Lexical Semantics

The relationship between landscape and culture seen through language is an exciting and increasingly explored area. This groundbreaking book contributes to the linguistic examination of both cross-cultural variation and unifying elements in geographical categorization. The study focuses on the contrastive lexical semantics of certain landscape words in a number of languages. The aim is to show how geographical vocabulary sheds light on the culturally and historically shaped ways people see and think about the land around them. Notably, the study presents landscape concepts as anchored in a human-centred perspective , based on our cognition, vision, and experience in places. The Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) approach allows an analysis of meaning which is both fine-grained and transparent. The book is aimed, first of all, at scholars and students of linguistics. Yet it will also be of interest to researchers in geography, environmental studies, anthropology , cultural studies, Australian Studies, and Australian Aboriginal Studies because of the book's cultural take.

This paper will be concerned with the way in which Grice’s Cooperative Principle is represented in the literature of both English and Arabic, and the interpretations and conclusions to which this can lead through showing the similarities and differences in those two languages with reference to the implementation of the cooperative principle and its maxims. Grice’s Cooperative Principle is an assumed basic concept in pragmatics. Grice has relocated the Cooperative Principle from philosophy to linguistics.

Natural Language Processing is a programmed approach to analyze text that is based on both a set of theories and a set of technologies. This forum aims to bring together researchers who have designed and build software that will analyze, understand, and generate languages that humans use naturally to address computers.

Tamil Onto-thesaurus is an outcome of a very long research activity that went on in the field of lexical semantics of Tamil vocabulary. It went through several stages before being culminated into Tamil onto-thesaurus. It depicts our travel from Tamil thesaurus to Tamil word net. It is a lexical resource which amalgamates all sorts of information available in a dictionary, thesaurus and wordNet. The Dravidian wordNets (in which Tamil wordNet is one of the four components) built under the IndoWordNet project depends on an ontology developed by western conceptualization of vocabularies of a language i.e. English). This has not taken into consideration the Indian conceptualization of vocabulary depicted in the nikhandu tradition. Say for examples, nikhandus have classifications such a six types of tastes, nine types of planets (gragams), 7 types of mandalams (a type of division), 15 tidis (15 phases of moon), etc which are crucial for Indian tradition. In the western oriented WordNet ontology there is no scope for the visualization of concepts depicted in nikhandus. More over building a wordNet based on Hindi wordNet which in turn is built on English wordNet will take many years to complete and it would miss the conceptualization depicted in Indian tradition. The present onto-thesaurus is based on the Indian conceptualization of vocabulary and the process of building one is very simple. We have the plan to make it into a generic one so that all the Dravidian languages can be easily accommodated into it.

This study aims at providing a possible model for linguistic representation, whose structure is able to describe the effects on sign’s indeterminacy (vagueness, ambiguities) and the dynamic nature of the system. In order to display the different ways of conceiving a linguistic system, various versions of the idea of "giving an order to the structures", that build up a theory, is taken into account: the Cartesian theory of generative grammar, the non-Euclidean one of hypertext networks, the complexity in genetic epistemology and in Jean Piaget’s cognitive development theory, and finally the theory of linguistic change by the language biologist Eric Lenneberg.

Scopo di questo studio è il tentativo di ipotizzare un modello di rappresentazione linguistica, la cui struttura sia capace di descrivere gli effetti dell'indeterminatezza del segno (vaghezza, ambiguità) e la dinamicità del sistema. Per mostrare differenti possibilità di concepire astrattamente un sistema linguistico, si considerano versioni diverse del concetto di “ordine delle strutture”: il sistema cartesiano nella grammatica generativa, la geometria non euclidea nelle reti ipertestuali, la (teoria della )complessità nella teoria dello sviluppo psicogenetico di Jean Piaget e nella teoria del mutamento del biolinguista Eric Lenneberg.

In this paper, I will outline a monotonic approach to what Jackendoff (1990) calls the correspondence problem, i.e. the mapping of semantic structure to surface syntax. My approach is based on three simple ideas. The first is that mapping principles are word templates, i.e. abstractions over fully specified lexical entries (or certain subparts of lexical entries): they constitute generalizations over the way classes of words associate their semantic arguments to their syntactic complements. The second is that mapping principles can include complex information, and, crucially, that the kind of complex information found in mapping principles spans the range of information found in lexical entries. The third idea is that the set of mapping principles (or word classes in the present approach) found in a grammar do not constitute an amorphous list of principles. They form a hierarchy of more or less general mapping types and this hierarchy of mapping types allows us to capture generalizations while accounting for the full range of phenomena.

