Lexical Semantics

Las preguntas que guían mi investigación son ¿cómo se conforma el vocabulario textil en el español de México y qué características tiene?, ¿el vocabulario de la elaboración textil artesanal quedó sólo como acervo de la memoria histórica en el español de México al restringirse su práctica?, ¿el léxico textil de la tradición artesanal del español de México se traslada a la terminología textil? y ¿cuál es el léxico con el que se lleva a cabo la interacción comunicativa entre los distintos sectores del ámbito textil, es decir, cuál es el léxico común?

This article is the second part in a series. It shows that the Old Norse term hrímþurs, often translated 'frost-ogre' or 'frost-giant' in English, was a poetic term as a variation on the archaic and obscure poetic term þurs (addressed in part I) that was employed for h-alliteration. After reviewing the limited poetic examples, the article shows that this term was strategically correlated with hrím ['rime, frost'] as a prime element of the world-creation in Snorri Sturluson's 13th century mythography, where hrímþurs is otherwise uniquely elevated to a distinct ethnonym. This construction of a mythic ethnic category is placed in
dialogue with other places where Snorri seems to have elevated or created a term and constructed a mythic ethnos in Edda. This discussion is put forward as a frame for considering whether Snorri also constructed the category of gods called ‘Vanir’, the controversial topic of the so-called Vanir Debate.

This paper addresses variation in lexical semantics by oral-poetic register and genre, including semantic variation in formulaic language.  It reviews uses of the Old Norse term þurs (commonly translated 'ogre') in verse contexts, including runic inscriptions.  It argues that the semantics of this term varied in relation to the genre in which it was used, including uses with reference to mythological giants (jötnar) in mythological narratives, agents of illness in charms, and as a vague synonym for 'monster' in death-songs more like the prose narratives in which these appear.  It proposes that variation by genre includes genres embedded in narrative as speech acts, approaching these as 'registral irruptions' in mertical narrative.

It shows that, especially in the fornyrðislag meter, use of this term was highly formulaic and considers the question of whether it may have indexed excessive or inappropriate sexuality.

In this paper my goal is twofold. For one, I will try to provide some kind of annotated bibliography of the most important works in polysemy research that have appeared in the last 15 years. I will constrain myself to those more theoretical pieces of the literature that discuss the question of what polysemy itself is in general and I will not be concerned with those empirical ones that just examine certain cases of polysemy in one theory or the other. However, this will be quite an extensive task in itself.
The structure of the paper will reflect the historical shift in attention between several aspects of the field of research, as outlined above:
My point of departure will be the excellent dissertation of Paul D. Deane (1987) on polysemy, which also includes a survey of literature on polysemy up to that date (Section 2), mostly representatives of the structural semantics strand. This survey is both exemplary in terms of philological thoroughness and very useful for our considerations because it highlights just those aspects of these earlier works that should be considered most relevant for the research today.
Then I will examine the works of researchers who explored the problem of polysemy in cognitive linguistics: the holistic cognitive semanticists (mainly Lakoff and Geeraerts) including Deane will be summarized in Section 3; the mostly German school of two-level semantics, which is based on seminal papers by Bierwisch and Lang in Section 5. The pragmatic approach of Nunberg, though it isn’t a typical cognitive approach, will also be discussed here, in Section 4, in part because it influenced both of the aforementioned approaches and in part because it appeared at approximately the same time as these.
Finally, two computational approaches will be examined: the DATR knowledge representation system employed by Kilgarriff and Gazdar (Section 6); and last but not least, the Generative Lexicon group around Pustejovsky (Section 7). I will take the liberty to draw together with any one of these groups other researchers (most notably, Ruhl, Blutner and Cruse) who do not really belong to it but whose position I judge to be sufficiently close to it.
The other, arguably more important goal of my paper is to present and compare the ideas expressed by these groups and to assess how, if in any way at all, these independent branches of research can be considered to be parts of a whole. To put it another way, I will try to sketch the overall picture of polysemy that arises when one puts together the puzzle pieces that one finds in the various theories.
My final conclusion (to be detailed in Section 8) will be that, despite the differences in the terminology and the descriptive formalisms that are characteristic of these approaches, it seems that most of them share most assumptions about what components a model of polysemy should have, what the functions of these components are, and how they cooperate to produce different kinds of polysemy. They also share some general explicit or implicit assumptions about the status of polysemy in linguistic theory.

