Lexical Semantics

Morphology is the area of linguistics concerned with the internal structure of words. Information retrieval has generally not paid much attention to word structure, other than to account for some of the variability in word forms via the use of stemmers. We report on our experiments to determine the importance of morphology, and the effect that it has on performance. We found that grouping morphological variants makes a significant improvement in retrieval performance. Improvements are seen by grouping inflectional as well as derivational variants. We also found that performance was enhanced by recognizing lexical phrases. We describe the interaction between morphology and lexical ambiguity, and how resolving that ambiguity will lead to further improvements in performance.

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 article provides an original account of slurs and how they may be differentially used by in-group and out-group speakers. Slurs are first distinguished from other terms and their role in social interaction is discussed. A new distinction is introduced between three different uses of slurs: the (a) paradigmatic derogatory use, (b) non-paradigmatic derogatory use, and (c) non-derogatory in-group use. I then account for their literal meaning and explain how a family-resemblance conception of category membership can clarify our understanding of the various natural-language uses of slurs, (a)–(c). The focus is restricted primarily to race-based and sex-based slurs used in the context of English speakers, and the article concludes with desiderata to be met by any subsequent analyses of slurs.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.langcom.2013.03.008
https://doctorcroom.com/croom-2013a

Semantics is an inherently interdisciplinary subject, and one which benefits from the intrinsically interdisciplinary perspective of cognitive science." Semantics" has meant different things in different disciplines: That situation is not just accidental but neither does it necessarily reflect" turf battles" or disagreements; mainly, it reflects the many different ways that different disciplines are concerned with meaning. And, even within a single discipline," semantics" often means different things within different schools of thought. There it often ...

Patients with focal diencephalic, temporal lobe, or frontal lobe lesions were examinedon various measures of remote memory. Korsakoff patients showed a severe impairment with acharacteristic temporal gradient, whereas two patients with focal diencephalic damage (andanterograde amnesia) were virtually unimpaired on remote memory measures. Patients withfrontal lobe pathology were severely impaired in the recall of autobiographical incidents andfamous news events. Patients

A familiar assumption in much linguistic semantics is that meanings are to be identified conceptually as, or as subparts of, the conceptual representations deployed in general cognitive processes. However, this assumption has increasingly come into question as a result of developments in the study of cognition both within and outside linguistics. This article reassesses the place of concept-based explanation in semantics in light of these developments,
concentrating on the explanatory power, scope and uniqueness of the conceptual hypothesis as a substantive proposal about the mental architecture supporting meaning.
It concludes that while concept-based explanations of meaning are viable for a certain class of referents, their role in a cognitively natural account of the lexicon is subject to significant but little appreciated limitations.

We test the Distributional Inclusion Hypothesis, which states that hypernyms tend to occur in a superset of contexts in which their hyponyms are found. We find that this hypothesis only holds when it is applied to relevant dimensions. We propose a robust supervised approach that achieves accuracies of .84 and .85 on two existing datasets and that can be interpreted as selecting the dimensions that are relevant for distributional inclusion.

Recent discoveries of semantic compositionality in Japanese tits have enlivened the discussions on the presence of this phenomenon in wild animal communication. Data on semantic compositionality in wild apes are lacking, even though language experiments with captive apes have demonstrated they are capable of semantic compositionality. In this paper, I revisit the study by Boesch (Hum. Evol. 6:81–89, 1991) who investigated drumming sequences by an alpha male in a chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes) community in the Taï National Park, Côte d’Ivoire. A reanalysis of the data reveals that the alpha male produced semantically compositional combined messages of travel direction change and resting period initiation. Unlike the Japanese tits, the elements of the compositional expression were not simply juxtaposed but displayed structural reduction, while one of the two elements in the expression coded the meanings of both elements. These processes show relative resemblance to blending and fusion in human languages. Also unlike the tits, the elements of the compositional expression did not have a fixed order, although there was a fixed distribution of drumming events across the trees used for drumming. Because the elements of the expression appear to carry verb-like meanings, the compositional expression also resembles simple verb-verb constructions and short paratactic combinations of two clauses found across languages. In conclusion, the reanalysis suggests that semantic compositionality and phenomena resembling paratactic combinations of two clauses might have been present in the communication of the last common ancestor of chimpanzees and humans, not necessarily in the vocal modality.

The amount of unstructured text present in all electronic media is increasing periodically day after day. In order to extract relevant and succinct information, extraction algorithms are limited to entity relationships. This paper is compendium of different bootstrapping approaches which have their own subtask of extracting dependencies like who did, what, whom, from natural language sentence. This can be extremely helpful in both feature design and error analysis in application of machine learning to natural language processing.