Download or read book Semantics Tense and Time written by Peter Ludlow and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1999-09-03 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: According to Peter Ludlow, there is a very close relation between the structure of natural language and that of reality, and one can gain insights into long-standing metaphysical questions by studying the semantics of natural language. In this book Ludlow uses the metaphysics of time as a case study and focuses on the dispute between A-theorists and B-theorists about the nature of time. According to B-theorists, there is no genuine change, but a permanent sequence of events ordered by an earlier-than/later-than relation. According to the version of the A-theory adopted by Ludlow (a position sometimes called "presentism"), there are no past or future events or times; what makes something past or future is how the world stands right now. Ludlow argues that each metaphysical picture is tied to a particular semantical theory of tense and that the dispute can be adjudicated on semantical grounds. A presentism-compatible semantics, he claims, is superior to a B-theory semantics in a number of respects, including its abilities to handle the indexical nature of temporal discourse and to account for facts about language acquisition. Along the way, Ludlow develops a conception of "E-type" temporal anaphora that can account for both temporal anaphora and complex tenses without reference to past and future events. His view has philosophical consequences for theories of logic, self-knowledge, and memory. As for linguistic consequences, Ludlow suggests that the very idea of grammatical tense may have to be dispensed with and replaced with some combination of aspect, modality, and evidentiality.
Download or read book The Structure of Time written by Vyvyan Evans and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2004-03-05 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the most enigmatic aspects of experience concerns time. Since pre-Socratic times scholars have speculated about the nature of time, asking questions such as: What is time? Where does it come from? Where does it go? The central proposal of The Structure of Time is that time, at base, constitutes a phenomenologically real experience. Drawing on findings in psychology, neuroscience, and utilising the perspective of cognitive linguistics, this work argues that our experience of time may ultimately derive from perceptual processes, which in turn enable us to perceive events. As such, temporal experience is a pre-requisite for abilities such as event perception and comparison, rather than an abstraction based on such phenomena. The book represents an examination of the nature of temporal cognition, with two foci: (i) an investigation into (pre-conceptual) temporal experience, and (ii) an analysis of temporal structure at the conceptual level (which derives from temporal experience).
Download or read book Futures Past written by Reinhart Koselleck and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Modernity in the late eighteenth century transformed all domains of European life -intellectual, industrial, and social. Not least affected was the experience of time itself: ever-accelerating change left people with briefer intervals of time in which to gather new experiences and adapt. In this provocative and erudite book Reinhart Koselleck, a distinguished philosopher of history, explores the concept of historical time by posing the question: what kind of experience is opened up by the emergence of modernity? Relying on an extraordinary array of witnesses and texts from politicians, philosophers, theologians, and poets to Renaissance paintings and the dreams of German citizens during the Third Reich, Koselleck shows that, with the advent of modernity, the past and the future became 'relocated' in relation to each other.The promises of modernity -freedom, progress, infinite human improvement -produced a world accelerating toward an unknown and unknowable future within which awaited the possibility of achieving utopian fulfillment. History, Koselleck asserts, emerged in this crucial moment as a new temporality providing distinctly new ways of assimilating experience. In the present context of globalization and its resulting crises, the modern world once again faces a crisis in aligning the experience of past and present. To realize that each present was once an imagined future may help us once again place ourselves within a temporality organized by human thought and humane ends as much as by the contingencies of uncontrolled events.
Download or read book Cultural Semantics written by Martin Jay and published by Univ of Massachusetts Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A leading intellectual historian explores some of the reigning assumptions and imperatives of our age. By looking closely at what "words do and perform", Martin Jay makes us aware of the extent to which the language we use mediates and shapes our experience. Elegantly written and richly insightful, this is a work of cultural criticism and intellectual analysis of the first order.