In the past, many Muslims maintained strong reservations about using English as a means of communication, interaction, and intellectual practices mainly due to its association with British colonialism. In the postcolonial world Muslims and other religious communities, as well as various ethnic and indigenous groups, have moved away from the ideological and political assumptions of a binary relationship between English and their cultural and religious identities. As a result, several hundred million Muslims now use English as their first or second language, and more books on Islam are published in it than in any other language. However, Ismail al-Faruqi (1921-86) sees a serious anomaly in how Muslim names and Islamic theological terms are transliterated and translated, as the dominant practice shows not a loyalty to meaning, but to the norms of the target language. Such an approach causes these names and terms to lose semantic associations and religious connotations. To rectify this, al-Faruqi proposes the introduction of “Islamic English.” Based on his linguistic diagnosis and remedy,
I will discuss this approach from a postcolonial perspective.

Zuckermann, Ghil'ad and Walsh, Michael 2011. ‘Stop, Revive, Survive!: Lessons from the Hebrew Revival Applicable to the Reclamation, Maintenance and Empowerment of Aboriginal Languages and Cultures’, Australian Journal of Linguistics 31.1: 111-127.

LINK TO THE ARTICLE: http://www.zuckermann.org/pdf/Revival_Linguistics.pdf

Final version:
http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~db=all~content=a932426202~frm=titlelink

DOI: 10.1080/07268602.2011.532859

Australian Journal of Linguistics (AJL)
Volume 31, Issue 1, January 2011, pages 111 - 127

Stop, Revive, Survive: Lessons from the Hebrew Revival Applicable to the Reclamation, Maintenance and Empowerment of Aboriginal Languages and Cultures

GHIL‘AD ZUCKERMANN and MICHAEL WALSH

University of Adelaide and University of Sydney


ABSTRACT

The revival of Hebrew is so far the most successful known reclamation of a sleeping tongue and is a language movement that has been in progress for more than 120 years. By comparison, language revival movements in Australia are in their infancy. This article provides comparative insights and makes information about the Hebrew revival accessible to Australian linguists and Aboriginal revival activists.

Needless to say, the first stage of any desire by professional linguists to assist in language reawakening must involve a long period of thoroughly observing, carefully listening to the people, learning, mapping and characterizing the specific indigenous community. Only then can one inspire and assist. That said, this article proposes that there are linguistic constraints applicable to all revival attempts. Mastering them would be useful to endangered languages in general and to Aboriginal linguistic revival in particular.

This article contributes towards the establishment of Revival Linguistics, a new linguistic discipline and paradigm. Zuckermann`s term Revival Linguistics is modelled upon 'Contact Linguistics' (<language contact). Revival linguistics inter alia explores the universal constraints and mechanisms involved in language reclamation, renewal and revitalization. It draws perspicacious comparative insights from one revival attempt to another, thus acting as an epistemological bridge between parallel discourses in various local attempts to revive sleeping tongues all over the globe.


Keywords: Revival Linguistics, Language Revival, Aboriginal Studies, Hebrew, Social Empowerment, Hybridity and Multiple Causation, Purism versus Compromise, Language and Identity, Contact Linguistics, Yiddish, Aboriginal English, Anthropological Linguistics, Sociolinguistics, Language Endangerment, Resilience Linguistics, Revitalization, Renewal.


Dedicated to Professor Michael Clyne z"l



ARTICLE

"I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain."

(John Adams, 1735–1826, second president of the United States)


The main aim of this article is to suggest that there are perspicacious lessons applicable from the relatively successful Hebrew revival to the reclamation, maintenance and empowerment of Aboriginal languages and cultures. 'Language is power; let us have ours', wrote Aboriginal politician Aden Ridgeway on 26 November 2009 in the Sydney Morning Herald. Previous revival efforts have largely failed (for obvious reasons, we are not going to single out specific failures here). While there have been some good results from several projects since 1992 (e.g. Kaurna, see below), Aboriginal people overall do not see as many positive outcomes from revival programmes as they would like. In large part this is the result of shortage of sufficient (continuity of) funding, lack of technical expertise, and lack of integration of school-based programmes with community language programmes. However, there are purely linguistic reasons too: Many revival efforts were not supported by a sound theoretical understanding of how successful language revival works. As pointed out by Thieberger (2002), decisions about the appropriate target for language maintenance programmes are too often driven by structural linguistics, where the supposed ideal is intergenerational transmission of the language with all its original structural complexity retained, thus creating unrealistic expectations among the Aboriginal community.

This article is the first of its kind as it will innovatively draw crucial insights from 'Modern Hebrew' (henceforth, Israeli – see Zuckermann 1999), so far the most successful known reclamation attempt of a sleeping tongue. Zuckermann's (2008a, 2009, 2010, 2011) research on Israeli demonstrates which language components are more revivable than others. Words and conjugations, for example, are easier to revitalize than intonation, discourse, associations and connotations. We should encourage revivalists and Aboriginal leaders to be realistic rather than puristic, and not to chastise English loanwords and pronunciation, for example, within the emergent language. Applying such precious conclusions from Hebrew will closely assist Australian revivalists in being more efficient, urging them not to waste time and resources on Sisyphean efforts to resuscitate linguistic components that are unlikely to be revivable.

