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1
Nivre, Joakim. "Situations, meaning, and communication a situation theoretic approach to meaning in language and communication /." Göteborg, Sweden : Dept. of Linguistics, University of Göteborg, 1992. http://catalog.hathitrust.org/api/volumes/oclc/31171651.html.
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Buckland, Warren Stephen. "Filmic meaning : the semantics-pragmatics interface." Thesis, University of East Anglia, 1992. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.333505.
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Bultinck, Bert. "Numerous meanings : the meaning of English cardinals and the legacy of Paul Grice /." Amsterdam [u.a.] : Elsevier, 2005. http://www.loc.gov/catdir/enhancements/fy0625/2005053106-d.html.
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Chng, Soke Wang. "Language thought and literal meaning." Thesis, University of Newcastle Upon Tyne, 1999. http://hdl.handle.net/10443/179.
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The notion of literalness in linguistics is based on the following assumptions: Linguistic expressions are vehicle-meaning p airs (since literal meaning has to be the meaning of something). Linguistic expressions have to be cognised a nd used (especially uttered) in order for their meanings to be regarded as literally theirs. "Linguistie, vehicle-meaning relations are fixed and autonomous- - rather than having particular meanings in virtue of being used to express those meanings," linguistie' vehicle-meaning p airs are used to express certain meanings in virtue of having the meanings th at they have. This thesis criticises Chomsky's and Sperber and Wilson's attempts to establish the autonomy of "linguistie'vehicle-meaning pairs. I argue that " Both Chomsky and Sperber and Wilson fail to distinguish "linguistie' semantics from the "real" semantics of what "linguistic" vehicle-meaning pairs are used to express. " They persist in the idea that "linguistic" vehicles are specifically for being uttered (physically instantiated), thus defeating their own purpose of setting the linguistic absolutely apart from what it is used for. " Neither Chomsky's internalist conception of language nor Sperber and Wilson's relevance framework is able to account for the phenomenon of "language misuse", i.e. the use of a "linguistic" vehicle to express the "wrong" meaning. Burton-Roberts' representational conjecture is applied and developed in the presentation of an alternative non/ extra-linguistic account of "literal meaning" and "language use/ misuse". This account has it that neither "linguistic" vehicles nor "linguistic" vehicle-meaning relations are actually linguistic. It avoids the problems attending the notion of linguistic expressions as objects with sortally disjoint and arbitrarily conjoint properties (i.e. physically instantiable "vehicle" and mentally constituted "meaning"), and resolves the unease within Chomsky's Minimalist Program about the inclusion of phonology in I-language. Finally, by way of this resolution, I address some seemingly unrelated issues concerning vehicle-less "meanings" and the relations between l anguage,thought and consciousness.
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Novakovic, David Petar. "Calculating shades of meaning in semantic spaces." Thesis, Queensland University of Technology, 2008. https://eprints.qut.edu.au/37313/1/David_Novakovic_Thesis.pdf.
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This thesis introduces the problem of conceptual ambiguity, or Shades of Meaning (SoM) that can exist around a term or entity. As an example consider President Ronald Reagan the ex-president of the USA, there are many aspects to him that are captured in text; the Russian missile deal, the Iran-contra deal and others. Simply finding documents with the word “Reagan” in them is going to return results that cover many different shades of meaning related to "Reagan". Instead it may be desirable to retrieve results around a specific shade of meaning of "Reagan", e.g., all documents relating to the Iran-contra scandal. This thesis investigates computational methods for identifying shades of meaning around a word, or concept. This problem is related to word sense ambiguity, but is more subtle and based less on the particular syntactic structures associated with or around an instance of the term and more with the semantic contexts around it. A particularly noteworthy difference from typical word sense disambiguation is that shades of a concept are not known in advance. It is up to the algorithm itself to ascertain these subtleties. It is the key hypothesis of this thesis that reducing the number of dimensions in the representation of concepts is a key part of reducing sparseness and thus also crucial in discovering their SoMwithin a given corpus.
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McArthur, Robert James. "Computing with meaning by operationalising socio-cognitive semantics." Thesis, Queensland University of Technology, 2007. https://eprints.qut.edu.au/16571/1/Robert_McArthur_Thesis.pdf.
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This thesis is motivated by the desire to provide technological solutions to enhance human
awareness in information processing tasks. The need is pressing. Paradoxically, as information
piles up people become less and less aware due to perceived scarce cognitive resources.
As a consequence, specialisations become ever more specialised, projects and individuals in
organisations become ever more insular. Technology can enhance awareness by informing
the individual about what is happening outside their speciality. Systems which can assist
people in these ways need to make sense of human communication. The computer system
must know about what it is that it is processing; it must follow a socio-cognitive framework
and reason with it. It must compute with meanings not symbolic surface structures.
The hypothesis of the thesis is that knowledge potentially useful for enhancing awareness
can be derived from interactions between people using computational models based on
socio-cognitive semantics. The goals are whether an appreciable approximation of conceptual
spaces can be realised through semantic spaces, and whether such semantic spaces can
develop representations of meaning which have the potential to enhance the awareness of
users? The two thesis questions are how well the socio-cognitive framework of G¨ardenfors
could be brought into operational reality, and if a bridge can be made, then what practical
issues can be involved?
The theory of conceptual spaces of Peter G¨ardenfors is combined with methods from
cognitive science for creating geometric spaces to represent meaning. Hyperspace Analogue
to Language and Latent Semantic Analysis are used as exemplars of the cognitive science
algorithms. The algorithms are modified by a variety of syntactic processing schemes to
overcome a paucity of data and hence lack of expressivity in representations of meaning:
part-of-speech tagging, index expressions and anaphora resolution are effected and incorporated
into the semantic space.
The practical element of the thesis consists of five case studies. These are developed in
two parts: studies describing how meaning changes and evolves in semantic spaces, and studies
describing semantic space applications featuring knowledge discovery. These studies are
in a variety of domains with a variety of data: online communities of interest using a mailing
list, a health-based mailing list, organisational blogs, "hallway chatter", and organisational
email. The data is real world utterances that provide the situational factors that cognitive
systems need to answer queries and provide context. The amounts of data are significantly less than previously used by semantic space methods, hence the need for syntactic assistance.
The particular problems examined in the case studies are corporate expertise management,
social network discovery, tracking ebbs and flows of topics, and noticing the change in a
person's sense-of-self over time. These are significantly different to those usually examined
using semantic spaces.
The key differentiator of this work stems from its focus on the geometrically-based computational
realisation of meaning. This thesis takes semantic spaces out of the closet and into
real-world information technology applications, with a roadtest in real life.