Graphical user interfaces design in software development process focuses on maximizing usability and the user's experience, in order to make the interaction for users easy, flexible and efficient. In this paper, we propose an approach for evaluating the usability satisfaction degree of a web-based system. The proposed method has been accomplished in two phases and implemented on an airlines website as a case study. In the first phase, a website usability test is implemented by a number of users, and then the results obtained are translated into charts for a final web-based system evaluation in the second phase. The results achieved were satisfactory, since the places where the weaknesses and gaps in the website are identified and recommended solutions to avoid them are drawn. The authenticity of the results have been confirmed by comparing them with user opinions acquired from a questionnaire, which proves the precision in which the website is rated.

Mario Barra Jover, Contraintes en sémantique lexicale 1 Mario Barra-Jover UMR 7023-CNRS/Université Paris 8 Contraintes en sémantique lexicale Je vais traiter dans cet article de la pertinence, voire de la nécessité, d'intégrer, dans toute théorie du sens, un volet comportant les connaissances qu'un locuteur donné a sur les contraintes d'emploi subies par les entrées lexicales. Il sera donc nécessaire, d'emblée, de mettre en évidence l'existence de ces contraintes ainsi que l'importance du rôle qu'elles jouent dans la délimitation des emplois potentiels des mots. Cela fait, nous serons en mesure d'analyser avec précision leur domaine d'application, ce qui nous permettra d'aborder d'un point de vue nouveau des problèmes classiques comme les significations-stimuli (Quine 1960), la contribution du sens lexical aux conditions de vérité et les emplois métaphoriques. J'aimerais que les idées exprimées dans ce qui suit soient perçues comme des suggestions pertinentes pour toute théorie sémantique et non comme des arguments en faveur ou contre l'une d'elles. Plutôt que critiquer leur contenu, je présuppose leurs résultats. 1. Pourquoi parler de contraintes Les théories sémantiques sont bâties, à ma connaissance, d'une façon que je me permets d'appeler "positive". Qu'elles soient essentialistes ou non, elles cherchent à décrire le sens d'un mot comme un objet ou comme un état de choses capable de rendre compte de toutes les occurrences de ce mot. Ceci peut être fait en accordant au sens un degré plus ou moins important de stabilité et de délimitation préalable. Mais, dans tous les cas de figure, on part de l'idée qu'un locuteur a des connaissances sur ce que le mot veut dire (ou peut vouloir dire) et que, s'il limite les emplois à une série intersubjectivement consensuelle, c'est parce que les emplois accessibles sont, d'une façon ou d'une autre, codés dans l'ensemble de ces connaissances sur le contenu du signe. Dans une optique naïve fondée sur l'appartenance (cf. Cadiot 1999, pour l'opposition entre logique d'appartenance et logique de conformité) un signe X désigne un objet appartenant à un ensemble A {a 1 , a 2 ,...a n } existant indépendamment du signe X. Par exemple, le mot eau désigne les occurrences de H 2 O. Mais il y a, bien entendu, deux situations qui demandent une explication : 1) le terme X peut être bien utilisé pour désigner un objet n'appartenant pas à dans, Langages 150 (2003), pp. 75-87.

В настоящей статье, основываясь на принципе формально-семантического единства языковых элементов, мы попытались представить 34 значения двух разновидностей предлога ЗА как единую систему, развившуюся из генетически первичного пространственного предлога со значением «сзади».  Возможности и направления семантических переходов интерпретируются с помощью структурного и когнитивного подходов. Полученная система, которую лучше называть «концептуальным пространством» предлога ЗА, может быть соотнесена и с лексической полисемией, правда, в диахроническом аспекте.