While the results the endeavors we are proposing here have considerable value as a research enterprise, one can also consider them in terms of a cost-benefit analysis (Mühlhäusler and Damania 2004, Walsh 2008): Language revitalization contributes to social reconciliation, cultural tourism (Clark and Kostanski 2005), capacity building, and improved community health for Indigenous peoples (Walsh forthcoming B). In the process of language revival, some Aboriginal people will go from being dysfunctional (cf. Sutton 2009) to well-balanced, positive people. The benefits to the wider community and to Australian society are immense.

Reversing language shift (RLS) (Fishman 1991, 2001, Hagège 2009, Evans 2010, Walsh 2005a, Zuckermann 2011) is thus of great social benefit. Language revival does not only do historical justice and address inequality but can also result in the empowerment of people who have lost their heritage and purpose in life.

Some Aboriginal people distinguish between usership and ownership. There are even those who claim that they own a language although they only know one single word of it: its name. Consequently, some Indigenous Australians do not find it important to revive their comatose tongue. We, on the other hand, have always believed in Australia’s very own roadside dictum: ‘Stop, revive, survive!'


Background: The Hebrew Revival

I suppose the process of acceptance will pass through the usual four stages: 1. This is worthless nonsense. 2. This is an interesting, but perverse, point of view. 3. This is true, but quite unimportant. 4. I always said so. (Haldane 1963: 464)

'Hebrew' is the most quoted example of a successful language revival. On the other hand, if we are to be brutally truthful with ourselves, the modern-day vernacular spoken in downtown Tel Aviv is a very different language – both typologically and genetically – to that of the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) or of the Mishnah, the first major redaction of Jewish oral traditions.

Hebrew was spoken since approximately the 14th century BC. It belonged to the Canaanite division of the northwestern branch of the Semitic languages, which constitute a branch of the Afro-Asiatic language family. Following a gradual decline, it ceased to be spoken by the second century AD. The failed Bar-Kokhba Revolt against the Romans in Judea in 132-5 AD marks the symbolic end of the period of spoken Hebrew. We believe that the Mishnah was codified around 200 AD because Hebrew was then dying as a mother tongue. Rabbi Judah haNasi and his collaborators might have realized that if they did not act then to redact the oral tradition, it would soon have been too late because Jews were already speaking languages other than Hebrew. (In fact, the Gemara, the other component of the Babylonian Talmud, which was codified around 500 AD, was written in Aramaic rather than in Hebrew.)

For approximately 1,750 years thereafter, Hebrew was ‘clinically dead’. A most important liturgical and literary language, it occasionally served as a lingua franca – a means of communication between people who do not share a mother tongue – for Jews of the Diaspora, but not as a native language.

Fascinating and multifaceted Israeli, which emerged in Palestine (Eretz Israel) at the end of the nineteenth century, possesses distinctive socio-historical characteristics such as the lack of a continuous chain of native speakers from spoken Hebrew to Israeli, the non-Semitic mother tongues spoken by the Hebrew revivalists, and the European impact on literary Hebrew. Consequently, it presents the linguist with a unique laboratory in which to examine a wider set of theoretical problems concerning language genesis, social issues like language, identity and politics, and important practical matters, such as whether it is possible to revive a no-longer spoken language.

The genetic classification of Israeli has preoccupied scholars since its genesis. The still regnant traditional thesis suggests that Israeli is Semitic: Hebrew revived. The revisionist antithesis defines Israeli as Indo-European: Yiddish relexified; that is, Yiddish, the revivalists’ mother tongue, is the 'substratum', whilst Hebrew is the 'superstratum' providing the vocabulary (cf. Horvath and Wexler 1997). According to Zuckermann's mosaic (rather than Mosaic) synthesis, Israeli is not only multi-layered but also multi-parental. A Semito-European, or Eurasian, hybr...