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McArthur, Robert James. "Computing with meaning by operationalising socio-cognitive semantics." Queensland University of Technology, 2007. http://eprints.qut.edu.au/16571/.
Full textAbstract:
This thesis is motivated by the desire to provide technological solutions to enhance human awareness in information processing tasks. The need is pressing. Paradoxically, as information piles up people become less and less aware due to perceived scarce cognitive resources. As a consequence, specialisations become ever more specialised, projects and individuals in organisations become ever more insular. Technology can enhance awareness by informing the individual about what is happening outside their speciality. Systems which can assist people in these ways need to make sense of human communication. The computer system must know about what it is that it is processing; it must follow a socio-cognitive framework and reason with it. It must compute with meanings not symbolic surface structures. The hypothesis of the thesis is that knowledge potentially useful for enhancing awareness can be derived from interactions between people using computational models based on socio-cognitive semantics. The goals are whether an appreciable approximation of conceptual spaces can be realised through semantic spaces, and whether such semantic spaces can develop representations of meaning which have the potential to enhance the awareness of users? The two thesis questions are how well the socio-cognitive framework of G¨ardenfors could be brought into operational reality, and if a bridge can be made, then what practical issues can be involved? The theory of conceptual spaces of Peter G¨ardenfors is combined with methods from cognitive science for creating geometric spaces to represent meaning. Hyperspace Analogue to Language and Latent Semantic Analysis are used as exemplars of the cognitive science algorithms. The algorithms are modified by a variety of syntactic processing schemes to overcome a paucity of data and hence lack of expressivity in representations of meaning: part-of-speech tagging, index expressions and anaphora resolution are effected and incorporated into the semantic space. The practical element of the thesis consists of five case studies. These are developed in two parts: studies describing how meaning changes and evolves in semantic spaces, and studies describing semantic space applications featuring knowledge discovery. These studies are in a variety of domains with a variety of data: online communities of interest using a mailing list, a health-based mailing list, organisational blogs, "hallway chatter", and organisational email. The data is real world utterances that provide the situational factors that cognitive systems need to answer queries and provide context. The amounts of data are significantly less than previously used by semantic space methods, hence the need for syntactic assistance. The particular problems examined in the case studies are corporate expertise management, social network discovery, tracking ebbs and flows of topics, and noticing the change in a person's sense-of-self over time. These are significantly different to those usually examined using semantic spaces. The key differentiator of this work stems from its focus on the geometrically-based computational realisation of meaning. This thesis takes semantic spaces out of the closet and into real-world information technology applications, with a roadtest in real life.
8
HAYDEN, KLICIA NOGUEIRA. "SEMANTICS VARIATION AND CHANGE: PREPOSITION POR MEANING PURPOSE." PONTIFÍCIA UNIVERSIDADE CATÓLICA DO RIO DE JANEIRO, 2009. http://www.maxwell.vrac.puc-rio.br/Busca_etds.php?strSecao=resultado&nrSeq=14737@1.
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PONTIFÍCIA UNIVERSIDADE CATÓLICA DO RIO DE JANEIROA proposta deste trabalho foi discutir as ocorrências da preposição por com valor final em textos portugueses dos séculos XIII ao XX, observando as ocasiões que fizeram com que ela fosse gradativamente substituída por outra preposição: para. Vê-se que, em textos mais antigos, a ocorrência de por com valor final prevalecia e, nos mais recentes, predomina para.O emprego de por final tornou-se estilístico. Pretendeu-se, neste trabalho, arrolar os diferentes valores das preposições em estudo, exemplificando com autores brasileiros do século XIX, como Machado de Assis, José de Alencar e Lima Barreto, e do século XX, como Jorge Amado e José Lins do Rego. A acepção de finalidade em por não foi encontrada em autores do século XX. Ela foi levantada para ilustrar o desaparecimento contínuo deste uso ao longo dos anos. O trabalho tem cunho histórico. Segue um enfoque funcionalista e, na pesquisa dos dados, apoia-se na sociolinguística variacional, nos moldes de Labov, tal como foi divulgada entre nós por Tarallo (1986 e 1990).
The aim of this work is to discuss the occurrence of the preposition por meaning purpose in texts in Portuguese language from XIII to XX centuries, observing the ocasions that this preposition have been gradually replaced by another one: the preposition para. It’s noticeable that, in older texts, occurrences of preposition por meaning purpose are majority, whereas, in most recent texts, preposition para occurs more frequently. The use of preposition por meaning purpose became only a matter of style. We intended to understand the different meanings of the prepositions we’re analyzing, through illustrations from Brazilian authors from the XIX century, Machado de Assis, José de Alencar and Lima Barreto; and from the XX century, Jorge Amado and José Lins do Rego. The particular meaning of purpose in preposition por has not been found in any author from the XX century. We intended to demonstrate the process of continuous disappearance of proposition por meaning purpose throughout the XX century. This work follows a historical approach. It adopts a functionalist perspective, and the collecting of data is based on Labov’s variationist sociolinguistics, as introduced in Brazil by Tarallo (1986 e 1990).
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Pietroski, Paul M. "Meaning naturally--a partial defense of covariation semantics." Thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1990. http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/14141.
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Richardson, Jason. "Meaning, Functions, and the Promise of Indicator Semantics." Thesis, Virginia Tech, 1996. http://hdl.handle.net/10919/36636.
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In this thesis, I first present Fred Dretske's theory of mental represent- ations, which purports to show how a physical thing could have (non-derived) meaning. In order to illustrate the applicability of the theory to an actual physical system, I discuss the theory in relation to two theories of audio localization (i.e., the capacity to locate the source of sounds in one's environment). Having clarified the theory, I examine two charges laid against it. Lynne Rudder Baker charges the theory with circularity. Her charge is refuted by appealing to the concept of a "standby function." Stephen Stich charges the theory with vagueness. His charge is refuted by appealing to a general analysis of functions. I conclude that a careful use and analysis of the previously unanalyzed term "function" makes possible the refutation of these two charges.Master of Arts
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Breheny, Richard Edward. "Context dependence and procedural meaning : the semantics of definites." Thesis, University College London (University of London), 1999. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.391772.
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Burton, Marilyn Elizabeth. "Semantics of glory : a cognitive, corpus-based approach to Hebrew word meaning." Thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2014. http://hdl.handle.net/1842/9573.