There has been general consensus that initial word learning during early infancy is a slow and time-consuming process that requires very frequent exposure, whereas later in development, infants are able to quickly learn a novel word for a novel meaning. From the perspective of memory maturation, this shift in behavioral development might represent a shift from slow procedural to fast declarative memory formation. Alternatively, it might be caused by the maturation of specific brain structures within the declarative memory system that may support lexical mapping from the very first. Here, we used the neurophysiological method of ERPs to watch the brain activity of 6-month-old infants, when repeatedly presented with object–word pairs in a cross-modal learning paradigm. We report first evidence that infants as young as 6 months are able to associate objects and words after only very few exposures. A memory test 1 day later showed that infants did not fully forget this newly acquired kn...

«ВИСОТА» У СТАРОУКРАЇНСЬКІЙ МОВНІЙ КАРТИНІ СВІТУ
Статтю присвячено вивченню структурно-семантичних і функційних особливостей одиниць лексико-словотвір-ного гнізда зі стрижневим словом «високий». Вербальні репрезентанти зазначеної характеристики в різних дискур-сах набувають специфічних семантичних і функційних властивостей, що зумовлені суспільно-політичними, історичними, релігійними та іншими чинниками. Джерелом дослідження є «Словник української мови ХVІ-першої половини ХVІІ століть». Залучений до аналізу матеріал, що містить головним чином книжну лексику різнодискурсивної належності, з огляду на морфемну будову поділено на прості однокореневі слова та складні слова-композити. Важливою детермінантою, що зумовлює семантичні властивості лексико-словотвірного гнізда, є релігійна свідомість, що вплинула на формування змістових параметрів фрагмента мовної картини світу, об'єднавчим елементом якого є «висота». Богоцентричність виявляється у значній кількості лексем із коренем вис-(виш-) на позначення Бога. Орієнтованість писемних текстів на релігійний дискурс зумовлює кореляцію семантики лексеми «висота» з біблійною картиною світу, в основі якої лежать християнські уявлення про два світи - людський та божественний, земний і небесний, нижній і верхній. Це засвідчує і зафіксована в словнику відповідна фразеологія, що увиразнює паралельність, ізоморфність цих двох світів. Прикметники з компонентом висок-на позначення фізичних характеристик людини є маркерами вертикальної моделі світу, а сам прикметник «високий» може характеризувати простір, кількість, виражати духовно-релігійні або морально-етичні поняття, набуваючи в певних контекстах позитивно-оцінних або негативно-оцінних конотацій. Тісний взаємозвʼязок формально-граматичної структури і світоглядно-концептуальної семантики демонструють дієслова з коренем вис-. Композити з компонентами висок-і висоц- виявляють дискурсивну маркованість, що засвідчує вживання лексем у контекстах різної жанрово-стилістичної належності. Ключові слова: висота, високий, релігійна картина світу, староукраїнська мовна картина світу, історична лексикологія.
“ВИСОТА” IN OLD UKRAINIAN LINGUISTIC WORLDVIEW
The article presents a study of the structural-semantic and functional features of the units of the derivational family with the core word "високий" (vysokyi, "high"). In different discourses, the verbal representatives of the above characteristic acquire specific semantic and functional properties which are determined by social and political, historic, religious and other factors.
The source of the research material is the dictionary of the Ukrainian Language of the late 1500-s – early 1600-s (Словник української мови ХVІ – першої половини ХVІІ століть). The analyzed material, which includes mainly bookish vocabulary of various discourse types, has been divided into simple cognate words and compound words. An important factor that determines the semantic properties of the derivational family is the religious consciousness, which has influenced the formation of the sense-bearing parameters of that part of the linguistic worldview whose uniting element is height (висота). Many lexemes with the root вис- (виш-) that denote God point to the phenomenon of being God-centred.The way written texts are oriented towards religious discourse determines the correlation of the semantics of the word висота with the Biblical worldview. The latter is based on the idea of the two worlds – human and divine, earthly and heavenly, lower and upper. The idea is also present in the dictionary’s relevant phraseology that accentuates the parallelness, isomorphness of the two worlds.The adjectives with the component висок- that denote physical properties of man are markers of the vertical world model while the adjective високий itself can describe space or quantity, express spiritual and religious or moral and ethical notions, acquiring pejorative or majorative connotations in certain contexts. The close interrelation of the formal grammatical structure and the conceptual worldview semantics can be seen in the verbs with the root вис-. The compounds with the components висок- and висоц- are discourse marked, which is proved by the use of the lexemes in text of different styles.Key words: height, high, religious worldview, old Ukrainian linguistic worldview, historical lexicology.