In this article, I introduce the terms and concepts semantic correlation and semantic disambiguation as tools for examining aspects of mythological thinking that interface with the lexicon. Semantic correlation describes a phenomenon whereby the name of the god and of the phenomenon become the same. In other words, a change in the theonym affects a change in the common noun or vice versa. In a culture where semantic correlation is a basic principle of mythological thinking, theonym and noun co-vary so that the god ‘Thunder’ is always called the same thing as ‘thunder’, the god ‘Sky’ and phenomenon ‘sky’ are called the same thing, and so on. Semantic correlation reflects the iconicity of the god, which becomes built into the lexicon. Semantic disambiguation describes the change from a theonym and corresponding noun being the same to becoming lexically distinct: either the name of the god or the noun for the phenomenon change independent of the other. Semantic disambiguation is an indicator that the god is no longer iconic of a natural phenomenon per se: a god may be identified with the sky as a location or be identified as producing thunder by, for example, driving a chariot, but the agent does not converge with the phenomenon. Recognizing semantic disambiguation can be significant because it is an indicator of change in a fundamental principle of mythological thinking.

Discussion is organized in three case studies. The first is of Uralic sky-gods. This study by language family includes discussion of the development spread of a Finnic theonym Ilma-ri to Udmurt, Sámi and probably Chuvash, and also addresses the problem of Finnic juma-la ['god']. The second case study explores an isogloss of changes in the Mari and Mordvin branches of Uralic and the Baltic and Germanic branches of Indo-European, as well as probably an Indo-Iranian language which was in contact with Finnic as well as potentially other languages subsumed by Finnic language spread. In these languages, the inherited theonym 'Sky' disappears as does the corresponding noun, and in its place appears a common noun 'God' as a theonym. This process is proposed to derive from a spread of religious change that moved across languages, quite possibly already in the Bronze Age. The third case examines names of the thunder-god in the Circum-Baltic area, revealing an isogloss in which the theonym underwent semantic disambiguation in some, but not all, branches of Finnic, Germanic and Sámi languages.

Many readers may only be superficially familiar with the history of some of the languages discussed, and even readers familiar with these languages may not be aware of the transformations in understanding that have developed during the past decade in particular. In order to make the discussion accessible to a wider range of readers, information on the historical spread and change of these languages is introduced as it becomes relevant. Although the individual case studies may each stand on their own merits, the overarching aim here is to illustrate the phenomena of semantic correlation and disambiguation and to illustrate their value as tools for examining historical changes encoded in a lexicon.

In 4 experiments, the authors addressed the mechanisms by which grammatical gender (in Italian and German) may come to affect meaning. In Experiments 1 (similarity judgments) and 2 (semantic substitution errors), the authors found Italian gender effects for animals but not for artifacts; Experiment 3 revealed no comparable effects in German. These results suggest that gender effects arise as a generalization from an established association between gender of nouns and sex of human referents, extending to nouns referring to sexuated entities. Across languages, such effects are found when the language allows for easy mapping between gender of nouns and sex of human referents (Italian) but not when the mapping is less transparent (German). A final experiment provided further constraints: These effects during processing arise at a lexical-semantic level rather than at a conceptual level.

In Construction Grammar, grammar is conceived as an inventory of form-function-meaning complexes of varying degrees of internal complexity and lexical fixity. These complexes range from single lexemes like the verb demur to multiword expressions like the VP sweep x under the rug to syntactic templates lacking any lexical content, like that used to form polar interrogative questions.  Whether we are describing a lexeme, a class of lexemes, a word with highly constrained selection properties (e.g., the adjective blithering) or a way to create a headed phrase of a particular type, we are describing patterns, because in each case we are describing the combinatoric properties of words.  But if we take pattern to mean a recurrent configuration containing some fixed and some variable components—which is presumably the standard sense of the term—only a phrasal template would seem to qualify. A verb by itself does not constitute a configuration, and a fixed expression like call it a day, while arguably phrasal, does not contain any open slots—it is inflexible. So can a word or a word class or a fixed formula really be a pattern? This puzzle is resolved in Sign Based Construction Grammar (SBCG; Sag 2012, Michaelis 2012, Kay and Sag 2012): all linguistic expressions are modeled as feature structures, whether these are signs or sign configurations, the latter of which are referred to as  constructs. The question of what forms the grammar licenses comes down to the question of whether a given feature structure of the type sign is well formed. SBCG analyzes lexical signs and constructs in much the same way: each kind of model object is deemed well formed (or not) according to its conformity to a feature-structure description of the type sign. The repertoire of signs includes lexemes with idiosyncratic valence requirements. The well formedness of a construct is determined indirectly, according to whether the construct’s mother sign conforms to a phrasal sign of the grammar. Because lexical signs and constructs are licensed in the same way, SBCG offers a uniform approach to all of the expressions—both lexemic and templatic—that populate the idiomaticity continuum. This point will be made using two patterns from antipodal points on the idiomaticity continuum, the negative polarity item a red cent and the abstract auxiliary-initial pattern, which captures properties common to numerous construct types in English. A pattern in SBCG is a feature-structure description, whether the feature structure describes a local tree (a combination of signs) or a single sign. Key to this approach is the idea that we can factor out phrasal information from multi-word expressions, allowing independently motivated phrasal constructions like the Head-Functor construction to create phrases from idiom words.

