Dissertations / Theses: 'Field theory (Linguistics) Semantics'

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Mansouri, Ali Nasser Harb. "Semantic field theory and the teaching of English vocabulary with special reference to Iraqi secondary schools." Thesis, University of Sheffield, 1985. http://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/3516/.

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The study of semantic fields and their relationships within lexical structure has become an essential part of semantic analysis. Vaguely formulated though it has been, semantic field theory has proved its worth as a general guide for research in descriptive semantics over the last fifty years-, and has undoubtedly increased our understanding of the way the lexemes of language are interrelated in sense. The aim of the present study is two-fold. First, it is an attempt to investigate the theory of semantic fields and offer an account of the theory that may be applied to lexical problems in foreign language teaching. The second aim of the study is 'applied' in nature. It is concerned with the potential applications of semantic field theory to the teaching and learning of lexis in EFL situations. Semantic field theory is a theory of lexical semantics. The evaluation of the adequacy of a linguistic theory is a matter internal to linguistics-, whether a theory succeeds according to some objective criteria in accounting for what it purports to account for. Semantic field theory has achieved a great deal of adequacy in accounting for the semantic relations holding between the meanings of lexemes in a natural language. However, in applied linguistics, we are not interested only in the adequacy or validity of linguistic theories but also in their utility for solving the practical problems faced by the language learner. Just as a linguistic theory must be validated empirically according to criteria internal to linguistics, so a linguistic theory must also be proved useful in application. The test of a theory's utility is, therefore, empirical. In order to assess the utility of semantic field theory in the teaching of English vocabulary, an experiment was formulated and conducted in an EFL situation. Although the experiment was limited and applied to a specific language skill (reading comprehension) and to a specific situation (a secondary school in Iraq), it is hoped that the findings of the experiment will be potentially relevant to other language skills and to EFL-teachers working in a wide variety of situations, The thesis is divided into eleven chapters. Chapter One is intended to shed light on the nature of vocabulary and the role of lexis in communication and to identify the EFL learners' problem in acquiring lexis in semantic fields. Chapter Two is an attempt to define and clarify some linguistic terms as used in our discussion and analysis of semantic fields. Chapter Three looks into the historical background of semantic field theory and critically examines some recent studies that have contributed to the development of the theory. Chapter Four is a somewhat detailed investigation of the structure of semantic fields and the characteristics of these fields as envisaged in our research. It also deals with some approaches to the analysis of lexical meaning and suggests a simplified componential-collocational approach for the teaching of lexis. Chapter. c Three and Four may be regarded as making up the 'theoretical part' of the research. The 'applied part' is covered in Chapters 5- 10. Chapter Five is a contrastive lexical analysis of some semantic fields in English and Arabic - Arabic being the language of the EFL learners with whom our research is mainly concerned. Chapters Six and Seven deal with some pedagogical issues relevant to the study and to the experiment. The experiment (its design, hypotheses, phases, results, statistical analyses of the results, discussion of the findings, etc. ) are given in Chapters Ekht, Nine and Ten. Some concluding remarks concerning the place of the study in the wider context of applied linguistics research and its implications for the teaching of vocabulary in Iraq and other EFL situations are dealt with in Chapter Eleven.

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Aertsen, H. "Play in Middle English : a contribution to word field theory /." Amsterdam : Free University Press, 1987. http://bibpurl.oclc.org/web/33043.

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Timmermann, Jörg. "Lexematische Wortfeldforschung einzelsprachlich und kontrastiv das Wortfeld "Gewässer" im Französischen, Deutschen, Englischen und Spanischen." Tübingen Narr, 2007. http://deposit.d-nb.de/cgi-bin/dokserv?id=2896854&prov=M&dok_var=1&dok_ext=htm.

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Clark, William. "Relevance theory and the semantics of non-declarative sentences." Thesis, University College London (University of London), 1991. http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/1317886/.

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Wilson and Sperber (1988a; Sperber and Wilson 1986) have proposed semantic analyses of declaratives, imperatives and interrogatives which are based on the notion of 'a direct semantic link between linguistic form and representations of propositional attitude'. They claim, however, that the various syntactic structures encode 'procedural' rather than 'conceptual' information. Rather than encoding concepts which appear in representations of propositional attitude (or what Sperber and Wilson call 'higher-level explicatures') they convey information about how to proceed in recovering such representations. This thesis is an attempt to extend this analysis to some constructions which have not been explicitly discussed by Wilson and Sperber, to consider the differences between this approach and some alternatives, and to question the status of the notion of a 'sentence type', which has often been assumed in analysing the various syntactic structures. Some evidence is provided that certain lexical items also encode procedural information about propositional attitudes, and the role of intonation in utterance-interpretation is also discussed. This analysis is based on relevance-theoretic assumptions about semantics and pragmatics. Chapter one presents the general approach to semantics assumed by relevance theory and shows how Wilson and Sperber's proposal fits into this framework. Chapter two is concerned with the proposed semantic analysis of imperatives. This analysis is extended to some 'pseudo-imperatives': forms consisting of the conjunction or disjunction of an imperative and a declarative clause, which have often been treated as conditionals. An analysis of imperative-like constructions containing 'let' or 'let's' is also proposed. This analysis can be extended to related forms containing 'may'. Chapter three is concerned with the semantic analyses of interrogatives and exciamatives proposed by Wilson and Sperber. This approach is extended to some constructions which seem to resemble interrogatives in some ways and exciamatives in others. The relationship between grammar and intonation is also discussed. Tonal structure can also be seen as encoding procedural information. Chapter four contrasts this approach with alternatives which treat illocutionary force or mood as semantic categories. Wilson and Sperber's approach is more successful than the alternatives and suggests reasons for their inadequacy. A straightforward account of the relationship between form and force, and the interpretation of utterances which have been said to perform 'indirect speech acts', follows from Wilson and Sperber's proposal.

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Zilis, Michael A. "Societal Semantics: The Linguistic Representation of Society." Miami University Honors Theses / OhioLINK, 2007. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=muhonors1177369105.

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McKay, Nicholas. "A semiotic evaluation of musical meaning in the works of Igor Stravinsky : decoding syntax with markedness and prototypicality theory." Thesis, University of Sussex, 1998. http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/23947/.

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Sheppard, James A. "The theory of names according to John Duns Scotus : a study in late thirteenth century semantics." Thesis, University of Sheffield, 1999. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.301262.

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Sbardolini, Giorgio. "Conventions and Change in Semantics." The Ohio State University, 2019. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1555334547254546.

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Al-Sharafi, Abdul Gabbar Mohammed. "Towards a textual theory of metonymy : a semiotic approach to the nature and role of metonymy in text." Thesis, Durham University, 2000. http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/4509/.

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This thesis argues that the scope of metonymy throughout history remains severely reduced to a process of word substitution and the signifying potential of the trope is limited to lexical representation. The study therefore proposes a semiotic approach to take the trope beyond this limitation and to develop a textual theory to the trope. A background study related to how metonymy is treated in previous studies is therefore necessary. This review of literature covers a long period starting from ancient Greece and going up to the present day. Chapters one and two of this thesis, which give this general background, show that the hypothesis is to a large extent valid. The thesis then examines another related hypothesis which is that metonymy is semiotic in nature and a semiotic approach to metonymy will solve the problem of reductionism in the treatment of this trope. Chapter three is devoted to an examination of this hypothesis. It shows that a semiotic approach to metonymy is not only possible but also crucial. The semiotic approach to metonymy basically concerns the treatment of metonymy as a sign which cuts across three domains of representation. These are the domain of words, the domain of concepts and the domain of things or objects. The last domain is itself treated from a semiotic perspective to stand for the domain of context at large. on the basis of this semiotic approach to metonymy a textual model of metonymic relations in text is constructed. this model is put to the test in chapter four. here the metonymic relations of form for form, form for concept, form for thing, thing for form and concept for form are brought to bear on the formal and semantic connectedness of text. in chapter five the metonymic relations of concept for concept, concept for thing, thing for thing and thing for concept are used to explain how these metonymic relations interact to provide a linkage between language, cognition and context.