The designations of the orange fruit in Indo-European languages very often literally meant “apple from China”. Citrus species were known in the Chinese cultural area in the fifth century BCE and glossed in c.100 CE, but there is no basic colour term for orange in Modern Standard Mandarin. This colour category is psychologically salient, but it is still inseparable from a concrete object in the mind of a native speaker, and can therefore be defined as starting to become basic. This article also suggests modification of Berlin and Kay’s (1969: 6) first criterion for basicness in colour terms: applied to Chinese, a term should be monomorphemic and, moreover, monosyllabic – rather than just monolexemic – since almost every syllable is a morpheme in Chinese.

Reading words in a native language triggers a largely obligatory cognitive process that we accept as leading to comprehension of the word-we cannot suppress our understanding of word meaning. In this study, we investigated the early stages of this comprehension process by means of event-related potentials (ERPs) to identify when this processing of meaning-that is, semantic processing-first occurs. We report that, when processing visually presented compound words, semantic access at some level occurs as early as the P100 and persists through to the N400. Specifically, we focused on the P100 ERP component, and utilized the unique features of compound words (i.e. variation in the transparency of meaning) to investigate the speed with which we gain access to information about meaning (i.e. semantic access). Twenty-two participants performed a lexical decision task including 40 English compounds, which varied with respect to their constituent semantic transparency. Compounds ranged from ...

Plenary talk:
Defining the term ‘Eastern Europe’: A linguist’s contribution

Abstract:
The term Eastern Europe has been used by scholars in international relations, history, political science etc. It has been commonly exploited in and by the media. It has also been in common use as a cover term for a vaguely specified region with its complex history, culture and politics. The term had a peculiar meaning during the Cold War period. In the post-1990 period, this term still seems to have an impact on international affairs despite some efforts to discard it. Scholars in different academic fields have exploited it for their own purposes. Additionally, several other related terms have been used, e.g., Central Europe, East Central Europe, Central and Eastern Europe etc., further complicating the terminological situation. It seems though that the term Eastern Europe has not been investigated by those who should be interested in terminology in the first place, namely linguists. This talk is meant fill this apparent gap. The presentation reports on the ongoing project whose goal is the construction of a complex semantic network for this term/concept. Problems with defining Eastern Europe are not new. A summary review of these difficulties will be presented. As a linguistic project, a corpus-based analysis of relevant data will be carried out. The language data are drawn from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). Focus is on the discourse of English-language international media outlets which play a fundamental role in shaping the opinions of the general public. Occurrences of the proper name Eastern Europe and other related names (e.g., Central Europe, East Central Europe etc.) have been checked for their frequency of use and the contexts in which they have been recorded. So-called concordances containing the key name will have been categorized on the basis of the grammatical functions and semantic roles played by this name (e.g., subject, object, agent, patient, setting etc.). A systematic linguistic analysis should contribute to the clarification of this vague concept.

In this paper, we introduce EVALution 1.0, a dataset designed for the training and the evaluation of Distributional Semantic Models (DSMs). This version consists of almost 7.5K tuples, instantiating several semantic relations between word pairs (including hypernymy, synonymy, antonymy, meronymy). The dataset is enriched with a large amount of additional information (i.e. relation domain, word frequency, word POS, word semantic field, etc.) that can be used for either filtering the pairs or performing an in-depth analysis of the results. The tuples were extracted from a combination of ConceptNet 5.0 andWordNet 4.0, and subsequently filtered through automatic methods and crowdsourcing in order to ensure their quality. The dataset is freely downloadable. An extension in RDF format, including also scripts for data processing, is under development.

The present paper outlines how possessive semantics is represented in causative verbs in the English and Ukrainian languages. English and Ukrainian causative verbs with possessive semantics lack any formal possessive markers, either word-building or word-changing. However, they combine in their semantic structure two fundamental linguistic categories: causativity and possessivity, which in case of privative verbs also involves implicit negation.