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The concept of ‘glory’ is one of the most significant themes in the Hebrew Bible, lying at the heart of God’s self-disclosure in biblical revelation. Yet, while the concept has received theological treatment, and while various relevant Hebrew roots have individually benefited from linguistic survey, the group of lexemes surrounding this concept is as yet untouched by a comprehensive semantic study. Through indepth semantic study this thesis offers a clearer understanding of the interrelations and differences between the Classical Hebrew lexemes centring around the concept of ‘glory’. The first chapter opens with a critical examination of both structuralist and cognitivist approaches to semantic research, focussing particularly on their historical use and current applicability to the study of ancient languages. It outlines the superior claims of cognitive semantics accurately to model patterns of language usage, addressing the challenges inherent in the application of such an approach to ancient language. The proposed methodology is characterised as cognitive in nature, focussed on both lexical interrelations (relational) and the internal composition of lexemes (decompositional), exhaustive in relating lexemes to each other point by point, and based on the entirety of the Classical Hebrew corpus. Finally, this chapter discusses issues relating to the limited, diachronic and fragmentary nature of the Classical Hebrew corpus. The second chapter delineates the boundaries of the semantic domain of כבוד . It opens with a methodological discussion introducing parallel terms and word pairs as valuable tools in the objective identification of semantically related terms. Proposing the theory that members of a semantic domain will regularly co-occur, it systematically analyses firstly the extant word associations of כבוד itself and secondly of those lexemes recurring in association with it, accepting or rejecting each as a member of its semantic domain on the basis of word associations. This process results in the identification of eleven lexemes as members of the semantic domain of The concept of ‘glory’ is one of the most significant themes in the Hebrew Bible, lying at the heart of God’s self-disclosure in biblical revelation. Yet, while the concept has received theological treatment, and while various relevant Hebrew roots have individually benefited from linguistic survey, the group of lexemes surrounding this concept is as yet untouched by a comprehensive semantic study. Through indepth semantic study this thesis offers a clearer understanding of the interrelations and differences between the Classical Hebrew lexemes centring around the concept of ‘glory’. The first chapter opens with a critical examination of both structuralist and cognitivist approaches to semantic research, focussing particularly on their historical use and current applicability to the study of ancient languages. It outlines the superior claims of cognitive semantics accurately to model patterns of language usage, addressing the challenges inherent in the application of such an approach to ancient language. The proposed methodology is characterised as cognitive in nature, focussed on both lexical interrelations (relational) and the internal composition of lexemes (decompositional), exhaustive in relating lexemes to each other point by point, and based on the entirety of the Classical Hebrew corpus. Finally, this chapter discusses issues relating to the limited, diachronic and fragmentary nature of the Classical Hebrew corpus. The second chapter delineates the boundaries of the semantic domain of כבוד . It opens with a methodological discussion introducing parallel terms and word pairs as valuable tools in the objective identification of semantically related terms. Proposing the theory that members of a semantic domain will regularly co-occur, it systematically analyses firstly the extant word associations of כבוד itself and secondly of those lexemes recurring in association with it, accepting or rejecting each as a member of its semantic domain on the basis of word associations. This process results in the identification of eleven lexemes as members of the semantic domain of The concept of ‘glory’ is one of the most significant themes in the Hebrew Bible, lying at the heart of God’s self-disclosure in biblical revelation. Yet, while the concept has received theological treatment, and while various relevant Hebrew roots have individually benefited from linguistic survey, the group of lexemes surrounding this concept is as yet untouched by a comprehensive semantic study. Through indepth semantic study this thesis offers a clearer understanding of the interrelations and differences between the Classical Hebrew lexemes centring around the concept of ‘glory’. The first chapter opens with a critical examination of both structuralist and cognitivist approaches to semantic research, focussing particularly on their historical use and current applicability to the study of ancient languages. It outlines the superior claims of cognitive semantics accurately to model patterns of language usage, addressing the challenges inherent in the application of such an approach to ancient language. The proposed methodology is characterised as cognitive in nature, focussed on both lexical interrelations (relational) and the internal composition of lexemes (decompositional), exhaustive in relating lexemes to each other point by point, and based on the entirety of the Classical Hebrew corpus. Finally, this chapter discusses issues relating to the limited, diachronic and fragmentary nature of the Classical Hebrew corpus. The second chapter delineates the boundaries of the semantic domain of כבוד . It opens with a methodological discussion introducing parallel terms and word pairs as valuable tools in the objective identification of semantically related terms. Proposing the theory that members of a semantic domain will regularly co-occur, it systematically analyses firstly the extant word associations of כבוד itself and secondly of those lexemes recurring in association with it, accepting or rejecting each as a member of its semantic domain on the basis of word associations. This process results in the identification of eleven lexemes as members of the semantic domain of כבוד.
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Mwihaki, Alice. "Meaning and use: a functional view of semantics and pragmatics." Universitätsbibliothek Leipzig, 2012. http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:bsz:15-qucosa-91021.
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This article addresses the notion of linguistic meaning with reference to Kiswahili. It focuses particular attention on meaning typology, with the assumption that a discussion of meaning types can enhance the understanding and appreciation of linguistic meaning. The discussion takes its general conceptual orientation from the approach that considers meaning as use, whereby the unit of analysis is the speech
act. This is a functional view of linguistic meaning, the tenets of which are contained in functional grammar. From a broader perspective, this article distinguishes conceptual and associative meaning then proceeds to deal with the individual types. Ultimately, five types of linguistic meaning are discussed: conceptual, connotative, social, affective and collocative. From the discussion, conclusionsabout the value of the typology for defining the concept and the scope of semantics are drawn.
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Robinson, H. M. "The capture of meaning in database administration." Thesis, University of Hertfordshire, 1988. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.234361.
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Mwihaki, Alice. "Meaning and use: a functional view of semantics and pragmatics." Swahili Forum 11 (2004) S. 127-139, 2004. https://ul.qucosa.de/id/qucosa%3A11492.
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This article addresses the notion of linguistic meaning with reference to Kiswahili. It focuses particular attention on meaning typology, with the assumption that a discussion of meaning types can enhance the understanding and appreciation of linguistic meaning. The discussion takes its general conceptual orientation from the approach that considers meaning as use, whereby the unit of analysis is the speech
act. This is a functional view of linguistic meaning, the tenets of which are contained in functional grammar. From a broader perspective, this article distinguishes conceptual and associative meaning then proceeds to deal with the individual types. Ultimately, five types of linguistic meaning are discussed: conceptual, connotative, social, affective and collocative. From the discussion, conclusionsabout the value of the typology for defining the concept and the scope of semantics are drawn.
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Becker, Kelly M. "Meaning holism : an articulation and defense /." Diss., Connect to a 24 p. preview or request complete full text in PDF format. Access restricted to UC campuses, 1999. http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/ucsd/fullcit?p9935483.
