Download or read book A Course in Semantics written by Daniel Altshuler and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2019-09-03 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An introductory text in linguistic semantics, uniquely balancing empirical coverage and formalism with development of intuition and methodology. This introductory textbook in linguistic semantics for undergraduates features a unique balance between empirical coverage and formalism on the one hand and development of intuition and methodology on the other. It will equip students to form intuitions about a set of data, explain how well an analysis of the data accords with their intuitions, and extend the analysis or seek an alternative. No prior knowledge of linguistics is required. After mastering the material, students will be able to tackle some of the most difficult questions in the field even if they have never taken a linguistics course before. After introducing such concepts as truth conditions and compositionality, the book presents a basic symbolic logic with negation, conjunction, and generalized quantifiers, to serve as the basis for translation throughout the book. It then develops a detailed compositional semantics, covering quantification (scope and binding), adverbial modification, relative clauses, event semantics, tense and aspect, as well as pragmatic phenomena, notably deictic pronouns and narrative progression. A Course in Semantics offers a large and diverse set of exercises, interspersed throughout the text; those labeled “Important practice and looking ahead” prepare students for material to come; those labeled “Thinking about ” invite students to think beyond the content of the book.
Download or read book Natural Language Semantics written by Brendan S. Gillon and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2019-03-12 with total page 731 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An introduction to natural language semantics that offers an overview of the empirical domain and an explanation of the mathematical concepts that underpin the discipline. This textbook offers a comprehensive introduction to the fundamentals of those approaches to natural language semantics that use the insights of logic. Many other texts on the subject focus on presenting a particular theory of natural language semantics. This text instead offers an overview of the empirical domain (drawn largely from standard descriptive grammars of English) as well as the mathematical tools that are applied to it. Readers are shown where the concepts of logic apply, where they fail to apply, and where they might apply, if suitably adjusted. The presentation of logic is completely self-contained, with concepts of logic used in the book presented in all the necessary detail. This includes propositional logic, first order predicate logic, generalized quantifier theory, and the Lambek and Lambda calculi. The chapters on logic are paired with chapters on English grammar. For example, the chapter on propositional logic is paired with a chapter on the grammar of coordination and subordination of English clauses; the chapter on predicate logic is paired with a chapter on the grammar of simple, independent English clauses; and so on. The book includes more than five hundred exercises, not only for the mathematical concepts introduced, but also for their application to the analysis of natural language. The latter exercises include some aimed at helping the reader to understand how to formulate and test hypotheses.
Download or read book Semantics in Business Systems written by Dave McComb and published by Morgan Kaufmann. This book was released on 2004 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book illustrates how this applies to the future of application system development, especially how it informs and affects Web services and business rule-based approaches, and how semantics will play out with XML and the semantic Web. The book also contains a quick reference guide to related terms and technologies.
Download or read book Meaning Diminished written by Kenneth Allen Taylor and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Meaning Diminished examines the complex relationship between semantic analysis and metaphysical inquiry. Kenneth A. Taylor argues that we should expect linguistic and conceptual analysis of natural language to yield far less metaphysical insight into what there is - and the nature of what there is - than many philosophers have imagined. Taking a strong stand against the so-called linguistic turn in philosophy, Taylor contends that philosophers as diverse as Kant, with his Transcendental Idealism, Frege, with his aspirational Platonism, Carnap with his distinction between internal and external questions, and Strawson, with his descriptive metaphysics, have placed too much confidence in the ability of linguistic and conceptual analysis to achieve deep insight into matters of ultimate metaphysics. He urges philosophers who seek such insight to turn away from the interrogation of language and concepts and back to the more direct interrogation of reality itself. In doing so, he maps out the way forward toward a metaphysically modest semantics, in which semantics carries less weighty metaphysical burdens, and toward a revisionary and naturalistic metaphysics, untethered to the a priori analysis of ordinary language.
