Lexical Semantics
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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... more
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... more
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,... more
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... more
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... more
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... more
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... more
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... more
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... more
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... more
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... more
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... more
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... more
The discussion of Uralic theonyms in this 2012 conference paper have been significantlu developed and discussed in more detail in "Language and Mythology" (2017):... more
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... more
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... more
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... more
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... more
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... more
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... more
There is an embarrassing error in the list of etymologies discussed. The Mongolian word said to be the equivalent of EAR is of course the word for NOSE, as correctly pointed out by S.A. Starostin in his rejoinder to this review.
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.... more
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... more
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... more
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... more
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... more
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... more