Kay, Paul and Ivan A. Sag. 2012. Discontinuous Dependencies and Complex Determiners. In H. Boas and I. Sag, (eds.), Sign-Based Construction Grammar. Stanford: CSLI Publications. 211-238.

Michaelis, Laura A. 2012. Making the Case for Construction Grammar. In H. Boas and I. Sag, (eds.), Sign-Based Construction Grammar. Stanford: CSLI Publications. 31-69.

Sag, Ivan A. 2012. Sign-Based Construction Grammar: An Informal Synopsis. In Hans Boas and Ivan A. Sag, (eds.), Sign-Based Construction Grammar. Stanford: CSLI Publications. 69-202.

The ancient Egyptian Coffin Texts form a corpus of ritual spells written on the inside of coffins from the Middle Kingdom (c. 2000-1650 BCE). The spells are part of a long Egyptian tradition of equipping the dead with ritual texts ensuring the transition from the state of a living human being to that of a deceased ancestor.

The Coffin Texts provide a rich material for studying ancient Egyptian conceptions of the body by providing insights into the underlying structure of the body as a whole and the proper function of individual parts of the body as seen by the ancient Egyptians.

Drawing on cognitive linguistics and phenomenological anthropology, Breathing Flesh presents an analysis of the conceptualisation of the human body and its individual parts in the Coffin Texts. Also discussed are the ritual conceptualisation and use of powerful substances such as ‘magic’, and the role of fertility and procreation in ancient Egyptian mortuary conceptions.

Introduction, table of contents and errata are available from Museum Tusculanum Press: http://www.mtp.hum.ku.dk/details.asp?eln=202870


Reviews
• PalArch: http://www.palarch.nl/wp-content/moje_j_2010_review_of_nyord_r_2009_breathing_flesh_carsten_niebuhr_institute.pdf
• The History Association: http://www.history.org.uk/resources/general_resource_3410_73.html
• Orientalistische Literaturzeitung 106 (2011), pp. 80-83: http://www.oldenbourg-link.com/toc/olzg/106/2"
• Lingua Aegyptia 19 (2011), pp. 375-386
• Wiener Zeitschrift für die Kunde des Morgenlandes 101 (2011), pp. 501-506: http://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/propylaeumdok/volltexte/2016/2874
• Bibliotheca Orientalis 71/3-4 (2014), coll. 403-406: http://poj.peeters-leuven.be/content.php?url=article&id=3062121&journal_code=BIOR

Hybrid nouns, nouns which induce different agreements according to the target, have been described in various languages. The new question is why they exist at all. There is clear evidence that hybrids vary considerably in the agreement they control, even within a single language. It therefore seems logical to align this variability with lexical semantics, and this is convincing for some hybrids. But this motivation is hard to reconcile with the fact that some hybrids are hybrids only for part of their paradigm. These latter instances suggest that the underlying motivation for some hybrids is a form-meaning mismatch.

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.

This study examines grammatical and discourse-pragmatric reflexes of the existential and resultative readings of the English present perfect. I present both negative and positive arguments in favor of the claim that the present perfect is ambiguous (rather
than vague) with respect to these readings. In particular, I argue that the resultative present-perfect represents a formal idiom: a morphosyntactic form characterized by idiosyncratic constraints on grammar, meaning and use. Certain constraints on the resultative present-perfecti, in particular that which prevents it from denoting a pragmatically presupposed event proposition, can be MOTIVATED with respect to discourse-pragmatic opposition involving the preterite. However, such constraints cannot be PREDICTED from functional oppositions or any general semantic principles. Finally, I suggest that mastery of aspectual grammar crucially entails knowledge of such idiomatic form-meaning pairings.

The discussion of Uralic theonyms in this 2012 conference paper have been significantlu developed and discussed in more detail in "Language and Mythology" (2017): https://www.academia.edu/35369652/Language_and_Mythology_Semantic_Correlation_and_Disambiguation_of_Gods_as_Iconic_Signs

The discussion of internal developments in Finnic mythology are discussed with emphasis on the epic Sampo-Cycle in "Confluence, Continuity and Change in the Evolution of Mythology" (2012): https://www.academia.edu/3687105/Confluence_Continuity_and_Change_in_the_Evolution_of_Mythology_The_Case_of_the_Finno-Karelian_Sampo-Cycle
and with emphasis on the role of the ritual specialist in "Shamans, Christians and Things in between":
https://www.academia.edu/4049431/Shamans_Christians_and_Things_in_between_From_Finnic_Germanic_Contacts_to_the_Conversion_of_Karelia

This paper focusses on the concept of ‘grammatical metaphor’ as it is conceived of in the framework of systemic functional linguistics. After an illustration of major subtypes of grammatical metaphor, the concept is explained in relation to lexical metaphor, using onomasiological and semasiological perspectives as two complementary viewpoints on metaphorical meaning in general.