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Stephenson, Tamina C. "Towards a theory of subjective meaning." Thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2007. http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/41695.

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Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Linguistics and Philosophy, 2007.
Includes bibliographical references (p. 203-212).
This dissertation develops a form of relativism in which propositions are treated as sets of world-time-individual triples, in contrast to standard views that treat them as sets of worlds or world-time pairs. This builds on existing proposals for predicates of personal taste such as fun and tasty, and has ties to approaches to de se attitudes involving centered worlds. I develop an accompanying pragmatic view in which the context set is similarly construed as a set of world-time-individual triples. The semantic and pragmatic systems together are used to account for the behavior of predicates of personal taste, epistemic modals, indicative conditionals, and a variety of attitude reports, including control constructions. I also explore ways that this account can help solve puzzles related to Moore's paradox. To give one concrete example, I propose that the proposition expressed by the sentence it might be raining is the set of world-time-individual triples such that it's compatible with x's knowledge in w at t that it's raining. On the pragmatic side, a speaker is justified in asserting this sentence in a conversation if it is compatible with the speaker's own knowledge that it's raining; by asserting it, though, the speaker is making the stronger proposal to make it common ground that it is compatible with the knowledge of the entire group of conversational participants that it's raining. If this proposal is accepted by the other participants, then the group will have established that their knowledge states are aligned in a particular way. I introduce the core semantic and pragmatic proposals in Chapter 2, focusing on epistemic modals, predicates of personal taste, and belief reports.
(cont.) In Chapter 3, I extend the analysis to indicative conditionals, showing that this solves longstanding puzzles involving the relationship between conditionals and disjunction. In Chapter 4, I extend the approach to certain control constructions, with a special emphasis on capturing their de se interpretation. In Chapter 5, I look at two puzzles related to Moore's paradox, with special attention to the meaning of imagine.
by Tamina C. Stephenson.
Ph.D.

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Emerson, Guy Edward Toh. "Functional distributional semantics : learning linguistically informed representations from a precisely annotated corpus." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2018. https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/284882.

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The aim of distributional semantics is to design computational techniques that can automatically learn the meanings of words from a body of text. The twin challenges are: how do we represent meaning, and how do we learn these representations? The current state of the art is to represent meanings as vectors - but vectors do not correspond to any traditional notion of meaning. In particular, there is no way to talk about 'truth', a crucial concept in logic and formal semantics. In this thesis, I develop a framework for distributional semantics which answers this challenge. The meaning of a word is not represented as a vector, but as a 'function', mapping entities (objects in the world) to probabilities of truth (the probability that the word is true of the entity). Such a function can be interpreted both in the machine learning sense of a classifier, and in the formal semantic sense of a truth-conditional function. This simultaneously allows both the use of machine learning techniques to exploit large datasets, and also the use of formal semantic techniques to manipulate the learnt representations. I define a probabilistic graphical model, which incorporates a probabilistic generalisation of model theory (allowing a strong connection with formal semantics), and which generates semantic dependency graphs (allowing it to be trained on a corpus). This graphical model provides a natural way to model logical inference, semantic composition, and context-dependent meanings, where Bayesian inference plays a crucial role. I demonstrate the feasibility of this approach by training a model on WikiWoods, a parsed version of the English Wikipedia, and evaluating it on three tasks. The results indicate that the model can learn information not captured by vector space models.

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Grefenstette, Edward Thomas. "Category-theoretic quantitative compositional distributional models of natural language semantics." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2013. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:d7f9433b-24c0-4fb5-925b-d8b3744b7012.

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This thesis is about the problem of compositionality in distributional semantics. Distributional semantics presupposes that the meanings of words are a function of their occurrences in textual contexts. It models words as distributions over these contexts and represents them as vectors in high dimensional spaces. The problem of compositionality for such models concerns itself with how to produce distributional representations for larger units of text (such as a verb and its arguments) by composing the distributional representations of smaller units of text (such as individual words). This thesis focuses on a particular approach to this compositionality problem, namely using the categorical framework developed by Coecke, Sadrzadeh, and Clark, which combines syntactic analysis formalisms with distributional semantic representations of meaning to produce syntactically motivated composition operations. This thesis shows how this approach can be theoretically extended and practically implemented to produce concrete compositional distributional models of natural language semantics. It furthermore demonstrates that such models can perform on par with, or better than, other competing approaches in the field of natural language processing. There are three principal contributions to computational linguistics in this thesis. The first is to extend the DisCoCat framework on the syntactic front and semantic front, incorporating a number of syntactic analysis formalisms and providing learning procedures allowing for the generation of concrete compositional distributional models. The second contribution is to evaluate the models developed from the procedures presented here, showing that they outperform other compositional distributional models present in the literature. The third contribution is to show how using category theory to solve linguistic problems forms a sound basis for research, illustrated by examples of work on this topic, that also suggest directions for future research.

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Miranda, Ine︠s︡ Miranda. "An optimality theoretic analysis of Nicaraguan Spanish diminutivization : results of a field survey /." Thesis, Connect to this title online; UW restricted, 1999. http://hdl.handle.net/1773/8393.

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Langton, Karen. "The physicality of the pregnant female body : applying Benjamin Harshav's theory of integrational semantics to Psalm 139, Job and Isaiah 42:14." Thesis, University of Birmingham, 2018. http://etheses.bham.ac.uk//id/eprint/8390/.

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In this thesis, I explore the physicality of the pregnant body in the womb imagery in Psalm 139 and Job 3 and in the simile “like a woman in labor,” specifically, the simile of YHWH as a woman in labor in Isa 42:14. I show that the metaphorical pregnant body is not an idea of a body; rather, it is a detailed physical body with images of gestation in the womb, physical descriptions of a body writhing in labor (e.g. face, breath, hands, heart, legs), and descriptions of a baby delivered from the womb. Using Benjamin Harshav’s theory of Integrational Semantics, I mine the text for details of and allusions to the physicality of the pregnant body. I look at the text through the lens of the pregnant female body and ask how the physicality of this body contributes to meaning. I show that the full impact of the text is lost when the physical properties of the pregnant body are not integrated within an interpretation.

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Kartsaklis, Dimitrios. "Compositional distributional semantics with compact closed categories and Frobenius algebras." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2014. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:1f6647ef-4606-4b85-8f3b-c501818780f2.

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The provision of compositionality in distributional models of meaning, where a word is represented as a vector of co-occurrence counts with every other word in the vocabulary, offers a solution to the fact that no text corpus, regardless of its size, is capable of providing reliable co-occurrence statistics for anything but very short text constituents. The purpose of a compositional distributional model is to provide a function that composes the vectors for the words within a sentence, in order to create a vectorial representation that re ects its meaning. Using the abstract mathematical framework of category theory, Coecke, Sadrzadeh and Clark showed that this function can directly depend on the grammatical structure of the sentence, providing an elegant mathematical counterpart of the formal semantics view. The framework is general and compositional but stays abstract to a large extent. This thesis contributes to ongoing research related to the above categorical model in three ways: Firstly, I propose a concrete instantiation of the abstract framework based on Frobenius algebras (joint work with Sadrzadeh). The theory improves shortcomings of previous proposals, extends the coverage of the language, and is supported by experimental work that improves existing results. The proposed framework describes a new class of compositional models thatfind intuitive interpretations for a number of linguistic phenomena. Secondly, I propose and evaluate in practice a new compositional methodology which explicitly deals with the different levels of lexical ambiguity (joint work with Pulman). A concrete algorithm is presented, based on the separation of vector disambiguation from composition in an explicit prior step. Extensive experimental work shows that the proposed methodology indeed results in more accurate composite representations for the framework of Coecke et al. in particular and every other class of compositional models in general. As a last contribution, I formalize the explicit treatment of lexical ambiguity in the context of the categorical framework by resorting to categorical quantum mechanics (joint work with Coecke). In the proposed extension, the concept of a distributional vector is replaced with that of a density matrix, which compactly represents a probability distribution over the potential different meanings of the specific word. Composition takes the form of quantum measurements, leading to interesting analogies between quantum physics and linguistics.

