and conveying? How should we analyse literal meaning, approximations, metaphors and ironies? Is the ability to understand speakers' meanings rooted in a more general human ability to understand other minds? How do these abilities interact in evolution and in cognitive development? Meaning and Relevance sets out to answer these and other questions, enriching and updating relevance theory and exploring its implications for linguistics, philosophy, cognitive science and literary studies.
Author: Nicholas Asher
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139501313
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 345
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Book Description
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.