This paper explores the theory of lexical knowledge set forth in the Module-Attribute Representation of Verbal Semantics (Biq 2000) and extends its scope to include issues concerning verbal polysemy. Previous versions of the theory postulated that different event structures required sense distinctions. In examining corpora data for the verbs 'put' and 'set' we argue that an additional criterion for 'sense'

Abstract: This study investigates the intricate polysemy of the Spanish perception verb sentir (‘feel’) which, analogous to the more-studied visual perception verbs ver (‘see’) and mirar (‘look’), also displays an ample gamut of semantic uses in various syntactic environments. The investigation is based on a corpus-based behavioral profile (BP) analysis. Besides its methodological merits as a quantitative, systematic and verifiable approach to the study of meaning and to polysemy in particular, the BP analysis offers qualitative usage-based evidence for cognitive linguistic theorizing. With regard to the polysemy of sentir, the following questions were addressed: (1) What is the prototype of each cluster of senses? (2) How are the different senses structured: how many senses should be distinguished – i.e. which senses cluster together and which senses should be kept separately? (3) Which senses are more related to each other and which are highly distinguishable? (4) What morphosynta...

In the modern era, many methods for the instruction of language principles and skills have been proposed, developed, and implemented to assist language learners with their advancement. In this paper, the unique concept of formulaic sequences is presented and examined to demonstrate its practical utility for instruction and furtherance of the skills of English language learners in the classroom. This language concept, while relatively novel and currently underutilized within contemporary instructional situations, has the capacity to provide a clear and engaging framework to accelerate language learning, and qualify students to an exceptional level. The idea has gained considerable momentum as studies in linguistics, neuroscience, and psychology have contributed to its recognition as a logical and legitimate base from which to bolster the development of new and sensible methods for students. A presentation of the history and theories underlying the concept of formulaic sequences is provided, along with a practical component and suggestions for its use in the instructional context.

Od najdawniejszych czasów w dziejach polszczyzny człowiek postrzegany był jako ‘ktoś dobry’. Oczywiście, rozumienie leksemu odnosiło się przede wszystkim do ‘istoty ludzkiej’, ale jednocześnie istniał silny związek pomiędzy człowiekiem a wartością. Tak jest do dziś, a liczne sfrazeologizowane wyrażenia są tego dowodem. Konsekwencją rozumienia człowieka jako ‘istoty wartościowej’ są zwroty zawarte w tytule: "stać się człowiekiem" i "przestać być człowiekiem". W artykule przedstawiono analizę kontekstów występowania tych − i podobnych − zwrotów, zaś celem było zarysowanie typowych sytuacji, w których człowiek przyobleka się niejako w wartość i takich, w których tę wartość traci. Przyjęto synkretyczne podejście metodologiczne − korzystano z narzędzi zarówno semantyki historycznej, strukturalizmu i pragmatyki językowej, jak i językoznawstwa kognitywnego oraz językowego obrazu świata. Na koniec przedstawiono dla porównania konteksty anglojęzyczne, które wykazują silny związek z rozumieniem człowieka jako wartości w języku polskim.

In the literature about category effects in semantic memory, body parts and musical instruments are often considered atypical, because in cases with a disproportionate impairment of living categories body parts are relatively spared, while musical instruments are often severely defective. In this study the performance of 57 subjects affected by diseases generally associated with lexical-semantic impairment, for the most part

The goal of this paper is to introduce CROATPAS, the Croatian sister project of the Italian Typed-Predicate Argument Structure resource (TPAS, Ježek et al. 2014). CROATPAS is a corpus-based digital collection of verb valency structures with the addition of semantic type specifications (SemTypes) to each argument slot, which is currently being developed at the University of Pavia. Salient verbal patterns are discovered following a lexicographical methodology called Corpus Pattern Analysis (CPA, Hanks 2004 & 2012; Hanks & Pustejovsky 2005; Hanks et al. 2015), whereas SemTypes – such as [HUMAN], [ENTITY] or [ANIMAL] – are taken from a shallow ontology shared by both TPAS and the Pattern Dictionary of English Verbs (PDEV, Hanks & Pustejovsky 2005; El Maarouf et al. 2014). The theoretical framework the resource relies on is Pustejovsky’s Generative Lexicon theory (1995 & 1998; Pustejovsky & Ježek 2008), in light of which verbal polysemy and metonymic argument shifts can be traced back to...