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Lindes, Peter. "OntoSoar: Using Language to Find Genealogy Facts." BYU ScholarsArchive, 2014. https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/etd/4133.

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There is a need to have an automated system that can read family history books or other historical texts and extract as many genealogy facts as possible from them. Embley and others have applied traditional information extraction techniques to this problem in a system called OntoES with a reasonable amount of success. In parallel much linguistic theory has been developed in the past decades, and Lonsdale and others have built computational embodiments of some of these theories using Soar. In this thesis we introduce a system called OntoSoar which combines the Link Grammar Parser using a grammar customized for family history texts with an innovative semantic analyzer inspired by construction grammars to extract genealogical facts from family history books and use them to populate a conceptual model compatible with OntoES with facts derived from the text. The system produces good results on the texts tested so far, and shows promise of being able to do even better with further development.

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Olofsson, Malin. "En kognitiv semantisk analys av partikelverbet gå upp: : Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) kontra Principled Polysemy Approach to Meaning Analysis (PPAMA)." Thesis, Örebro University, Department of Humanities, 2008. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:oru:diva-1881.

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This essay examines the differences and similarities, weaknesses and strengths of the two Cognitive Semantic theories Conceptual Metaphor Theory and Principled Polysemy Approach to Meaning Analysis. To illustrate the two theories, the Swedish verb-particle construction "gå upp" is examined and analyzed accordingly. The results showed differences in the number of polysemous meaning found. The methodological evaluation showed that the differences in the underlying ideas concerning meaning-construction behind these two theories make them incompatible.

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Sbardolini, Giorgio. "From Language to Thought: On the Logical Foundations of Semantic Theory." The Ohio State University, 2019. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu155307880402531.

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Vogel, Anna. "Swedish Dimensional Adjectives." Phd thesis, Stockholms universitet, Institutionen för nordiska språk, 2004. http://tel.archives-ouvertes.fr/tel-00460516.

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The purpose of this study is to give a thorough and detailed account and analysis of the semantics of twelve Swedish dimensional adjectives: hög ‘high/tall', låg ‘low', bred ‘broad/wide', smal ‘narrow/thin', vid ‘broad', trång ‘narrow', tjock ‘thick', tunn ‘thin', djup ‘deep', grund ‘narrow', lång ‘long' and kort ‘short'. Focus has been placed on their spatial, non-metaphorical sense. The study was written within the framework of cognitive linguistics, where lexical definitions may be given in terms of prototypical and peripheral uses. Four sources of data have been considered: a corpus, consisting of contemporary fiction, an elicitation test, designed for the purpose, dictionary articles on the pertinent adjectives, and the author's own linguistic intuition as a native speaker. The methodology has involved categorisation of combinations of adjective and noun, based upon three major themes: orientation, function, and shape. In order to determine prototypical uses, precedence has been given to the outcome of the elicitation test over the corpus search. For both sources, frequency has played an important part. The ranking of senses as stated in the dictionary articles has also been considered. The results indicate that the dimensional adjectives differ quite markedly from each other, as opposed to a structural view where the adjectives traditionally have been regarded as forming a neat patchwork. Adjectives overlap each other for some uses (högt gräs ‘high grass', långt gräs ‘long grass' and even djupt gräs ‘deep grass'), while there are also situations in which no dimensional adjective can describe an object. Furthermore, adjectives forming pairs, such as djup – grund ‘deep – shallow', do not exhibit full antonymy, despite the fact that dimensional adjectives are traditionally cited as examples par excellence concerning antonymy.

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Antblad, Desirée. "A study of how students feed from feedback : An application of speech act and attribution theory within the field of linguistics." Thesis, Södertörns högskola, Lärarutbildningen, 2020. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:sh:diva-42242.

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This essay provides an analysis of five examples of written feedback on a speech assignment completed for an English as a foreign language (EFL) class by second-year students of upper secondary school. The essay aims to shed light on how feedback is formulated and how it is interpreted as a part of a textual dialogue between teacher and student. The analysis focuses on three separate sources of data: an interview with the students, examples of feedback and a short teacher interview. This dataset provides an insight to the process of the students’ reception and interpretation of the feedback and allows an analysis of the correspondence between what the teacher tries to communicate and what the students in their turn understand from the feedback. Two theories applied in this research include 1) attribution theory and 2) speech act theory, which attempt to show how the students reflect on their achievements and apply feedback to their own development. The feedback is interpreted on two different occasions. First, the textual feedback was coded, and an analysis model was developed based on two characteristics of in-text feedback: directive and expressive functions. The findings suggest that more specific feedback should be provided, and a deeper awareness among teachers of how students interpret their feedback would aid the students’ learning process.

The presentation was held online due to Corona.

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Baraldi, Maria Jose. "Instrumentos linguísticos para análise de corpora de entrevistas clínicas." Universidade de São Paulo, 2011. http://www.teses.usp.br/teses/disponiveis/8/8139/tde-18092012-093719/.

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No presente trabalho, foram analisadas as expressões verbais da limitação imposta aos portadores de insuficiência cardíaca do Instituto do Coração, do Hospital das Clínicas da Faculdade de Medicina da Universidade de São Paulo (InCor), com o objetivo de buscar uma metodologia capaz de levar dados de língua natural, de entrevistas gravadas, a unidades categorico-quantitativas, de forma a permitir tratamentos estatísticos posteriores que correlacionem esses dados com indicadores clínicos. Para tanto, utilizou-se um corpus linguístico composto por duzentas e sessenta e seis entrevistas baseadas em sete perguntas abertas, feitas com pacientes de insuficiência cardíaca de ambos os sexos, pertencentes a quatro grupos etiológicos cardiovasculares: hipertensão arterial sistêmica, isquemia miocárdica, doenca de chagas e inespecífica. As seleções lexicais feitas pelos pacientes foram agrupadas e classicadas por temas. Para isso, foram criadas oito categorias semântico-lexicais. Tais categorias serviram de base para a análise estatística e testes de associação com os dados clínicos dos pacientes. Também foram geradas análises baseadas na Teoria da Informação, como o cáalculo de entropia semântica condicional. Através delas, ficou demonstrado que os grupos formados por critérios clínicos e linguísticos não coincidem e que, além disso, o grupo linguístico acrescenta mais informações aquelas do grupo clínico do que o inverso. As análises temáticas, por sua vez, apresentaram as qualidades dos gradientes informativos detectados nas análises entrópicas. Assim, com base em diferentes procedimentos, foram obtidos resultados que mostram a associação entre variáveis linguísticas e clínicas.
We analyze verbal expressions of symptoms from interviews with heart failure patients from InCor (Heart Institute of the University of São Paulo Faculty of Medicine), in order to create a method capable of converting natural language data from the interviews into categorical and quantitative units, thus enabling posterior statistical treatment that should correlate those data with clinical indicators. The linguistic corpus is represented by two hundred and sixty-six interviews consisting in seven standardized questions. Patients belong one out of four etiological groups, all related to heart failure: systemic arterial hypertension, ischemic myocardial disease, Chagas disease and unspecic etiology. Lexical choices from patients were organized into groups according and thematically classied. Eight lexical-semantic categories were generated. Those categories were used in statistical analysis and association tests with clinical data. Information Theory-based analysis were also held, such as semantic conditional entropy calculus. Based on these methods, we demonstrate that clinic and linguistic-oriented groups are not the same and, furthermore, the linguistic group adds a fair amount of information to the clinical data, but not the other way round. Thematic analysis, on the other hand, present details on the quality of those information gradients detected by entropic methods. Thus, based on dierent procedures, we can bring on results that prove the association between several linguistic and clinic variables.

