Download or read book Where Words Get their Meaning written by Marianna Bolognesi and published by John Benjamins Publishing Company. This book was released on 2020-11-15 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Word Meaning written by Richard Hudson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2003-09-02 with total page 116 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Word Meaning, Richard Hudson introduces readers to the techniques of lexical semantic analysis. Word Meaning: * is based on a problem-solving approach to language * introduces readers to the technical terminology and basic principles associated with the analysis of word meaning * shows students how to apply these terms and principles to English * includes suggestions for further work
Download or read book Oxford English Dictionary written by John A. Simpson and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2002-04-18 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Oxford English Dictionary is the internationally recognized authority on the evolution of the English language from 1150 to the present day. The Dictionary defines over 500,000 words, making it an unsurpassed guide to the meaning, pronunciation, and history of the English language. This new upgrade version of The Oxford English Dictionary Second Edition on CD-ROM offers unparalleled access to the world's most important reference work for the English language. The text of this version has been augmented with the inclusion of the Oxford English Dictionary Additions Series (Volumes 1-3), published in 1993 and 1997, the Bibliography to the Second Edition, and other ancillary material. System requirements: PC with minimum 200 MHz Pentium-class processor; 32 MB RAM (64 MB recommended); 16-speed CD-ROM drive (32-speed recommended); Windows 95, 98, Me, NT, 200, or XP (Local administrator rights are required to install and open the OED for the first time on a PC running Windows NT 4 and to install and run the OED on Windows 2000 and XP); 1.1 GB hard disk space to run the OED from the CD-ROM and 1.7 GB to install the CD-ROM to the hard disk: SVGA monitor: 800 x 600 pixels: 16-bit (64k, high color) setting recommended. Please note: for the upgrade, installation requires the use of the OED CD-ROM v2.0.
Download or read book The Language of Word Meaning written by Pierrette Bouillon and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2001-01-15 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of contributions addresses the problem of words and their meaning.
Download or read book Words Meaning and Vocabulary written by Howard Jackson and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2000-01-01 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work goes back to the sources of modern English words and studies the development of vocabulary over time. It examines what constitutes a word, with a discussion of words that look and sound the same, words that have several meanings, and "words" that are made up of more than one "word". As well as considering the borrowing of words from other languages throughout the history of English as a means of increasing the vocabulary, the book also outlines how English forms new words by exploiting the structure of existing words, through processes of derivation and compounding. The meaning of a word is composite of a number of relations: reference to external context, relations with other words of a similar or opposite meaning, collocational relations, and so on. The book grapples with the meaning problem, but then goes on to look at the contexts in which words are used and the purposes for which they are used, raising the question whether it is more sensible to talk about English "vocabularies" rather than English "vocabulary".
Download or read book Semantic Antics written by Sol Steinmetz and published by Random House Reference. This book was released on 2009-02-04 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "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.
Download or read book Words and Their Meaning written by Howard Jackson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-06-03 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The Meaning of Language second edition written by Heidi Savage and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2020-01-21 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new edition of a comprehensive introduction to the philosophy of language, substantially updated and reorganized. The philosophy of language aims to answer a broad range of questions about the nature of language, including “what is a language?” and “what is the source of meaning?” This accessible comprehensive introduction to the philosophy of language begins with the most basic properties of language and only then proceeds to the phenomenon of meaning. The second edition has been significantly expanded and reorganized, putting the original content in a contemporary context and offering substantial new material, with extended discussions and entirely new chapters. After establishing the basics, the book discusses general criteria for an adequate theory of meaning, takes a first pass at describing meaning at an abstract level, and distinguishes between meaning and other related phenomena. Building on this, the book then addresses various specific theories of meaning, beginning with early foundational theories and proceeding to more contemporary ones. New to this edition are expanded discussions of Chomsky's work and compositional semantics, among other topics, and new chapters on such subjects as propositions, Montague grammar, and contemporary theories of language. Each chapter has technical terms in bold, followed by definitions, and offers a list of main points and suggested further readings. The book is suitable for use in undergraduate courses in philosophy and linguistics. Some background in philosophy is assumed, but knowledge of philosophy of language is not necessary.