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Pearce, Martin. "Baptismal texts : the construction of meaning in written English." Thesis, University of Nottingham, 1996. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.307764.
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McGregor, Stephen. "Geometric methods for context sensitive distributional semantics." Thesis, Queen Mary, University of London, 2018. http://qmro.qmul.ac.uk/xmlui/handle/123456789/36691.
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This thesis describes a novel methodology, grounded in the distributional semantic paradigm, for building context sensitive models of word meaning, affording an empirical exploration of the relationship between words and concepts. Anchored in theoretical linguistic insight regarding the contextually specified nature of lexical semantics, the work presented here explores a range of techniques for the selection of subspaces of word co-occurrence dimensions based on a statistical analysis of input terms as observed within large-scale textual corpora. The relationships between word-vectors that emerge in the projected subspaces can be analysed in terms of a mapping between their geometric features and their semantic properties. The power of this modelling technique is its ability to generate ad hoc semantic relationships in response to an extemporaneous linguistic or conceptual situation. The product of this approach is a generalisable computational linguistic methodology, capable of taking input in various forms, including word groupings and sentential context, and dynamically generating output from a broad base model of word co-occurrence data. To demonstrate the versatility of the method, this thesis will present competitive empirical results on a range of established natural language tasks including word similarity and relatedness rating, metaphor and metonymy detection, and analogy completion. A range of techniques will be applied in order to explore the ways in which different aspects of projected geometries can be mapped to different semantic relationships, allowing for the discovery of a range of lexical and conceptual properties for any given input and providing a basis for an empirical exploration of distinctions between the semantic phenomena under analysis. The case made here is that the flexibility of these models and their ability to extend output to evaluations of unattested linguistic relationships constitutes the groundwork for a method for the extrapolation of dynamic conceptual relationships from large-scale textual corpora. This method is presented as a complement and a counterpoint to established distributional methods for generating lexically productive word-vectors. Where contemporary vector space models of distributional semantics have almost universally involved either the factorisation of co-occurrence matrices or the incremental learning of abstract representations using neural networks, the approach described in this thesis preserves the connection between the individual dimensions of word-vectors and statistics pertaining to observations in a textual corpus. The hypothesis tested here is that the maintenance of actual, interpretable information about underlying linguistic data allows for the contextual selection of non-normalised subspaces with more nuanced geometric features. In addition to presenting competitive results for various computational linguistic targets, the thesis will suggest that the transparency of its representations indicates scope for the application of this model to various real-world problems where an interpretable relationship between data and output is highly desirable. This, finally, demonstrates a way towards the productive application of the theory and philosophy of language to computational linguistic practice.
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Silberer, Carina Helga. "Learning visually grounded meaning representations." Thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2015. http://hdl.handle.net/1842/14236.
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Humans possess a rich semantic knowledge of words and concepts which captures the perceivable physical properties of their real-world referents and their relations. Encoding this knowledge or some of its aspects is the goal of computational models of semantic representation and has been the subject of considerable research in cognitive science, natural language processing, and related areas. Existing models have placed emphasis on different aspects of meaning, depending ultimately on the task at hand. Typically, such models have been used in tasks addressing the simulation of behavioural phenomena, e.g., lexical priming or categorisation, as well as in natural language applications, such as information retrieval, document classification, or semantic role labelling. A major strand of research popular across disciplines focuses on models which induce semantic representations from text corpora. These models are based on the hypothesis that the meaning of words is established by their distributional relation to other words (Harris, 1954). Despite their widespread use, distributional models of word meaning have been criticised as ‘disembodied’ in that they are not grounded in perception and action (Perfetti, 1998; Barsalou, 1999; Glenberg and Kaschak, 2002). This lack of grounding contrasts with many experimental studies suggesting that meaning is acquired not only from exposure to the linguistic environment but also from our interaction with the physical world (Landau et al., 1998; Bornstein et al., 2004). This criticism has led to the emergence of new models aiming at inducing perceptually grounded semantic representations. Essentially, existing approaches learn meaning representations from multiple views corresponding to different modalities, i.e. linguistic and perceptual input. To approximate the perceptual modality, previous work has relied largely on semantic attributes collected from humans (e.g., is round, is sour), or on automatically extracted image features. Semantic attributes have a long-standing tradition in cognitive science and are thought to represent salient psychological aspects of word meaning including multisensory information. However, their elicitation from human subjects limits the scope of computational models to a small number of concepts for which attributes are available. In this thesis, we present an approach which draws inspiration from the successful application of attribute classifiers in image classification, and represent images and the concepts depicted by them by automatically predicted visual attributes. To this end, we create a dataset comprising nearly 700K images and a taxonomy of 636 visual attributes and use it to train attribute classifiers. We show that their predictions can act as a substitute for human-produced attributes without any critical information loss. In line with the attribute-based approximation of the visual modality, we represent the linguistic modality by textual attributes which we obtain with an off-the-shelf distributional model. Having first established this core contribution of a novel modelling framework for grounded meaning representations based on semantic attributes, we show that these can be integrated into existing approaches to perceptually grounded representations. We then introduce a model which is formulated as a stacked autoencoder (a variant of multilayer neural networks), which learns higher-level meaning representations by mapping words and images, represented by attributes, into a common embedding space. In contrast to most previous approaches to multimodal learning using different variants of deep networks and data sources, our model is defined at a finer level of granularity—it computes representations for individual words and is unique in its use of attributes as a means of representing the textual and visual modalities. We evaluate the effectiveness of the representations learnt by our model by assessing its ability to account for human behaviour on three semantic tasks, namely word similarity, concept categorisation, and typicality of category members. With respect to the word similarity task, we focus on the model’s ability to capture similarity in both the meaning and appearance of the words’ referents. Since existing benchmark datasets on word similarity do not distinguish between these two dimensions and often contain abstract words, we create a new dataset in a large-scale experiment where participants are asked to give two ratings per word pair expressing their semantic and visual similarity, respectively. Experimental results show that our model learns meaningful representations which are more accurate than models based on individual modalities or different modality integration mechanisms. The presented model is furthermore able to predict textual attributes for new concepts given their visual attribute predictions only, which we demonstrate by comparing model output with human generated attributes. Finally, we show the model’s effectiveness in an image-based task on visual category learning, in which images are used as a stand-in for real-world objects.
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Coulson, Seana. "Semantic leaps : the role of frame-shifting and conceptual blending in meaning construction /." Diss., Connect to a 24 p. preview or request complete full text in PDF format. Access restricted to UC campuses, 1997. http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/ucsd/fullcit?p9722823.