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Abrahamsson, Clara. "Glad fast ändå inte glad : Emojiers betydelser och användning." Thesis, Högskolan i Halmstad, Akademin för lärande, humaniora och samhälle, 2018. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:hh:diva-37029.

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Emojis are colorful pictorial icons used in day to day conversations via SMS and on plenty of different platforms, available for everyone today, but not yet studied to an extent even though they they are highly ambigous. The aim of this study is to find which semantic meanings emojis can have, if gender or age is a causing factor and if any norm for when and how emojis should be used exists among the users. Through a digital survey uploaded on different platforms and sent to different companies, the results show that misconceptions do happen, and that they happen often. However, gender does not seem to matter to the same extent as age. There is also evidence pointing to the users following some rules when it comes to what emoji should be used when and when no emoji should be used at all.

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Båve, Arvid. "Deflationism : A Use-Theoretic Analysis of the Truth-Predicate." Doctoral thesis, Stockholms universitet, Filosofiska institutionen, 2006. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:su:diva-999.

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I here develop a specific version of the deflationary theory of truth. I adopt a terminology on which deflationism holds that an exhaustive account of truth is given by the equivalence between truth-ascriptions and de-nominalised (or disquoted) sentences. An adequate truth-theory, it is argued, must be finite, non-circular, and give a unified account of all occurrences of “true”. I also argue that it must descriptively capture the ordinary meaning of “true”, which is plausibly taken to be unambiguous. Ch. 2 is a critical historical survey of deflationary theories, where notably disquotationalism is found untenable as a descriptive theory of “true”. In Ch. 3, I aim to show that deflationism cannot be finitely and non-circularly formulated by using “true”, and so must only mention it. Hence, it must be a theory specifically about the word “true” (and its foreign counterparts). To capture the ordinary notion, the theory must thus be an empirical, use-theoretic, semantic account of “true”. The task of explaining facts about truth now becomes that of showing that various sentences containing “true” are (unconditionally) assertible. In Ch. 4, I defend the claim (D) that every sentence of the form “That p is true” and the corresponding “p” are intersubstitutable (in a use-theoretic sense), and show how this claim provides a unified and simple account of a wide variety of occurrences of “true”. Disquotationalism then only has the advantage of avoiding propositions. But in Ch. 5, I note that (D) is not committed to propositions. Use-theoretic semantics is then argued to serve nominalism better than truth-theoretic ditto. In particular, it can avoid propositions while sustaining a natural syntactic treatment of “that”-clauses as singular terms and of “Everything he says is true”, as any other quantification. Finally, Horwich’s problem of deriving universal truth-claims is given a solution by recourse to an assertibilist semantics of the universal quantifier.

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Bochner, Gregory. "Naming and contingency : towards an internalist theory of direct reference." Doctoral thesis, Universite Libre de Bruxelles, 2011. http://hdl.handle.net/2013/ULB-DIPOT:oai:dipot.ulb.ac.be:2013/209797.

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This work is an essay on the reference of names in language and thought. According to the Theory of Direct Reference, nowadays dominant in philosophy of language, the semantic content of a proper name is directly its referent (Chapter 1).

Nevertheless, despite its current fame, this theory must face two major difficulties, familiar since Frege and Russell: the Co-Reference and the No-Reference Problems. The traditional response to these problems consisted precisely in abandoning Referentialism in favour of a version of Descriptivism according to which the semantic content of a proper name would be, not its referent, but a descriptive condition (Chapter 2).

However, it is also this traditional version of Descriptivism that the arguments offered by the pioneers of modern Referentialism—including Kripke, Putnam, and Kaplan—have largely discredited (Chapter 3).

The theoretical tools developed within the framework of possible worlds semantics enable to restate the problems generated by Referentialism in terms of the opacity of linguistic intensions and Modal Illusions (Chapter 4).

At this stage, our semantic theory of names seems to have reached a dead end: on the one hand, modern Referentialism recreates the problems which classical Descriptivism was meant to solve, but, on the other hand, this kind of Descriptivism appears to be refuted by the argumentation of new Referentialists. A common reaction, then, has been to devise more complex semantic theories purporting to combine Referentialism with crucial features from Descriptivism. However, a careful examination reveals that the various versions of this strategy fail (Chapter 5).

Another type of reaction, also ecumenical, has been to draw a distinction between two kinds of contents which would be associated with names and the sentences in which these occur: while the first kind of content would be descriptive, the second would be referential. The Two-Dimensionalist framework has received several interpretations (pragmatic, semantic, metasemantic); but a new construal, metasyntactic, is defended in this work (Chapter 6).

The metasyntactic interpretation of Two-Dimensionalism allows for a radical gap between language and thought: while the thoughts of their users can remain descriptive, names are supposed to achieve direct reference by themselves, and independently of the mental states of their users. Hence, names must be regarded as objects living in the external world, on a par with other ordinary objects like trees or chairs, and not as mental objects. An Externalist metaphysics of names is then submitted, as well as a corresponding epistemology, according to which external names are described in the mind through a description of their reference (Chapter 7).

The general strategy pursued in this work amounts to combining a Theory of Direct Reference in language with a Descriptivist (hence, Internalist) account of thought. Also, certain influential arguments — notably devised by Burge — intended to support Mental Referentialism (hence, Externalism) beyond Linguistic Referentialism, are rejected; it is moreover argued that a Non-Descriptivist conception of the mental is incapable of securing the introspective transparency of thoughts, which, however, seems indispensable, among other things in order to solve and even pose the Co-Reference and the No-Reference Problems (Chapter 8).

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Ce travail est un essai sur la référence des noms dans le langage et la pensée. Selon la Théorie de la Référence Directe, aujourd'hui dominante en philosophie du langage, le contenu sémantique d'un nom propre est directement son référent (Chapitre 1).

Or, malgré son succès récent, cette théorie Référentialiste se heurte à deux obstacles majeurs, reconnus depuis Frege et Russell : les Problèmes de la Co-référence et de la Non-Référence. La réponse traditionnelle à ces problèmes consistait précisément à abandonner la conception Référentialiste en faveur d'un Descriptivisme selon lequel le contenu sémantique d'un nom propre serait, non pas son référent, mais une condition descriptive (Chapitre 2).

Toutefois, c'est aussi ce Descriptivisme traditionnel que les arguments formulés par les hérauts du Référentialisme moderne—dont Kripke, Putnam, et Kaplan—ont largement discrédité (Chapitre 3).

Les outils théoriques développés dans le cadre de la sémantique des mondes possibles permettent de reformuler les problèmes générés par le Référentialisme en termes d'opacité des intensions linguistiques et d'Illusions Modales (Chapitre 4).

A ce stade, la théorie sémantique des noms semble dans une impasse : d'une part, le Référentialisme moderne recrée des problèmes que le Descriptivisme classique devait résoudre, mais d'autre part, ce Descriptivisme paraît bel et bien réfuté par l'argumentation des Référentialistes. Aussi, une réaction commune a été de chercher à concilier le Référentialisme et une forme de Descriptivisme au sein d'une même théorie sémantique. Cependant, un examen approfondi révèle que les différentes versions de cette stratégie échouent (Chapitre 5).