Ethnopragmatics starts with the objective of understanding speech practices in terms of the values and social models of cultural insiders. It applies analytical methods based on cross-linguistic semantics in order to access and represent cultural meanings (Wierzbicka 1991[2003]; Goddard/Wierzbicka eds. 2004; Goddard ed. 2006). The chapter explains and positions these characteristics of ethnopragmatics with respect to similar and rival approaches. Ethnopragmatics is anti-Anglocentric, identifying as a critical issue the need to avoid English-specific terminology and English-specific concepts both in cultural description and in theory formulation. Relatedly, an important aspect of the ethnopragmatic project to de-naturalise the pragmatics of Anglo English. The chapter illustrates how cultural scripts and semantic explications framed in simple translatable words can be used to faithfully capture cultural-internal understandings of meaning, while at the same time allowing these to be accessible to cultural outsiders.
    Ethnopragmatics can be applied at different levels of description, from high-level cultural scripts associated with cultural keywords, to interactional scripts for communicative style, right down to scripts for linguistic routines and other word usage phenomena. It can illuminate connections between cultural values and beliefs, on the one hand, and a wide range of features of language structure and use, such as diminutives and honorifics, systems of address and reference, discourse particles, and of course, language-specific word meanings of diverse kinds. Ethnopragmatic sketches are provided for Chinese and Anglo English.  As for future directions, the chapter looks to practical applications of ethnopragmatics in intercultural education and in language documentation.

Are there any word-meanings which are absolute and precise lexico-semantic universals, and if so, what kind of meanings are they? This paper assesses the status, in a diverse range of languages, of about 100 meanings which have been proposed by various scholars (linguists, anthropologists, psychologists) as potential universals. Examples include: ‘I’, ‘this’, ‘one’, ‘big’, ‘good’, ‘true’, ‘sweet’, ‘hot’, ‘man’, ‘mother’, ‘tree’, ‘water’, ‘sun’, ‘wind’, ‘ear’, ‘say’, ‘do’, ‘go’, ‘sit’, ‘eat’, ‘give’, ‘die’, ‘maybe’, ‘because’. Though relatively small, the sample is variegated enough to justify the preliminary conclusion that the semantic primes proposed by Wierzbicka (1996) and colleagues are much stronger contenders for universal status than are terms designating natural phenomena, body parts, concrete objects, and other putative experiential or cultural universals.

This paper aims to identify and categorize terms for violence in Hebrew, as a foundation for further study of the use of violence. I understand violence as the deliberate use of physical force against another, and especially against the body of another. I study terms such as Afflict, Kill, Strike, Break, Crush, Pierce, Cut, Seize.

In the last four decades the United Arab Emirates has become one of the emerging hubs of international business and trade. With the bilingual situation in the UAE, the need has arisen to have translators to play the role of linguistic and cultural mediators. Translation industry has flourished and translation activity has gained a momentum in the economic and education sectors. Given this activity setting and the creation of translation degrees in UAE universities, this paper provides an overview of areas of research on translation with regard to the UAE. It is designed to function as a research guide to students and researchers who plan to conduct research on translation in, and of the UAE. A systematic coverage of research areas in translation studies is presented by linking them to the Emirati context. The paper outlines those research areas and offers questions that need to be answered in doing research on translation activity in the economic and socio-cultural system of the UAE. Main areas of research are introduced in the form of indicators for researchers who would like to embark on a research related to translation activity in the UAE. The areas of research are discussed first within Holmes's map of translation studies. They are divided broadly into the traditional fields of investigation with determining parameters whether they are linguistic or extra-linguistic topics of research. A special discussion of translation as inter-cultural communication within the history of the UAE is also provided. Corpus-based translation studies as a research methodology is addressed as well.

Ambiguity happens in a sentence which contains more than one meaning. Ambiguity can be caused by the ambiguous lexicon in which a word has more than one meaning and it can also be caused by the syntactic structure. Context also determines whether the sentence can be interpreted differently and become ambiguous. Ambiguity often causes confusion and it has become one of the phenomena in linguistic studies, particularly semantics. This study investigates ambiguity in creating humors in which the data were gathered from electronic sources in forms of newspaper headlines, jokes, riddles and anecdotes. The number of the data collection includes 25 cases of ambiguity. 12 sentences were lexically ambiguous, while the other 13 sentences were syntactically ambiguous. The results showed that lexical ambiguity and syntactic ambiguity were the language devices used to create puns in humor. The results also suggested that the ambiguity could be an effective source of humor when it particularly involves dual interpretations in which one interpretation gives a serious meaning and tone, whereas the other interpretation gives a humorous meaning which is not likely to occur in normal contexts.