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Leckie, Gail. "The meaning of logical constants : an inferentialist account." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2015. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.711820.
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Cameron, Matthew Dunbar. "Taking meaning out of context : essays on the foundations of natural language semantics." Thesis, University of St Andrews, 2018. http://hdl.handle.net/10023/15555.
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David Lewis articulated minimal constraints on a formal theory of natural language semantics that have been widely adopted by subsequent theorists: compositionality and sentence truth in a given context. In the process, Lewis distinguished between the compositional semantic value of an expression and its propositional content relative to a context. This dissertation consists of a series of essays in which I address several questions that arise from this distinction, including how we should understand semantic values, how we should understand propositional content, and how we should understand the relation between them. Related to this, I explore and address a number of interesting and unresolved methodological issues that arise in relation to context-sensitivity, and provide an account of the role of speaker intentions in a formal theory of natural language semantics. Additionally, I provide a detailed analysis of the role of context in a theory of natural language semantics and its connection to various aspects of language use and communication. I also motivate coherence with syntactic structure (in the tradition of generative grammar) as an additional constraint on a formal theory of natural language semantics and assess its import for how we theorize about tense and modality and issues related to the syntax-semantics interface, including covert structure and logical form. In broad strokes, this dissertation addresses issues concerning the aims, scope and criteria of a theory of natural language semantics. I approach these issues from the perspective of generative grammar, a theoretical framework that aims to characterize our understanding of natural language independent of its use. These essays help to clarify what should be expected of a formal theory of natural language semantics and its contribution to theories of speech acts and communication.
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O'Keefe, Greg, and gregokeefe@netspace net au. "The Meaning of UML Models." The Australian National University. Computer Science Laboratory, Research School of Information Sciences and Engineering, 2010. http://thesis.anu.edu.au./public/adt-ANU20100614.175427.
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The Unified Modelling Language (UML) is intended to express complex ideas
in an intuitive and easily understood way. It is important because it is widely
used in software engineering and other disciplines. Although an official definition
document exists, there is much debate over the precise meaning of UML models.
¶
In response, the academic community have put forward many different proposals
for formalising UML, but it is not at all obvious how to decide between
them. Indeed, given that UML practitioners are inclined to reject formalisms as
non-intuitive, it is not even obvious that the definition should be formal at all.
Rather than searching for yet another formalisation of UML, our main aim is to
determine what would constitute a good definition of UML.
¶
The first chapter sets the UML definition problem in a broad context, relating
it to work in logic and the philosophy of science. More specific conclusions about
the nature of model driven development are reached in the beginning of Chapter 2.
We then develop criteria for a definition of UML. Applying these criteria to the
existing definition, we find that it is lacking in clarity. We then set out to test the
precision of the definition. The test is to take an apparently inconsistent model, and
determine whether it really is inconsistent according to the definition.
¶
Many people have proposed that UML models are graphs, but few have justified
this choice using the official definition of UML. We begin Chapter 3 by arguing
from the official definition that UML models are graphs and that instantiation
is a graph homomorphism into an interpretation functor. The official definition of
UML defines the semantics against its abstract syntax, which is in turn defined by
a UML model. Chapters 3 and 4 prepare for our test by resolving this apparent
circularity. The result is a semantics for the metamodel fragment of the language.
¶
In Chapter 5, we find, contrary to popular belief, that the official definition does
provide sufficient semantics to classify the example model as inconsistent. Moreover,
the sustained study of the semantics in Chapters 3 to 5 confirms our initial
argument that the semantic domain is graphs. The Actions are the building blocks
of UMLs prescriptive dynamics. We see that they can be naturally defined as graph
transformation rules. Sequence diagrams are the main example of descriptive dynamics,
but we find that their official semantics are broken. The recorded history
approach should be replaced, we suggest, by a graph-oriented dynamic logic.
¶
Chapter 6 presents our early work on dynamic logic for UML sequence diagrams
and further explores the proposed semantic repairs. In Chapter 7, guided
by the criteria developed in Chapter 2, we critically survey the UML formalisation
literature and conclude that an existing body of graph transformation based work
known as dynamic metamodelling is very close to what is required.
¶
The final chapter draws together our conclusions. It proposes a category theoretic
construction to merge models of the syntax and semantic domain, yielding
a type graph for the graph transformation system which defines the dynamic semantics
of the language. Finally, it outlines the further work required to realise a
satisfactory definition of UML.
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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.
Full textAbstract:
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
(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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Jager, Bernadet. "Processing lexical ambiguity : the effects of meaning relatedness, word frequency, concreteness, and level of processing." Thesis, University of Aberdeen, 2012. http://digitool.abdn.ac.uk:80/webclient/DeliveryManager?pid=185856.
Full textAbstract:
This thesis explores the processing of lexical ambiguity: words with several unrelated meanings (homonymy) or many related senses (polysemy). Chapter I provides a literature overview of studies investigating this topic. Chapters 2 and 3 pursue a first goal: to investigate whether effects are influenced by the methodology of defining lexical ambiguity. The results support the hypothesis (Rodd, Gaskell, & Marslen- Wilson, 2002) that studies using questionnaires to define lexical ambiguity (e.g. Rubenstein, Garfield, & Millikan, 1970) found a polysemy advantage rather than a homonymy advantage. Questionnaire-based ambiguity classifications are more similar to dictionary-defined polysemy than to homonymy (Experiment 1). Moreover, earlier findings (e.g. Rodd et al., 2002) of a polysemy advantage and homonymy disadvantage are replicated, and the questionnaire-based classifications result in effects more similar to the former than to the latter (Experiments 2 to 4). Chapters 4 to 6 pursue a second goal: to explore the effects of polysemy and homonymy with new stimuli. Chapters 4 and 5 indicate that polysemy effects are sensitive to concreteness (Experiments 5 & 6), frequency (Experiment 7), and level of processing (Experiment 8). Furthermore, polysemy effects seem to take place relatively late (Experiment 9). In contrast, Chapter 6 does not find any effects of homonymy (Experiments 10 to 12). Chapter 7 pursues a third goal: to test whether the relationship between senses plays a role in word processing. Sense relationship influences word recognition (Experiments 13 & 16), but not semantic categorization (Experiment 14). The temporal locus of the lexical decision effect cannot be determined (Experiment 15). Finally, Chapter 8 shows that the current findings fit reasonably well within an account by Rodd, Gaskell, and Marslen- Wilson (2004), and suggests possible directions for further research.
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Staude, Martin [Verfasser]. "Meaning and meaning fields : a theory from semiotics, sociology, and semantics through the example of power and law / Martin Staude." Berlin : Freie Universität Berlin, 2012. http://d-nb.info/1027151264/34.