Une autre réaction, elle aussi œcuménique, a été d'opérér une distinction entre deux types de contenus qui seraient associés avec les noms et les phrases dans lesquels ceux-ci figurent : le premier contenu serait descriptif, tandis que le second serait référentiel. Le cadre offert par un tel Bi-Dimensionnalisme a reçu plusieurs interprétations très différentes (pragmatique, sémantique, métasémantique) ; mais c'est une nouvelle version, métasyntaxique, qui est défendue dans ce travail (Chapitre 6).

Le Bi-Dimensionalisme métasyntaxique autorise une séparation radicale entre langage et pensée : tandis que les pensées de leurs utilisateurs peuvent rester descriptives, les noms sont censés référer directement par eux-mêmes, indépendamment des états mentaux de leurs utilisateurs. Dès lors, les noms doivent être considérés comme des objets appartenant au monde extérieur, au même titre que des objets ordinaires tels que les arbres ou les chaises, et non comme des objets mentaux. Une métaphysique externaliste des noms est proposée, ainsi qu'une épistémologie assortie, selon laquelle les noms externes sont décrits dans l'esprit à travers une description de leur référence (Chapitre 7).

La stratégie générale qui est défendue dans ce travail revient à combiner une Théorie de la Référence Directe dans le langage avec une conception Descriptiviste (et donc, Internaliste) de la pensée. Aussi, certains arguments influents — émis par notamment Burge — censés établir un Référentialisme non seulement linguistique mais aussi mental (et donc, un Externalisme) sont rejetés ; il est en outre défendu qu'une vision Non-Descriptiviste du mental apparaît incapable de garantir la transparence introspective des pensées, cependant indispensable, notamment pour résoudre et même poser les Problèmes de Co-Référence et de Non-Référence (Chapitre 8).
Doctorat en Langues et lettres
info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

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Khan, Mohammad Miraz Hossain. "See how far we’ve come : A corpus study of the source metaphor JOURNEY." Thesis, Karlstads universitet, Institutionen för språk, litteratur och interkultur, 2015. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:kau:diva-34984.

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The present study is based on conceptual metaphor theory (CMT), which Lakoff and Johnson introduced in 1980. Data were taken from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), and three phrases (a long road, bumpy road and fork in the road) were investigated, in order to see how far the conceptual metaphor theory can be corroborated using authentic data. Journey was taken as the source domain of the three phrases. After analysis it was found that altogether 79% were metaphorical tokens, 18% were literal uses and 3% ‘other’ uses of the three phrases. In the metaphorical tokens of the three phrases six conceptual metaphors were identified and the most common conceptual metaphor was LONG-TERM PURPOSEFUL (LABOURIOUS) ACTIVITIES ARE JOURNEYS which made up 63% of all metaphorical tokens. The conceptual metaphor RECOVERING FROM PHYSICAL ILLNESS (OR GRIEF) OR PHYSICAL (OR MENTAL) SUFFERING IS A JOURNEY was only found in metaphorical tokens of the phrase a long road. The study shows that CMT can be used to explain the majority of the tokens in the corpus. However, one conceptual metaphor often mentioned in previous accounts, LOVE IS A JOURNEY, turned out to be quite rare.
Studien baseras på Lakoff och Johnsons teori om konceptuella metaforer som introducerades 1980. Materialet är hämtat från Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), där tre fraser undersöktes (a long road, bumpy road, fork in the road), för att se i vilken mån teorin om konceptualla metaforer kan beläggas i autentiskt material. Journey (dvs. resa)var källdomänen för de tre fraserna. Analysen visade att totalt 79 % av de undersökta fraserna var metaforiska, i 18 % användes fraserna i bokstavlig mening, och 3 % klassificerades som ”annat”. Sex konceptuella metaforer identifierades; den vanligaste visade sig vara LÅNGSIKTIGA MÅLINRIKTADE (ARBETSKRÄVANDE) AKTIVITETER ÄR RESOR vilket utgjorde 63 % av alla token. Den konceptuella metaforen ATT TILLFRISKNA FRÅN FYSISK SJUKDOM (ELLER SORG) ELLER FYSISKT (ELLER MENTALT) LIDANDE ÄR EN RESA påträffades bara i frasen a long road. Studien visar att teorin om konceptuella metaforer kan användas för att förklara majoriteten av träffarna i korpusen. Det visade sig emellertid att en konceptuell metafor som ofta nämns i tidigare beskrivningar, KÄRLEKEN ÄR EN RESA, var ovanlig i materialet.

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BIGI, SARAH FRANCESCA MARIA. "Le parole chiave nelle dinamiche testuali." Doctoral thesis, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, 2007. http://hdl.handle.net/10280/165.

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La presente ricerca nasce con lo scopo di indagare la pertinenza del concetto di parola chiave in rapporto alla realizzazione delle dinamiche testuali. Questo concetto è presentato nella letteratura come uno strumento euristico, utilizzato per analizzare oggetti diversi, quali le culture, le società o i testi. Tuttavia emerge una certa discordanza nelle diverse caratterizzazioni delle parole chiave che impedisce di circoscrivere questa categoria di elementi linguistici e di definirne un metodo di individuazione. Dalla nostra indagine emerge che le funzioni delle parole chiave possono essere ricondotte alle metafore della chiave d'accesso , chiave d'interpretazione e chiave di volta . E' in particolare quest'ultima accezione quella più adeguata a descrivere la funzione svolta dalle parole chiave in rapporto alle dinamiche testuali. Esse si caratterizzano cioè per essere elementi linguistici che contribuiscono in maniera strategica a realizzare lo scopo comunicativo globale del testo, instaurando un legame particolarmente forte con il sapere condiviso tra mittente e destinatario. E' questo nesso che giustifica il loro ruolo centrale nella costruzione della strategia comunicativa del testo. Un'applicazione della definizione al testo argomentativo, nell'ultima parte della ricerca, precisa la funzione della parola chiave in relazione a una struttura testuale specifica.
The present research aims at analysing the concept of keyword in the context of textual analysis. In the literature keywords are mostly conceived of as tools useful to give insights into cultures, societies or texts. Nevertheless they are not univocally described and it is difficult to outline a precise method for their identification. In fact the methods proposed are highly subjective as keywords are mainly indicated as the results of previous interpretations conducted on the culture, society or text which is being analysed. In this research instead we are interested in the possibility of describing keywords as elements concurring in the construction of textual meaning. This presupposes the definition of the specific function played by keywords and a logical-semantic textual theory which allows analysing the structure of texts and the ways in which they realize their communicative goals. Congruity Theory is the theory which seemed to offer the most comprehensive methodology to analyse texts. Thanks to the theoretical tools offered by it, we define keywords as linguistic elements that play a strategic role in the realization of the text's global communicative aim. The last part of the research is devoted to the application of the definition to argumentative texts, showing in which ways keywords contribute in the realization of their persuasive goal. In relation to these texts the specific function of keywords appears to be that of giving arguments their persuasive power.

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Renau, Araque Irene. "Gramática y diccionario : las construcciones con se en las entradas verbales del diccionario de español como lengua extranjera." Doctoral thesis, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, 2012. http://hdl.handle.net/10803/97047.