Download or read book Semantics World View and Bible Translation written by Gerrit van Steenbergen and published by AFRICAN SUN MeDIA. This book was released on 2006-03-01 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study draws a number of disciplines together from a Bible translation perspective. It offers a thorough semantic analysis of selected Hebrew lexical items referring to negative moral behaviour in the book of Isaiah, and discusses the implications of the analysis for Hebrew lexicography. The book first offers a critical appraisal of componential analysis of meaning, followed by a number of proposals to improve this analytical tool in order to bring it in line with modern insights from cognitive linguistics.
Download or read book The Tools of Metaphysics and the Metaphysics of Science written by Theodore Sider and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-02-19 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Metaphysics is sensitive to the conceptual tools we choose to articulate metaphysical problems. Those tools are a lens through which we view metaphysical problems, and the same problems will look different when we change the lens. In this book, Theodore Sider identifies how the shift from modal to "postmodal" conceptual tools in recent years has affected the metaphysics of science and mathematics. He highlights, for instance, how the increased consideration of concepts of ground, essence, and fundamentality has transformed the debate over structuralism in many ways. Sider then examines three structuralist positions through a postmodal lens. First, nomic essentialism, which says that scientific properties are secondary and lawlike relationships among them are primary. Second, structuralism about individuals, a general position of which mathematical structuralism and structural realism are instances, which says that scientific and mathematical objects are secondary and the pattern of relations among them is primary. And third, comparativism about quantities, which says that particular values of scientific quantities, such as having exactly 1000g mass, are secondary, and quantitative relations, such as being-twice-as-massive-as, are primary. Sider concludes these discussions by considering the meta-question of when theories are equivalent and how that impacts the debate over structuralism.
Download or read book Semantics written by James R. Hurford and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1983-04-28 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Introduces the major elements of semantics in a simple, step-by-step fashion. Sections of explanation and examples are followed by practice exercises with answers and comment provided.
Download or read book Semantics written by F. R. Palmer and published by . This book was released on 1979 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Two Dimensional Semantics written by Manuel Garcia-Carpintero and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2006-04-06 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: According to two-dimensional semantics, the meaning of an expression involves two different "dimensions": one dimension involves reference and truth-conditions of a familiar sort, while the other dimension involves the way that reference and truth-conditions depend on the external world (for example, reference and truth-conditions might be held to depend on which individuals and substances are present in the world, or on which linguistic conventions are in place). A number ofdifferent two-dimensional frameworks have been developed, and these have been applied to a number of fundamental problems in philosophy: the nature of communication, the relation between the necessary and the a priori, the role of context in assertion, Frege's distinction between sense and reference, thecontents of thought, and the mind-body problem.Manuel Garcia-Carpintero and Josep Macia present a selection of new essays by an outstanding international team, shedding fresh light both on foundational issues regarding two-dimensional semantics and on its specific applications. The volume will be the starting-point for future work on this approach to issues in philosophy of language, epistemology, and metaphysics.
Download or read book Dividing Reality written by Eli Hirsch and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1993-04-29 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why does our language divide up reality one way rather than another? On what rational basis does our language contain certain kinds of general words rather than others? Hirsch shows that a language can be constructed which describes reality in ways we would find absurdly irrational, for example by classifying normally disparate items under the same general term. The apparent irrationality of the new language does not depend on its impoverished fact-stating power, as this may be equivalent to the fact-stating power of ordinary language; the problem then is to explain exactly what is wrong with it. Various options are explored and criticized, such as the hypothesis that language must reflect an underlying objective distinction between 'natural' kinds; that there are pragmatic reasons for the way language functions as it does; and that, as a matter of 'metaphysical necessity, ' strange ways of dividing up reality are constructions out of ordinary ways. Having demonstrated that this newly identified problem is in fact a serious one which cannot be easily solved or brushed aside, Hirsch offers his own suggestions for a possible solution.