The  present  research  work  about  lexical  creativity  in  youth  languages  of  Cameroon  and Germany  is  based  on  the  idea  that  youths  have  resort  to  some  linguistic  techniques  to  create new  words  for  their  slangs.  Taking  into  consideration  that  youth  languages  emerge  from contacts  between  languages  and  are  a  phenomenon  of  linguistic  variation,  this  work  aims  at analyzing  linguistic  phenomena  such  as  lexical  borrowing,  semantic  change,  semantic amplification,  word  formation,  and  onomatopoeia  from  a  descriptive  and  lexicological perspective.  These  procedures  have  been  analyzed  comparatively  within  eight  texts  of Cameroonian and  German  Rap.    The  first  chapter  deals  with  the  definition  of  the  concept  of  youth  language,  its  characteristics and  the  delimitation  to  other  neighboring  concepts.  Here,  youth  language  is  being  defined  as  a sociolect  that  is  a  language  variety  from  the  perspective  of  Heinrich  Löffler.  In  the  second chapter,  youth  languages  are  perceived  as  resulting  from  the  contacts  between  languages  at the  level  of  multilingual  individual  or  society.  This  part  also  deals  with  the  history  of scientific  theoretical  or  empirical  researches  on  Camfranglais  or  on  German  youth  languages, the  latest  being  vulgarized  and  widespread  through  media  and  mostly  through  the  Hip  Hop scene.  The  third  chapter  deals  with  the  presentation  of  the  analysis  methodology  and  defines the  main categories of the  work.  The  fourth    concerns  the  analysis  of  lexical  creativity  in selected texts of  Rap.  Through  a  more  qualitative  than  quantitative  lexicological-descriptive  approach,  it  has  been noticed  that  the  youths  of  both  linguistic  areas  have  recourse  to  all  of  the  studied  linguistic procedures,  with  the  aim  of  extending  or  finding  new  Signifiers  and  Signified  for  their specific  lexicon.  Lexical  borrowing  from  the  English  language  or  from  the  American  urban culture  is  more  important  in  the  concerned  milieus.    Nevertheless,  each  procedure  presents internal  differences  when  contrasting  with  the  other  language.  This  can  be  explained  with  the differences  in  socio-cultural  milieus,  in  the  socialization  of  these  youths  likewise  in  their linguistic  uses.  Beyond  this,  lexical  creativity  can  be  exemplified  with  the  phenomenon  of spontaneity  that  the  youths  of  the  two  countries  express,  because  many  lexemes  have  been created spontaneously  and  by  chance.

This article explores the ways in which language users make sense of metaphoricity when manifest in a variety of ways within the language. The research provides an analysis of the lexical characteristics of a single item (grew) when used in potentially, but not clearly identified, metaphoric contexts. The analysis focuses on flexible patterns of meaning and the relationship between metaphor and other aspects of figurative language such as polysemy, metonymy, and meronymy. The research stands as a follow up to a larger corpus-driven study that found differences in the lexical behavior of clearly defined metaphoric and non-metaphoric instances of items (flame, cultivated, and grew), when looking at a large set of collocations, colligations, and semantic, pragmatic and textual associations. These behaviors or patterns are consequently avoided by the non-metaphoric instances of that same item, in order to avoid ambiguity. In the case of more ambiguous or unclear cases of metaphor, this article aims to determine if these patterns are still visible and the extent to which they signal metaphoricity. Evidence of such patterns would imply that lexical, grammatical, textual, and pragmatic manifestations in language play an important role in distinguishing between subtleties in word senses and meanings, even in the case of less obvious metaphoricity. As a consequence, awareness of these behaviors or characteristics (or lexical primings) should be at the forefront of any lexical metaphor theory.

This article provides a discussion on implicational hierarchies. It presents the examples of typological hierarchies and considers in turn syntactic, morphosyntactic, and lexical hierarchies. A well-known syntactic hierarchy is the Accessibility Hierarchy. The Agreement Hierarchy and the Animacy Hierarchy are the two well-established examples of morphosyntactic hierarchy. The Berlin and Kay Hierarchy is a famous typological hierarchy for lexis. Any proposed hierarchy must be justified by the range of data that it explains and the closeness of fit between the data and the claim made. The use of hierarchies for research on individual languages is described. The article finally deals with the extension of hierarchies and the relation of hierarchies to semantic maps.