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La presente tesis doctoral aborda los usos de se, su tratamiento en los diccionarios románicos actuales y su representación en un diccionario de aprendizaje de español como lengua extranjera. Su objetivo principal es proponer un modelo de representación para verbos que muestren estos usos. Para ello, se atenderán los siguientes aspectos:  El estado de la cuestión tanto en los estudios de gramática (capítulo 2) como en los lexicográficos (capítulo 3).  La representación de los usos pronominales en los diccionarios románicos actuales, en concreto los de aprendizaje de segunda lengua (capítulo 4).  El análisis sistemático de los usos de se en el corpus, enfocado desde la perspectiva de la Theory of Norms and Exploitations y el Corpus Pattern Analysis de Hanks (2004) (capítulos 5 y 6).  La elaboración de un modelo de entrada lexicográfica verbal que contenga usos con se para un diccionario de ELE (capítulo 7). Los resultados de la tesis son principalmente la elaboración de una base de datos sobre verbos con usos pronominales (capítulo 6, SCPA) y de un prototipo de 20 entradas lexicográficas de los mismos verbos analizados con CPA (capítulo 7).
The present Ph.D. thesis studied the uses of the Spanish particle se, its treatment by current romance dictionaries and its representation in a dictionary for learners of Spanish as a foreign language. The main objective is to propose a model for the representation of the verbs that present the use of se. For this, the following aspects will be analysed:  The review of related work in grammar studies (chapter 2) as well as lexicography (chapter 3).  The representation of pronominal uses in the current romance dictionaries, particularly in those for learners of Spanish as a second language (chapter 4).  The systematic analysis of se in corpora from the perspective of Hanks’ (2004) theory of Norms and Exploitations and Corpus Patterns Analysis (chapter 5 and 6).  The elaboration of a model of a verbal lexical entry for a dictionary of Spanish as a second language containing uses of se (chapter 7). The results of the thesis are mainly the elaboration of a database on Spanish pronominal verbs (chapter 6, Spanish CPA) and of a prototype of 20 lexical entries with the same verbs analysed with CPA (chapter 7).

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Courbon, Bruno. "Étude sémantique des mots "chance", "fortune", "hasard" et "risque" du XVIIIe au XXIe siècle : perspectives sur le lexique du français et ses usages." Thesis, Lyon 2, 2009. http://www.theses.fr/2009LYO20041.

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La recherche a pour objet la structuration du champ lexical des mots « chance », « fortune », « hasard » et « risque » du XVIIIe au XXIe siècle. Témoin de mutations qu’a connues la civilisation occidentale durant cette période, ce champ, qui se rattache à la notion de fortune / hasard, présente une relative homogénéité sémantique.Les mots (et leurs dérivés) sont étudiés à travers le déploiement, la régulation et la répartition des normes d’usages, non seulement en français hexagonal, mais aussi en français québécois. L’étude se fonde sur l’exploitation de deux types de corpus. D’une part, un corpus d’articles extraits d’une cinquantaine de dictionnaires sert à mettre en évidence la productivité morphosémantique et sémantique de ces unités dans une perspective historique large. D’autre part, un grand ensemble d’énoncés diversifiés permet, par la mise au jour de types de contextes, d’effectuer un suivi diachronique des usages. L’approche continuiste des différences d’usages s’appuie sur une représentation fréquentielle des changements sémantiques.La thèse apporte une contribution à la question de la variation des usages et du changement sémantique, qui ouvre sur plusieurs perspectives. Elle se veut d’abord une réflexion sur la théorie et la méthodologie descriptives, appréhendées à la lumière de l’analyse de la nature et du rôle des corpus. Elle met ensuite en évidence l’importance de la dimension intersubjective dans l’activité de signification, en particulier le rôle déterminant des structures syntagmatiques dans l’établissement de nouveaux usages sémantiques. Enfin, elle permet de mettre en relation le changement sémantique avec les conditions sociohistoriques et les représentations collectives
The present study deals with the way in which the lexical field regrouping the words “chance”, “fortune”, “hazard” and “risqué” has been structured in the French language from the eighteenth century till the present day. Revealing major changes in western societies during this period of time, the field, which corresponds to the linguistic representation of the notion of fortune / hasard, presents a certain coherence.We have examined these words and their derived forms through the display, regulation, and distribution of norms of use, not only in Hexagonal French, but also in Quebec French. Two types of corpora have been analysed. On the one hand, a corpus of articles from around 50 dictionaries has been used to emphasize the lexical and semantic productivity of the different units on a large historical scale. On the other hand, in revealing context types, a set of texts reflecting French language varieties has allowed for carrying out a diachronic analysis of lexical uses. The continuist approach to semantic differences rests upon a frequential representation of semantic changes.The thesis brings a significant contribution to the question of usage variations and semantic change, providing new perspectives. It first deals with theory and methodology of lexical description, considered through the analysis of the nature and the role of corpora. It then evidences the central role of syntagmatic structures in the setting of new semantic uses. The study has finally put into relation semantic changes with their historical background and the collective representations of the time

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Wright, Kelly E. "The Reflection and Reification of Racialized Language in Popular Media." UKnowledge, 2017. http://uknowledge.uky.edu/ltt_etds/18.

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This work highlights specific lexical items that have become racialized in specific contextual applications and tests how these words are cognitively processed. This work presents the results of a visual world (Huettig et al 2011) eye-tracking study designed to determine the perception and application of racialized (Coates 2011) adjectives. To objectively select the racialized adjectives used, I developed a corpus comprised of popular media sources, designed specifically to suit my research question. I collected publications from digital media sources such as Sports Illustrated, USA Today, and Fortune by scraping articles featuring specific search terms from their websites. This experiment seeks to aid in the demarcation of socially salient groups whose application of racialized adjectives to racialized images is near instantaneous, or at least less questioned. As we view growing social movements which revolve around the significant marks unconscious assumptions leave on American society, revealing how and where these lexical assignments arise and thrive allows us to interrogate the forces which build and reify such biases. Future research should attempt to address the harmful semiotics these lexical choices sustain.

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Kiattibutra-Anantalapochai, Raksi. "Analyse lexicale, morphologique et syntaxique du Thaï en vue de la traduction automatique appliquée au domaine de l'administration publique." Phd thesis, Université de Franche-Comté, 2011. http://tel.archives-ouvertes.fr/tel-01020748.

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Cette recherche présente une méthode d'analyse micro-systémique des mots composés thaïs. Le but denotre étude est de trouver une réponse au questionnement suivant " existe-t- il une voie qui permette de traduireautomatiquement les mots thaïs vers le français avec un résultat parfait ? ". Ce travail est divisé en cinqchapitres. La première partie concerne une histoire brève de la traduction automatique dont celle du thaï. Lespoints de vue des autres travaux sont étudiés. Le deuxième chapitre présente les caractéristiques de la langue thaïe qui possède une forme d'écriture typique sans espacement et peut entrainer des difficultés en termes d'ambiguïté dans la traduction. Certaines divergences entre le thaï et le français sont soulignées à l'aide de la théorie micro-systémique du Centre Tesnière. Le troisième chapitre fait l'étude des mots composés thaïs en utilisant une méthode hybride de l'analyse morphosyntaxique et notre système à base de règles conformes à notre modèle d'analyse de données. Le quatrième chapitre met en évidence un contrôle modélisé des unités lexicales codées syntaxiquement et sémantiquement afin d'en définir des algorithmes efficaces. Le dernier chapitre conclut sur les résultats des nouveaux algorithmes par leur informatisation. Sont enfin énoncées les perspectives ouvertes par cette nouvelle recherche. Cette étude est présentée comme un travail fiable à l'élimination des ambiguïtés. Fondée sur une méthode hybride, elle nous a permis d'atteindre notre objectif et de trouver ainsi une voie efficace qui nous autorise à traduire automatiquement les mots thaïs vers le français. Le résultat place cet outil comme l'un des plus accessibles à la recherche internationale où le thaï et le français prennent leurs places de choix

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Menuet, Laetitia. "Le discours sur l'espace judiciaire européen : analyse du discours et sémantique argumentative." Phd thesis, Université de Nantes, 2006. http://tel.archives-ouvertes.fr/tel-00133442.