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Kong, Lingyue, and 孔令躍. "The role of phonology in access to Chinese character meaning." Thesis, The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong), 2008. http://hub.hku.hk/bib/B39848760.
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Warshaw, Mark. "The cognitive challenge to the truth conditional theory of meaning /." Diss., Connect to a 24 p. preview or request complete full text in PDF format. Access restricted to UC campuses, 2005. http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/ucsd/fullcit?p3170238.
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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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Poirier, Josée. "Finding meaning in silence the comprehension of ellipsis /." Diss., [La Jolla] : [San Diego] : University of California, San Diego ; San Diego State University, 2009. http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/ucsd/fullcit?p3358671.
Full textAbstract:
Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, San Diego and San Diego State University, 2009.Title from first page of PDF file (viewed July 14, 2009). Available via ProQuest Digital Dissertations. Vita. Includes bibliographical references.
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Sugaya, Yusuke. "Constructing Evaluations: The Meaning-Making Process of Adjectives." Kyoto University, 2020. http://hdl.handle.net/2433/259753.
Full textAbstract:
Kyoto University (京都大学)0048
新制・課程博士
博士(人間・環境学)
甲第22857号
人博第965号
新制||人||229(附属図書館)
2020||人博||965(吉田南総合図書館)
京都大学大学院人間・環境学研究科共生人間学専攻
(主査)教授 谷口 一美, 教授 藤田 耕司, 准教授 守田 貴弘, 教授 山梨 正明
学位規則第4条第1項該当
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Neff, Kathryn Joan Eggers. "Neural net models of word representation : a connectionist approach to word meaning and lexical relations." Virtual Press, 1991. http://liblink.bsu.edu/uhtbin/catkey/832999.
Full textAbstract:
This study examines the use of the neural net paradigm as a modeling tool to represent word meanings. The neural net paradigm, also called "connectionism" and "parallel distributed processing," provides a new metaphor and vocabulary for representing the structure of the mental lexicon. As a research method applied to the componential analysis of word meanings, the neural net approach has one primary advantage over the traditional introspective method: freedom from the investigator's personal biases.The connectionist method is illustrated in this thesis with an extensive examination of the meanings of the words "cup" and "mug." These words have been studied previously by Labov (1973), Wierzbicka (1985), Andersen (1975), and Kempton (1978), using very different methods.The neural net models developed in this study are based on empirical data acquired through interviews with nine informants who classified 37 objects, 37 photographs, and 37 line drawings as "cups," "mugs," or "neither." These responses were combined with a data file representing the coded attributes of each object, to construct neural net models which reflect each informant's classification process.In the neural net models, the "cup" and "mug" features are interconnected with positive and negative weights that represent the association strengths of the features. When the connection weights are set so that they reflect the informants' responses, the neural net models can account for the extreme discrepancies in object-naming among informants, and the models can also account for the inconsistent classifications of each individual informant with respect to the mode of presentation (drawing, photograph, or actual object). Further, the neural net modelscan predict classifications for novel objects with an accuracy varying from 82% to 100%.By examining the connection weight patterns within the neural net model, it is possible to discover the "cup" and "mug" features which are most salient for each informant, and for the informants collectively. This analysis shows that each informant has acquired internal meanings for the words "cup" and "mug" which are unique to the individual, although there is considerable overlap with respect to the most salient features.Department of English
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Kaczorowski, Anna. "Is 'respect' a Feeling or a Behaviour? : -a study of the connection between word meaning and age for native and non-native speakers of English." Thesis, Mid Sweden University, Department of Humanities, 2009. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:miun:diva-9175.
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The aim of this study was to investigate if there is a connection between language and social identity in the perception of word meaning among second language learners in the same way as for native speakers, and if the sociolinguistic variable age is significant. This was done with an investigation of two generations of Swedish learners' perception of the meaning of the words 'respect', 'integrity' and 'communication'. The investigation showed that age is important to a certain extent regarding interpreting words and their meaning, but that it is not as important if the speaker has English as their mother tongue or as their second language.
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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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Greenhall, Owen F. R. "The semantics/pragmatics distinction : a defence of Grice." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2006. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:00db9bdd-143d-4900-b564-3af9d002f1ea.
Full textAbstract:
The historical development of Morris’ tripartite distinction between syntax, semantics and pragmatics does not follow a smooth path. Examining definitions of the terms ‘semantic’ and ‘pragmatic’ and the phenomena they have been used to describe, provides insight into alternative approaches to the semantics/pragmatics distinction. Paul Grice’s work receives particular attention and taxonomy of philosophical positions, roughly divisible into content minimalist and maximalist groups, is set up. Grice’s often neglected theory of conventional implicature is defended from objections, various tests for the presence of conventional implicature are assessed and the linguistic properties of conventional implicature defined. Once rehabilitated, the theoretical utility of conventional implicature is demonstrated via a case study of the semantic import of the gender and number of pronouns in English. The better-known theory of conversational implicature is also examined and refined. New linguistic tests for such implicatures are devised and the refined theory is applied to scalar terms. A pragmatic approach to scalar implicatures is proposed and shown to fare better than alternatives presented by Uli Sauerland, Stephen Levinson and Gennaro Chierchia. With the details of the theory conversational implicature established, the use made of Grice’s tool in the work of several philosophers is critically evaluated. Kent Bach’s minimalist approach to quantifier domain restriction is examined and criticised. Also, the linguistic evidence for semantic minimalism provided by Herman Cappelen and Ernie Lepore is found wanting. Finally, a content maximalist approach to quantifier domain restriction is proposed. The approach differs from other context maximalist theories, such as Jason Stanley’s, in relying on semantically unarticulated constituents. Stanley’s arguments against such theories are examined. Further applications of the approach are briefly surveyed.
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譚力海 and Lihai Tan. "The activation of early phonological code before access to meaning in written Chinese." Thesis, The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong), 1995. http://hub.hku.hk/bib/B31234483.
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Garceau, Mary Elizabeth. "Gender Vs. Sex: Defining Meaning in a Modern World through use of Corpora and Semantic Surveys." BYU ScholarsArchive, 2020. https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/etd/8444.