The purpose of the present article is the contrastive analysis of the semantic aspect of the lexemes דָםּ (dam), krew and blood, respectively in biblical Hebrew, Polish, and English. Apart from its fundamental meaning referring to the fluid which circulates in the blood vessels of humans and animals, in all of these three languages blood occurs in many other meanings and contexts of language use. The analysis of examples taken from the Hebrew Bible and from Polish and English
dictionaries demonstrates that some of these meanings are coincident for all the three languages, some are analogous only in Polish and English and some typical only to one of these languages.
Key words: blood, contrastive analysis, semantics, symbolism, Polish, English, biblical Hebrew

The aim of this paper is to reconcile two claims that have long been thought to be incompatible: (a) that we compositionally determine the meaning of complex expressions from the meaning of their parts, and (b) that prototypes are components of the meaning of lexical terms such as "fish", "red", and "gun". Hypotheses (a) and (b) are independently plausible, but most researchers think that reconciling them is a difficult, if not hopeless task. In particular, most linguists and philosophers agree that (a) is not negotiable; so they tend to reject (b). Recently, there have been some attempts to reconcile these claims, but they all adopt an implausibly weak notion of compositionality. Furthermore, parties to this debate tend to fall into a problematic way of individuating prototypes that is too externalistic. In contrast, I propose that we can reconcile (a) and (b) if we adopt, instead, an internalist and pluralist conception of prototypes and a context-sensitive but strong notion of compositionality. I argue that each of this proposals is independently plausible, and that, when taken together, provide the basis for a satisfactory account of prototype compositionality.

This study discusses lexical preferences as a factor affecting the word order variation in Dutch verbal clusters. There are two grammatical word orders for Dutch two-verb clusters, with no clear meaning difference. Using the method of collostructional analysis, I find significant associations between specific verbs and word orders, and argue that these associations must be encoded in the lexicon as lexical preferences. In my data, the word orders also show some semantic associations, indicating that there might be a meaning difference after all. Based on these findings, I conclude that both word orders are stored in the lexicon as constructions.

This study utilized an experimental research design to determine if there was a significant difference in the writing proficiency of the students before and after the incorporation of the lexical semantic activities in the intervention classes done in the context of the subject, Practical Research. Writing tasks, in form of poem interpretation, picture analysis, and essay writing, served as the instruments of this study which was administered as pretest and posttest. This research purposively selected 30 samples from the Grade 11 Humanities and Social Sciences students from Talisay Senior High School who have access to internet and those who belonged to the above average, average, and below average levels in their respective classes. All the data gained in this research were subjected to data management and analysis through Mean, Standard Deviation, and T Dependent Test. According to the results of the analysis and statistical calculation, findings indicated the following difference...

Linguists have identified a number of types of recurrent semantic change, and have proposed a number of explanations, usually based on specific lexical items. This paper takes a different approach, by using a distributional semantic model to identify and quantify semantic change across an entire lexicon in a completely bottom-up fashion, and by examining which distributional properties of words are causal factors in semantic change. Several independent contributing factors are identified. First, the degree of prototypicality of a word within its semantic cluster correlated inversely with its likelihood of change (the " Diachronic Prototypicality Effect "). Second, the word class assignment of a word correlates with its rate of change: verbs change more than nouns, and nouns change more than adjectives (the " Diachronic Word Class Effect "), which we propose may be the diachronic result of an independently established synchronic psycholinguistic effect (the " Verb Mutability Effect "). Third, we found that mere token frequency does not play a significant role in the likelihood of a word's meaning to change. A regression analysis shows that these effects complement each other, and together, cover a significant amount of the variance in the data.

قد انتشرتْ الألفاظ الموضوعة في المجال الاقتصادي وتتداول على الألسنة ومِنْ ثمّ يهتمّ هذا البحث بنظرة لغوية دلالية لتحليل نموذج من المصطلحات المالية العربيّة المعاصرة، ذلك بالاستناد إلى مبادئ تغيّر الدّلالة نحو التّخصيص، والتّعميم، والتّوسّع، والانحطاط، والرّقيّ، والنّقل الدّلالي؛ ليربط بين تلك المصطلحات ومدلولاتها ربطًا سليمًا يمكن الكشف عما طرأ عليها مِنْ تغيّرات عند انتقالها مِنَ الدّلالات اللّغويّة الأصليّة إلى الدّلالات الاصطلاحيّة.