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La recherche menée dans cette thèse traite du discours de l'Union européenne sur l'espace judiciaire européen entre 1996 et 1999. En convoquant l'analyse du discours et la lexicométrie dans un cadre théorique de la sémantique argumentative, elle analyse le sens des mots autour de l'expression « espace de liberté, de sécurité et de justice ». L'objectif est de définir comment s'élabore la réappropriation de valeurs universelles au profit du discours et de l'identité européenne véhiculée par les procédés argumentatifs utilisés pour représenter l'espace judiciaire européen. Le contexte politique et les théories linguistiques de la méthode d'analyse exposés, cette thèse porte sur les conditions de communication du discours et de sa particularité sémantique, en montrant qu'il construit une identité en triade renvoyant aux trois valeurs de son emblème triptyque (« liberté, sécurité et justice ») : les institutions, la criminalité organisée et les citoyens. Elle révèle les indices linguistiques de cette construction identitaire avec ses enjeux politiques et de légitimation en introduisant la notion de « normalisation discursive ». Celle-ci adopte un schéma linguistique très marqué conduisant à la mise en œuvre d'un processus de « manipulation argumentative » défini et démontré dans ce travail. Les résultats illustrent que la normalisation et la manipulation engendrent une circularité du discours reposant sur le conflit de deux orientations discursives : celle d'un discours sécuritaire et celle d'un discours sur l'État de droit et la démocratie.

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Bachmar, Karim. "Les quadriconsonantiques dans le lexique de l'arabe." Phd thesis, Ecole normale supérieure de lyon - ENS LYON, 2011. http://tel.archives-ouvertes.fr/tel-00672544.

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La thèse se répartit en deux tomes. Les quadriconsonantiques forment deux groupes de radicaux distincts, à savoir : les radicaux de forme ABAB et les radicaux de forme ABCD. L'analyse de ces radicaux, en appliquant la TME (Théorie, Matrice, Etymon) élaborée par G. Bohas, permet de définir leur fonctionnement aux plans sémantique, sémantico phonétique et structurel. La première partie Tome 1 analyse les quadriconsonantiques de forme ABAB. La deuxième partie Tome 2 est consacrée aux quadriconsonantiques de forme ABCD.Concernant les radicaux ABAB, dont la structure est issue d'un redoublement de l'unique étymon AB, le travail d'analyse va plus s'orienter sur la sémantique. Il est démontré que le redoublement ne s'accompagne pas d'une modification sémantique systématique, contrairement à ce que l'on observe dans les parlers d'orient et d'occident.La deuxième partie de la thèse, Tome 2, dans les mêmes conditions que précédemment, étudie les radicaux ABCD dans le cadre de la TME en prenant en compte la contrainte phonétique formulée par Angoujard (1997), notée : CPA. L'objectif est de déterminer leur mode de fonctionnement tant sur le plan structurel que sur le plan sémantico phonétique. L'étude de ces radicaux ABCD ne se limite pas uniquement à montrer le fonctionnement structurel des radicaux mais établit une relation entre la TME de Bohas et la CPA d'Angoujard.

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Bolin, Mary K. "Grace : a contrastive analysis of a Biblical semantic field /." 1999. http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/libraryscience/6/.

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Portner, Paul Howard. "Situation theory and the semantics of propositional expressions." 1992. https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations/AAI9305882.

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This paper discusses the variety of propositional expressions in English: gerunds, infinitives, and indicative and subjunctive clauses. It is proposed that, by using a variety of situation semantics developed by Kratzer (1991a), one can assign different characteristic sorts of propositions to each class of expressions. On this theory, propositions are sets of possible situations, where situations are parts of worlds; a possible world is simply a maximal possible situation. A uniform analysis of subordination is also given. When these types of phrases are subordinated, they always denote functions from reference situations to propositions. Gerunds may be considered to denote sets of minimal situations. This allows an analysis which does not postulate an ambiguity of the idea that sometimes they denote sets of events but that other times they denote propositions (Vendler (1967)). The reference situation is used in giving a semantics for imperfectivity that allows gerunds, the progressive, and free adjuncts to be treated uniformly. For infinitives, in contrast, are argued to denote sets of situations which extend into the future from the reference situation, thus providing an understanding of the idea that they are future-oriented and irrealis (Bresnan (1972)). There are at least two kinds of subjunctive in English. Given a reference situation, one type denotes a set of situations incompatible with it. The other type requires its reference situation to be one in which something is obliged. Finally, with indicative clauses the reference situation is used as part of the analysis of sequence of tense phenomena. The proposition they result in is always persistent: it includes a supersituation of any situation in it. The characteristic propositions each type of phrase denotes lets us understand the selectional restrictions that a variety of propositional attitude verbs have.

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Coyne, Robert Eric. "Painting Pictures with Words - From Theory to System." Thesis, 2017. https://doi.org/10.7916/D8QC084F.

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A picture paints a thousand words, or so we are told. But how many words does it take to paint a picture? And how can words create pictures in the first place? In this thesis we examine a new theory of linguistic meaning -- where the meaning of words and sentences is determined by the scenes they evoke. We describe how descriptive text is parsed and semantically interpreted and how the semantic interpretation is then depicted as a rendered 3D scene. In doing so, we describe WordsEye, our text-to-scene system, and touch upon many fascinating issues of lexical semantics, knowledge representation, and what we call "graphical semantics." We introduce the notion of vignettes as a way to bridge between function and form, between the semantics of language and the grounded semantics of 3D scenes. And we describe how VigNet, our lexical semantic and graphical knowledge base, mediates the whole process. In the second part of this thesis, we describe four different ways WordsEye has been tested. We first discuss an evaluation of the system in an educational environment where WordsEye was shown to significantly improve literacy skills for sixth grade students versus a control group. We then compare WordsEye with Google Image Search on "realistic" and "imaginative" sentences in order to evaluate its performance on a sentence-by-sentence level and test its potential as a way to augment existing image search tools. Thirdly, we describe what we have learned in testing WordsEye as an online 3D authoring system where it has attracted 20,000 real-world users who have performed almost one million scene depictions. Finally, we describe tests of WordsEye as an elicitation tool for field linguists studying endangered languages. We then sum up by presenting a roadmap for enhancing the capabilities of the system and identifying key opportunities and issues to be addressed.

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Altman, Magda Elizabeth. "Making sense of traditional Chinese medicine: a cognitive semantic approach." Diss., 2004. http://hdl.handle.net/10500/981.

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Cognitive linguists posit that language as a system of meaning is closely related to cognition and to the associated perceptual and physiological structures of the body. From the cognitive semantic viewpoint, cognitive processes underpin and motivate linguistic phenomena such as categorisation, polysemy, metaphor, metonymy and image schemas. The pedagogical implication of the cognitive semantic perspective is that understanding these cognitive motivations facilitates language learning. This dissertation uses an applied cognitive semantic approach to `make sense' of a traditional knowledge system, Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM). TCM views human physiology as a holistic and dynamic system that exemplifies the same principles as the cosmos-environment. TCM models result in a categorisation of physiological phenomena based on a complex system of experiential and cosmological correspondences. I suggest that the holistic epistemology of cognitive linguistics is well suited to an understanding of these holistic models. From a pedagogical viewpoint, I argue that an analysis of the cognitive motivations which underpin TCM categorisations and the polysemy of some key TCM terms can help the student make sense of TCM as a meaningful system of thought and practice. Both the theoretical and applied approaches explored in this dissertation should have relevance to other traditional knowledge systems, particularly traditional medical systems.
Linguistics
M.A. (Linguistics)

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Pavlásková, Marie. "Sémantická analýza vybraných českých klíčových slov. Teorie přirozeného sémantického metajazyka v češtině." Master's thesis, 2017. http://www.nusl.cz/ntk/nusl-367967.