Full textAbstract:
Considerable resources in U.S. legal studies are devoted to determining the precise meaning of contested terms specifically in statutory interpretation. Traditional judicial approaches have defined meaning using dictionaries. This reliance has led to Mouritsen’s (2010) observation that "the judicial conception of lexical meaning—i.e., what judges think about what words mean … is often [subjectively] outcome determinative." Beginning with Mouritsen’s (2010) article, a movement in U.S. legal scholarship offers corpus linguistics as a more objective method to resolving contested meaning (Lee and Mouritsen, 2018). However, I assert that weaknesses still exist in contemporary applications of corpus linguistics to legal interpretation. I first review methodological differences in two corpus-based projects that attempt to resolve the meaning of the contested term, "emoluments," a high-profile Supreme Court-bound contemporary issue related to the legitimacy of the Trump presidency (Phillips and White, 2018; Cunningham and Egbert, 2019). Unfortunately, the results of these two studies are in conflict. Based upon a critique of these projects, I advocate for a more objective method of interpreting the results of corpus analyses using multiple human coders following rater reliability research models often used in sociolinguistics and second language acquisition research. In order to test our assumptions, I apply this approach to utilizing corpus linguistics to define the meaning of "sex" in two highly charged cases pending in the U.S. Supreme Court within the context of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 which prohibits discrimination "because of. . . sex" (42 U.S.C. § 2000e-2(a)(1). The first case, Harris Funeral Home v. EEOC, questions if "sex" encompasses "gender identity;" while the second, Altitude v. Zarda, asks if the meaning of "sex" includes "sexual orientation." I discuss results of this research model and its implications to further corpus linguistic applications to the law.
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Johnston, David. "J.L. Austin on truth and meaning." Thesis, McGill University, 1991. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=70292.
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The thesis presents a development of J. L. Austin's analysis of truth and its accompanying analysis of sentence structure. This involves a discussion and refinement of Austin's notions of the demonstrative and descriptive conventions of language and of the demonstrative and descriptive devices of sentences. The main point of the thesis is that ordinary language must be treated as an historical phenomenon: one that has evolved its more complex features through a long series of variations upon a small number of rudimentary conventions and locutions. The utility of Austin's analysis is shown to lie in the description that it provides of the functions of these rudimentary conventions and locutions. The analysis is used to illuminate a number of problematic sentences and expressions of ordinary language, including identity sentences, definite descriptions, existential sentences, and conditionals.
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Spalek, Alexandra Anna. "Verb meaning and combinatory semantics: a corpus based study of Spanish change of state verbs." Doctoral thesis, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, 2014. http://hdl.handle.net/10803/145476.
Full textAbstract:
Even though it is an intuitive and perhaps obvious idea that composition leads
to non-trivial semantic interactions between words, and these interactions affect
the contents of predication, there has still been little work done on how verbs restrict
their arguments and how flexible these restrictions are. This dissertation thus
starts out with the observation that verbs have very rich combinatorial paradigms
and raises the question of what this wide combinatorial capacity of verbs means
for the semantics of the verb and the process of composition. Distributed in three
case studies, a rich data set of the Spanish change of state verbs congelar ‘freeze’,
romper ‘break’ and cortar ‘cut’ is analysed and further discussed against the background
of studies from theoretical linguistics. Tackling the question of the rich
combinatorial paradigm of verbs leads to taking a position on the theoretical horizon
of theories of predication as well as theories of lexicon, for which I turn to
Modern Type Theories and an underspecified lexical meaningAunque es intuitiva y quizás obvia la idea de que la composición conduce a interacciones semánticas no triviales entre las palabras que afectan al contenido de una predicación, hay todavía pocos trabajos que analicen el modo como los verbos restringen sus argumentos y examinen si sus restricciones son muy amplias o más bien limitadas. Esta tesis parte de la observación de que los verbos tienen unos paradigmas combinatorios muy ricos, para plantear la pregunta acerca del papel que desempeña la combinatoria predicado-argumento tanto en el significado de los verbos como en el proceso de construcción del significado composicional. Se llevan a cabo tres estudios de caso correspondientes a otros tantos verbos de cambio de estado, congelar, romper y cortar, en los que se presenta una rica colección de datos que se discute a la luz del conocimiento que proporcionan los estudios de lingüística teórica. Abordar la cuestión del rico paradigma de combinatoria de los verbos conduce a tomar una posición en el horizonte de las teorías de la predicación, así como también en el de las teorías del léxico. La presente tesis se decanta en este sentido por la teoría de tipos moderna (Modern Type Theory) y un significado léxico subespecificado.
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Heath, Derrall L. "Using Perceptually Grounded Semantic Models to Autonomously Convey Meaning Through Visual Art." BYU ScholarsArchive, 2016. https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/etd/6095.
Full textAbstract:
Developing advanced semantic models is important in building computational systems that can not only understand language but also convey ideas and concepts to others. Semantic models can allow a creative image-producing-agent to autonomously produce artifacts that communicate an intended meaning. This notion of communicating meaning through art is often considered a necessary part of eliciting an aesthetic experience in the viewer and can thus enhance the (perceived) creativity of the agent. Computational creativity, a subfield of artificial intelligence, deals with designing computational systems and algorithms that either automatically create original and functional products, or that augment the ability of humans to do so. We present work on DARCI (Digital ARtist Communicating Intention), a system designed to autonomously produce original images that convey meaning. In order for DARCI to automatically express meaning through the art it creates, it must have its own semantic model that is perceptually grounded with visual capabilities.The work presented here focuses on designing, building, and incorporating advanced semantic and perceptual models into the DARCI system. These semantic models give DARCI a better understanding of the world and enable it to be more autonomous, to better evaluate its own artifacts, and to create artifacts with intention. Through designing, implementing, and studying DARCI, we have developed evaluation methods, models, frameworks, and theories related to the creative process that can be generalized to other domains outside of visual art. Our work on DARCI has even influenced the visual art community through several collaborative efforts, art galleries, and exhibits. We show that the DARCI system is successful at autonomously producing original art that is meaningful to human viewers. We also discuss insights that our efforts have contributed to the field of computational creativity.
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Zhu, Qi. "A discussion of two design approaches : in architecture." Thesis, Virginia Tech, 1999. http://hdl.handle.net/10919/34314.
Full textAbstract:
A:
Architecture is a world of making.
B:
Architecture is a world of making the thinking.
A:
In my world of architecture, the thinking-of-making is a conscious mental development, while the thinking generated afterwards is autonomous. Hitherto in the design process, I am free from any burdens of the unpredictable and uncontrollable afterward "thinking".
B:
In my world of architecture, the making-of-thinking is structurally dependent on the thinking-of-making. Moreover, I want to direct the thinking of "the making" towards a specific cultural dimension. I enjoy the restrictions imposed by it.
The above dialogue comprised the basic subject discussed in this thesis. The thesis projects are examinations of the two design approaches.Master of Architecture
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Matos, Amaral Patricia. "The meaning of approximative adverbs evidence from European Portuguese /." Columbus, Ohio : Ohio State University, 2007. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc%5Fnum=osu1186724054.