Download or read book Word Meaning and Montague Grammar written by D. R. Dowty and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 441 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The most general goal of this book is to propose and illustrate a program of research in word semantics that combines some of the methodology and results in linguistic semantics, primarily that of the generative semantics school, with the rigorously formalized syntactic and semantic framework for the analysis of natural languages developed by Richard Montague and his associates, a framework in which truth and denotation with respect to a model are taken as the fundamental semantic notions. I hope to show, both from the linguist's and the philosopher's point of view, not only why this synthesis can be undertaken but also why it will be useful to pursue it. On the one hand, the linguists' decompositions of word meanings into more primitive parts are by themselves inherently incomplete, in that they deal only in distinctions in meaning without providing an account of what mean ings really are. Not only can these analyses be made complete by a model theoretic semantics, but also such an account of these analyses renders them more exact and more readily testable than they could ever be otherwise.
Download or read book Encyclopaedia Britannica written by Hugh Chisholm and published by . This book was released on 1910 with total page 1090 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This eleventh edition was developed during the encyclopaedia's transition from a British to an American publication. Some of its articles were written by the best-known scholars of the time and it is considered to be a landmark encyclopaedia for scholarship and literary style.
Download or read book Meaning and Relevance written by Deirdre Wilson and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2012-03-22 with total page 397 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Words Without Meaning written by Christopher Gauker and published by Christopher Gauker. This book was released on 2003 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A critique of, and alternative to, the received view of linguistic communication.
Download or read book The Standard of Usage in English written by Thomas R. Lounsbury and published by . This book was released on 1908 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book How Children Learn the Meanings of Words written by Paul Bloom and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2002-01-25 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How do children learn that the word "dog" refers not to all four-legged animals, and not just to Ralph, but to all members of a particular species? How do they learn the meanings of verbs like "think," adjectives like "good," and words for abstract entities such as "mortgage" and "story"? The acquisition of word meaning is one of the fundamental issues in the study of mind. According to Paul Bloom, children learn words through sophisticated cognitive abilities that exist for other purposes. These include the ability to infer others' intentions, the ability to acquire concepts, an appreciation of syntactic structure, and certain general learning and memory abilities. Although other researchers have associated word learning with some of these capacities, Bloom is the first to show how a complete explanation requires all of them. The acquisition of even simple nouns requires rich conceptual, social, and linguistic capacities interacting in complex ways. This book requires no background in psychology or linguistics and is written in a clear, engaging style. Topics include the effects of language on spatial reasoning, the origin of essentialist beliefs, and the young child's understanding of representational art. The book should appeal to general readers interested in language and cognition as well as to researchers in the field.
Download or read book How Language Works written by David Crystal and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2007-03-29 with total page 715 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this fascinating survey of everything from how sounds become speech to how names work, David Crystal answers every question you might ever have had about the nuts and bolts of language in his usual highly illuminating way. Along the way we find out about eyebrow flashes, whistling languages, how parents teach their children to speak, how politeness travels across languages and how the way we talk show not just how old we are but where we’re from and even who we want to be.
Download or read book It s All in a Word written by Vivian Cook and published by Profile Books. This book was released on 2010-12-09 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cross words, crass words, kind words, bad words, first words, rude words, new words, weazel words, teen words, rap words, power words, colour words, Indian words, Brit words, Blairwords, war words, ad words, p-c words, borrowed words, Shakespeare's amazing words, false words, fine words, wine words, American words, name words, last words, even lost for words - this book has them all. Vivian Cook takes us on a series of excursions down the curious byways of word history and meaning, mingling the fare with games, lists, tests, and quotes. Discover the theojollylogical joys of infixation. Find out if you're a charva, what it means to be nithered, and how to hoy. Delve into the hidden nature of words. Consider how they're born, why they change, and how they die. Learn about the words that are never spoken and others that don't get written. Here's a book overflowing with words and about every kind and variety of word. It offers an irresistible cornucopia of information and entertainment.
Download or read book Politics and the English Language written by George Orwell and published by Renard Press Ltd. This book was released on 2021-01-01 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: George Orwell set out ‘to make political writing into an art’, and to a wide extent this aim shaped the future of English literature – his descriptions of authoritarian regimes helped to form a new vocabulary that is fundamental to understanding totalitarianism. While 1984 and Animal Farm are amongst the most popular classic novels in the English language, this new series of Orwell’s essays seeks to bring a wider selection of his writing on politics and literature to a new readership. In Politics and the English Language, the second in the Orwell’s Essays series, Orwell takes aim at the language used in politics, which, he says, ‘is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind’. In an age where the language used in politics is constantly under the microscope, Orwell’s Politics and the English Language is just as relevant today, and gives the reader a vital understanding of the tactics at play. 'A writer who can – and must – be rediscovered with every age.' — Irish Times