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Diploma thesis, which is based on Anna Wierzbicka's natural semantic metalanguage theory, discusses certain specific features of Czech language worldview and compares them with specific features of English language worldview. This intercultural comparison is made possible by the cultural neutrality of the natural semantic metalanguage which serves as a language in which explications of analyzed words are formulated and compared to their English counterparts. Analyses of Czech keywords are based mainly on the use of dictionaries (explanatory and etymological dictionaries and dictionaries of phrases and idioms) and Czech corpora. The analysis aims to show differences between Czech and English cultural norms and values as reflected in different semantic structures of analyzed concepts, which presumably indicate deeper differences in perceiving and interpreting reality in both languages.

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Holden, Joshua. "A lexical semantic study of Dene Suliné, an Athabaskan language." Thèse, 2010. http://hdl.handle.net/1866/4616.

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Cette thèse constitue une étude systématique du lexique du déné sųłiné, une langue athabaskane du nord-ouest canadien. Elle présente les définitions et les patrons de combinatoire syntaxique et lexicale de plus de 200 unités lexicales, lexèmes et phrasèmes, qui représentent une partie importante du vocabulaire déné sųłiné dans sept domaines: les émotions, le caractère humain, la description physique des entités, le mouvement des êtres vivants, la position des entités, les conditions atmospheriques et les formations topologiques, en les comparant avec le vocubulaire équivalent de l'anglais. L’approche théorique choisie est la Théorie Sens-Texte (TST), une approche formelle qui met l’accent sur la description sémantique et lexicographique empiriques. La présente recherche relève d'importantes différences entre le lexique du déné sųłiné et celui de l'anglais à tous les niveaux: dans la correspondence entre la représentation conceptuelle, considérée (quasi-)extralinguistique, et la structure sémantique; dans les patrons de lexicalisation des unités lexicales, et dans les patrons de combinatoire syntaxique et lexicale, qui montrent parfois des traits propres au déné sųłiné intéressants.
This work constitutes a systematic lexical semantic study of Dene Sųłiné, an Athabaskan language from northwestern Canada. As such, it presents the lexicographic definitions, syntactic and lexical combinatorial patterns of over 200 lexical units (lexemes and idioms) representing part of the core Dene Sųłiné vocabulary for seven semantic fields: terms to describe emotions, human character, physical description, position of an object, atmospheric conditions and topographical features. The theoretical approach used is Meaning-Text Theory (MTT), a formal linguistic approach with a strong empirical focus on semantics and lexicography. This work finds significant differences between Dene Sųłiné and English at all levels: in the relationship between of (quasi-)extralinguistic concepts and linguistic meanings, in the lexicalization or conflation patterns one finds in meanings of lexical units, and finally in the syntactic and lexical combinatorial patterns, which also show interesting language-specific tendencies.

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Hanitramalala, Rita. "Vers une typologie des collocations à verbe support en malgache." Thèse, 2017. http://hdl.handle.net/1866/20507.

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Redlich, Karel. "Nos v českém znakovém jazyce ve srovnání s češtinou." Master's thesis, 2016. http://www.nusl.cz/ntk/nusl-348040.

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I continue my work on the cognitive-linguistic research of somatisms (names of body parts) and conceptual profiles, into which I bring research findings of Czech sign language. I performed a structural analysis of the signs, where a place of articulation is on the nose. Then I categorized these signs using conceptual profiles: GESTURE, APPEARANCE/ MANIFESTATION, FUNCTION and LOCALIZATION. On the basis of such profiles are shown new possibilities etymological interpretation of a relatively large number of collected signs. The created linguistic picture of the nose in the Czech sign language I compared with the image with the linguistic picture of the nose in the Czech language. I also conducted preliminary probes into other sign languages, which I have served as a guide for effective grasp of the issues.

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Courinha, Joana Araújo Carvalho Brazão. "Para uma metodologia da tradução do texto jurídico – proposta interdisciplinar." Master's thesis, 2019. http://hdl.handle.net/10362/63265.

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A consciência de que a mediação dos textos jurídicos não se limita à sua componente linguística, mas abrange, igualmente, as dimensões jurídica, terminológica e tradutoló-gica, constitui um pressuposto indispensável para uma tradução bem-sucedida. A exces-siva confiança que muitas vezes se deposita quer em bases de dados terminológicas, quer nos dicionários bilingues da especialidade, conduz facilmente a traduções erróneas por falta de acuidade. A fim de trazer à tradução jurídica os aportes que lhe assistem, propo-mos com este estudo apresentar uma nova metodologia de tradução interdisciplinar, de-vidamente sistematizada, assente em quatro pilares: Direito Comparado, Linguística, Terminologia e Tradutologia. Pretendemos cruzar estas áreas do saber, de forma a res-ponder às exigências de tradução do texto jurídico impostas, sobretudo, por divergências nas molduras jurídicas das culturas de partida e de chegada. O Direito Comparado ocupa-se do cotejo dos ordenamentos jurídicos, numa vertente marcadamente funcional, de onde o tradutor extrai, não só equivalentes funcionais, como um entendimento das semelhanças e diferenças conceptuais entre esses ordenamentos. A Terminologia, as-sente nos princípios da Linguística semântica, guia o tradutor pela extracção dos traços semânticos dos conceitos, pela construção de sistemas conceptuais, pelo estudo das re-lações de sentido e pela análise do grau de equivalência semântica entre os conceitos de partida e de chegada. Por fim, a Tradutologia oferece ao tradutor as ferramentas neces-sárias para uma tomada de decisão consciente, propondo designadamente, os critérios de aceitabilidade de equivalentes semânticos e as operações de tradução adequadas. O presente trabalho é complementado pela análise de um conjunto de casos práticos em que se põe à prova a metodologia proposta, procurando-se demonstrar como o cruza-mento sistematizado destas áreas permite obter um conhecimento mais aprofundado e sólido dos conceitos a traduzir, levando a uma tomada de decisão mais consciente por uma tradução conceptual e contextualmente adequada.
The success of legal translation relies on the awareness that the mediation of legal texts is not limited to its linguistic dimension, but also extends to other dimensions such as the legal, the terminological and the translational dimensions. The excessive trust put either in terminology databases or in bilingual dictionaries often results in erroneous translations due to their lack of accuracy. In order to provide legal translation with more accurate tools, we propose the systematic presentation of a new interdisciplinary trans-lation methodology based on four pillars: Comparative Law, Linguistics, Terminology and Translation. By intersecting these fields of knowledge, we seek to meet the transla-tion requirements for legal texts imposed mainly by deviations in the legal frameworks of the source and target cultures. Comparative Law consists of comparing legal systems within a functional approach, which provides the translator not only with functional equivalents, but also allows him/her to understand the conceptual similarities and differ-ences between the legal systems involved. By doing terminological work based on se-mantic linguistics, the translator extracts the semantic properties of concepts, builds con-ceptual systems, analyzes meaning relations and the degree of semantic equivalence be-tween the source and target concepts. Translation theory then provides the translator with the acceptance criteria of semantic equivalents, as well as translation strategies for a responsible decision-making. This work is complemented with a set of practical case studies in which we prove the application of the proposed methodology. Our goal is to demonstrate that the intersection of these areas allows for a deeper knowledge of the concepts to be translated, leading to a more adequate translation both at conceptual and contextual level.

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Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Field theory (Linguistics) Semantics'

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