Download or read book What It All Means written by Philippe Schlenker and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2022-11-22 with total page 488 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How meaning works—from monkey calls to human language, from spoken language to sign language, from gestures to music—and how meaning is connected to truth. We communicate through language, connecting what we mean to the words we say. But humans convey meaning in other ways as well, with facial expressions, hand gestures, and other methods. Animals, too, can get their meanings across without words. In What It All Means, linguist Philippe Schlenker explains how meaning works, from monkey calls to human language, from spoken language to sign language, from gestures to music. He shows that these extraordinarily diverse types of meaning can be studied and compared within a unified approach—one in which the notion of truth plays a central role. “It’s just semantics” is often said dismissively. But Schlenker shows that semantics—the study of meaning—is an unsung success of modern linguistics, a way to investigate some of the deepest questions about human nature using tools from the empirical and formal sciences. Drawing on fifty years of research in formal semantics, Schlenker traces how meaning comes to life. After investigating meaning in primate communication, he explores how human meanings are built, using in some cases sign languages as a guide to the workings of our inner “logic machine.” Schlenker explores how these meanings can be enriched by iconicity in sign language and by gestures in spoken language, and then turns to more abstract forms of iconicity to understand the meaning of music. He concludes by examining paradoxes, which—being neither true nor false—test the very limits of meaning.
Download or read book Five Words written by Roland Greene and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2013-06-10 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Blood. Invention. Language. Resistance. World. Five ordinary words that do a great deal of conceptual work in everyday life and literature. In this original experiment in critical semantics, Roland Greene considers how these words changed over the course of the sixteenth century and what their changes indicate about broader forces in science, politics, and other disciplines. Rather than analyzing works, careers, or histories, Greene discusses a broad swath of Renaissance and transatlantic literature—including Shakespeare, Cervantes, Camões, and Milton—in terms of the development of these five words. Aiming to shift the conversation around Renaissance literature from current approaches to riskier enterprises, Greene also proposes new methods that take advantage of digital resources like full-text databases, but still depend on the interpreter to fashion ideas out of ordinary language. Five Words is an innovative and accessible book that points the field of literary studies in an exciting new direction.
Download or read book Understanding the lexicon written by Werner Hüllen and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2011-05-02 with total page 457 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the past few decades, the book series Linguistische Arbeiten [Linguistic Studies], comprising over 500 volumes, has made a significant contribution to the development of linguistic theory both in Germany and internationally. The series will continue to deliver new impulses for research and maintain the central insight of linguistics that progress can only be made in acquiring new knowledge about human languages both synchronically and diachronically by closely combining empirical and theoretical analyses. To this end, we invite submission of high-quality linguistic studies from all the central areas of general linguistics and the linguistics of individual languages which address topical questions, discuss new data and advance the development of linguistic theory.
Download or read book Elements of Formal Semantics written by Yoad Winter and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2016-04-08 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Introducing some of the foundational concepts, principles and techniques in the formal semantics of natural language, Elements of Formal Semantics outlines the mathematical principles that underlie linguistic meaning. Making use of a wide range of concrete English examples, the book presents the most useful tools and concepts of formal semantics in an accessible style and includes a variety of practical exercises so that readers can learn to utilise these tools effectively. For readers with an elementary background in set theory and linguistics or with an interest in mathematical modelling, this fascinating study is an ideal introduction to natural language semantics. Designed as a quick yet thorough introduction to one of the most vibrant areas of research in modern linguistics today this volume reveals the beauty and elegance of the mathematical study of meaning.
Download or read book Between Logic and the World written by Bernhard Nickel and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In our everyday thought and talk, we put things into categories in order to generalize about them: 'Lions have manes', 'Ravens are black'. Bernhard Nickel presents a theory of generic sentences and the modes of thought they express, integrating compositional semantics with metaphysics to solve the problems of what they mean and how they work.
Download or read book Language and Meaning in the Age of Modernism written by James McElvenny and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2018-01-09 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the influential currents in the philosophy of language and linguistics of the first half of the twentieth century, from the perspective of the English scholar C. K. Ogden (1889 - 1957). It reveals links between early analytic philosophy, semiotics and linguistics in a crucial period of their respective histories.
Download or read book Introducing Semantics written by Nick Riemer and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2010-03-25 with total page 477 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An introduction to the study of meaning in language for undergraduate students.