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 Cognitive Development and Acquisition of Language written by Timothy E. Moore and published by Elsevier. This book was released on 2014-06-28 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cognitive Development and Acquisition of Language
Download or read book The Expression of Time written by Wolfgang Klein and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2009-03-26 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Time is the most fundamental category of human cognition and action, and all human languages have developed many devices to express it. These include verbal categories, such as tense and aspect, but also adverbials, particles, and principles of discourse organisation. This book is intended as a tutorial for the study of how time is expressed in natural languages. Its chapters take the reader through a number of foundational issues, such as the various notions of time and the various means to express it; other chapters are devoted to more specific questions, such as the acquisition of time, its modelling in formal semantics and in computational linguistics, or how its expression can be empirically investigated.
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 Language and Time written by Vyvyan Evans and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-10-03 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Vyvyan Evans focuses on the linguistic and conceptual resources we make use of when we fix events in time.
Download or read book The Tyranny of Words written by Stuart Chase and published by New York : Harcourt, Brace. This book was released on 1938 with total page 424 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
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 Theories written by Claudia Maienborn and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2019-02-19 with total page 450 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Now in paperback for the first time since its original publication, the material gathered here is perfect for anyone who needs a detailed and accessible introduction to the important semantic theories. Designed for a wide audience, it will be of great value to linguists, cognitive scientists, philosophers, and computer scientists working on natural language. The book covers theories of lexical semantics, cognitively oriented approaches to semantics, compositional theories of sentence semantics, and discourse semantics. This clear, elegant explanation of the key theories in semantics research is essential reading for anyone working in the area.
Download or read book The Cambridge Handbook of Formal Semantics written by Maria Aloni and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2016-07-07 with total page 1239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Formal semantics - the scientific study of meaning in natural language - is one of the most fundamental and long-established areas of linguistics. This Handbook offers a comprehensive, yet compact guide to the field, bringing together research from a wide range of world-leading experts. Chapters include coverage of the historical context and foundation of contemporary formal semantics, a survey of the variety of formal/logical approaches to linguistic meaning and an overview of the major areas of research within current semantic theory, broadly conceived. The Handbook also explores the interfaces between semantics and neighbouring disciplines, including research in cognition and computation. This work will be essential reading for students and researchers working in linguistics, philosophy, psychology and computer science.
Download or read book Time in Language written by Wolfgang Klein and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-09-13 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book looks at the various ways in which time is reflected in natural language. All natural languages have developed a rich repetoire of devices to express time, but linguists have tended to concentrate on tense and aspect, rather than discourse principles. Klein considers the four main ways in which language expresses time - the verbal categories of tense and aspect; inherent lexical features of the verb; and various types of temporal adverbs. Klein looks at the interaction of these four devices and suggests new or partly new treatments of these devices to express temporality.
Download or read book Conceptualizations of Time written by Barbara Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk and published by John Benjamins Publishing Company. This book was released on 2016-06-14 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As time cannot be observed directly, it must be analyzed in terms of mental categories, which manifest themselves on various linguistic levels. In this interdisciplinary volume, novel approaches to time are proposed that consider temporality without time, on the one hand, and the coding of time in language, including sign language, and gestures, on the other. The contributions of the volume demonstrate that time is conceptualized not only in terms of space but in terms of other domains of human experience as well. Renowned specialists in the study of time, the authors of this volume investigate this fascinating topic from a variety of perspectives – philosophical, linguistic, anthropological, (neuro)psychological, and computational – demonstrating a familiarity with both classical and recent approaches to the study of time and including up-to-date corpus-based methods of study. The volume will be of interest to philosophers, linguists (including specialists in cognitive linguistics, corpus linguistics, and computational linguistics), anthropologists, (neuro)psychologists, translators, language teachers, and graduate students.
Download or read book Time and Modality written by Jacqueline Guéron and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2008-07-27 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Here is a unique work of reference. Not only does it unite studies which explore the syntax and semantics of tense or modality, but it is the first book of its kind to embrace the interaction of tense and modality within a coherent generative model.
Download or read book The Syntax of Time written by Jacqueline Guéron and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 684 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of recent studies by leading scholars that examines the syntactic analysis of time from varying perspectives.