The Sapir–Whorf hypothesis holds that language plays a powerful role in shaping human consciousness, affecting everything from private thought and perception to larger patterns of behavior in society—ultimately allowing members of any given speech community to arrive at a shared sense of social reality. This article starts with a brief consideration of the philosophical insights that inspired the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis or the “principle of linguistic relativity,” as it is more often known today. Toward the end of the article current empirical research is reviewed. This explores everything from human universals to the cross-cultural differences in the construction of gender, color, space, and other creative practices associated with language, such as storytelling, poetry, or song.

Resumen:
Wittgenstein, el filósofo más original del siglo XX, fue tomado erróneamente por un positivista. Pese a ello, la intención con la que Wittgenstein escribió el Tractatus era, en última instancia, una intención ética, que puede compendiarse bajo lo que el autor llama lo místico (das Mystische), que incluye la ética, la estética y la teoría de los valores. La preocupación por estas y otras cuestiones conexas, como la religión y el del sentido de la existencia, desempeñan un sordo papel central en el conjunto de su  pensamiento.
Y, si bien, según las propias tesis wittgensteinianas, las cuestiones éticas, no pueden ser respondidas y, en rigor, ni siquiera formuladas en el marco de la ciencia natural, esto no implica un menosprecio de “esta irrevocable tendencia del espíritu humano” a plantear tales cuestiones, sino más bien el reconocimiento de las limitaciones de nuestro lenguaje para dar cuenta de ellas. Ello se desprende de una afirmación central del Tractatus: “Nosotros sentimos que incluso si todas las posibles cuestiones científicas pudieran responderse, el problema de nuestra vida no habría sido más penetrado”.
Dr. Adolfo Vásquez Rocca
Palabras clave:
Filosofía Analítica, Wittgenstein, Tractatus, Lógica, Lenguaje, Mundo, Estética, Círculo de Viena,  Ética, Mística, Filosofía,  Religión, Psicoanálisis.
Referencia:
VÁSQUEZ ROCCA, Adolfo, “Wittgenstein; Mística, Filosofía y Silencio” – CONFERENCIA en 'SEMINARIO HUMANIDADES: ESTUDIOS ANTROPOLÓGICOS ACERCA DE LO DIVINO', Departamento de Artes y Humanidades, Facultad de Filosofía, Universidad Andrés Bello UNAB, Santiago, octubre, 2005. Publicada en Revista Observaciones Filosóficas – ISSN 0718-3712,  Sección Filosofía Contemporánea, Año 2006  http://www.observacionesfilosoficas.net/misticayfilosofia.html

The proprioception of space is a major matrix of cognitive and conceptual metaphors. Scholars too often resort to spatial metaphors in order to “place” and “visualize” their theoretical insights. Semiotics is not an exception: on the opposite, given the abstractedness of the semiotic investigation, semioticians have often coated their theories in spatial imaginaire. Peirce’s semiotics could not be conceived without its triangular insistence, the superposition of a representamen upon an object through an interpretant, diagrams, and graphs; Lotman turned space into a meta-language, but was himself thinking semiotics in spatial terms (the semiosphere being the epitome of spatial theorization); as for the trend of semiotic scholarship that develops from Saussure through Hjelmslev to Greimas and beyond, the preeminence of “spatial thought” (perhaps a consequence of the “diachronic primacy”) is evident since the first model of sign, wherein the signifier and the signified are situated in a specific, hierarchic topology. The paper will claim that not only each school of semiotics, and perhaps each semiotician too, refer to a characteristic spatial imaginaire, but also that this theoretical topology interacts with what could be called an “ontological ideology”: in each sociocultural group, at a given moment of its history, a certain conception of being is given preference over the others, generating a spatial imaginaire.
The paper will therefore seek to retrace the intellectual trajectory of Algirdas J. Greimas’s semiotics in relation to one of these ontological ideologies and its spatial figure: depth. Greimas’s theory on- and model of- meaning became international acclaimed — the paper will argue — because successfully intercepted an ontological ideology predominant across societies and cultures in the 1960s and 1970s: according to it, what matters does not lie at the surface of things, but in their depths; in order to reach value, one must dive into this depth, equipped with a suitable methodology, and unveil the essential that is hidden behind several layers of inessentiality. Greimas’s “generative path” [parcours génératif] epitomized the theoretical triumph of such “topological ideology”. With this hypothesis in the background, the paper will seek to explain why the Greimasian method became so acclaimed, why it was subsequently so denigrated, and why and in what guise it should be rediscovered in present-day international semiotics.