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Hussein, Miri Muhammad. "Relevance theory and procedural meaning : the semantics and pragmatics of discourse markers in English and Arabic." Thesis, University of Newcastle Upon Tyne, 2009. http://hdl.handle.net/10443/1155.
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The present study is an attempt to investigate the use of discourse markers in English and Arabic. The study uses Relevance Theory as a theoretical framework for the analysis of discourse markers in both Syrian and Standard Arabic. It benefits from Blakemore’s (1987, 2002) account of procedural meaning, in which she argues that discourse markers encode procedural meaning that constrains the inferential phase of the interpretation of the utterance in which they occur. According to Blakemore, the procedural meaning encoded by discourse markers controls the hearer’s choice of context under which the utterance is relevant. The study concentrates on ten discourse markers, five of which are only used in Standard Arabic. These are lakinna, bainama, lakin, bal and fa. The other five (bass, la-heik, la-ha-sabab, ma‘nāt-o and bi-ittal ī ) are only used in Syrian Arabic. The choice of these discourse markers has been motivated by the fact that they can be compared and contrasted with Blakemore’s two favoured discourse markers, but and so. The claim is that like so and but, such discourse markers encode procedural meaning that constrains the interpretation of the utterance in which they occur. The study argues that like but in English, bass in Syrian Arabic encodes a general procedure that can be implemented to derive different meanings such as ‘denial of expectation’, ‘contrast’, ‘correction’ and ‘cancellation’. The four discourse markers (lakinna, bainama, lakin and bal) used in Standard Arabic are analysed as lexical representations of these different implementations. The discourse marker fa, in this study, has also been analysed as encoding a general procedure that can be implemented to derive different meanings such as ‘sequentiality’, ‘immediacy’, ‘non-intervention’ and ‘causality’. It has also been argued that the procedure encoded by fa can put constraints on either the explicit or the implicit side of the interpretation of the utterance in which it occurs.
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Moldovan, Andrei. "The Literal Meaning of Definite Descriptions." Doctoral thesis, Universitat de Barcelona, 2015. http://hdl.handle.net/10803/294262.
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This thesis focuses on the semantics of definite descriptions (DDs). In chapter 1 I introduce a framework for doing compositional semantics for natural language that follows Heim and Kratzer (1998) and Fintel and Heim (2011). I also address a number of issues concerning the methodology of natural language semantics, as well as the theoretical desiderata that we aim to achieve. In chapter 2 I offer a reconstruction within this theoretical framework of three classical theories of DDs: the Russellian theory, the Fregean theory, and the Barwise and Cooper (1981) theory. Chapter 3 focuses on incomplete DDs. The incompleteness problem affects not only the Russellian theory, but also the Fregean and B&C theories. I argue that the syntactic variable approach to QDR proposed by Stanley and Szabó (2000a) offers a solution to the incompleteness problem that is equally applicable to the three theories of DDs introduced. Chapter 4 focuses on the referential/attributive distinction. Although intuitions of singularity are not part of our methodology, I point out (following Neale (2004)) that there are independent reasons why the Russellian theory predicts that a DD is semantically a rigid designator when it is used referentially. I argue that this proposal is applicable not only to the Russellian theory, as Neale does, but also to the Fregean and the B&C theories. In Chapter 5 and 6 I look at non-denoting DDs (i.e. DDs for which either uniqueness or existence fails to be satisfied). In chapter 5 I address the phenomenon called ‘presupposition’ in the literature, distinguishing between various kinds of data that are usually treated under this heading. I argue that with respect to a certain characterization of presuppositions, the Fregean theory and the B&C theory have more explanatory power than the Russellian theory. Chapter 6 deals with the truth-value intuitions triggered by utterances of sentences containing improper DDs. With respect to failures of uniqueness, I discuss Ramachandran’s (1993) argument and offer an improved version of it, which provides a compelling objection against the Russellian theory. With respect to failures of existence, I argue that the Fregean and the B&C theorist are in a better position to account for the patter of data than the Russellian. In chapter 7 I address data concerning the embedding of DDs in propositional attitude verbs. I discuss in detail the objection proposed by Heim (1991) against the Russellian theory. Again, this poses an important problem to the Russellian theory, while the Fregean and the B&C theories are not affected by the objection. The overall conclusion that this discussion leads to is that the Russellian theory is in general less prepared to account for the kinds of truth-conditional data we have considered than the alternative proposals discussed. The conclusions of chapters 6 and 7, and partially those of chapter 5, all indicate that the Russellian theory is the worst of the three options considered. The main positive contribution of this thesis is to point out that the B&C theory, although generally ignored in the literature, has the same theoretical virtues as the Fregean theory with respect to accounting for the range of data considered.Esta tesis se centra en la semántica de las descripciones definidas (DDs). En el capítulo 1 introduzco un marco teórico para la semántica composicional del lenguaje natural que sigue la propuesta de Heim y Kratzer (1998) y Fintel y Heim (2011). En el capítulo 2 ofrezco una reconstrucción dentro de este marco de tres teorías clásicas de las DDs: la teoría de Russell, la teoría de Frege, y la propuesta de Barwise y Cooper (1981). El capítulo 3 tiene como enfoque las DDs incompletas y el capítulo 4 se centra en la distinción entre los usos referenciales y los usos atributivos. Argumento que ninguno de estos fenómenos nos permite elegir entre las tres teorías de las DDs introducidas. En los capítulos 5 y 6 analizo las DDs que no denotan. En el capítulo 5 sostengo que, con respecto a una determinada caracterización de las presuposiciones, la teoría de Frege y la de B&C tienen más poder explicativo que la teoría russelliana. El capítulo 6 trata de las intuiciones acerca de los valores de verdad de las oraciones que contienen DDs que no denotan. Discuto la objeción de Ramachandran (1993) a la teoría russelliana y ofrezco una versión mejorada de esta objeción. En el capítulo 7 analizo los datos provenientes de la inserción de DDs en el complemento de los verbos de actitud proposicional. Discuto la objeción propuesta por Heim (1991) contra la teoría russelliana. Una vez más, se trata de un problema importante para esta teoría que no afecta a las teorías de Frege y de B&C. La conclusión general de esta discusión es que la teoría de Russell es la menos preparada de las tres propuestas consideradas para dar cuenta de los tipos de datos lingüísticos analizados. Esta conclusión se sostiene sobre los resultados de los capítulos 6 y 7, y parcialmente los del capítulo 5. La principal contribución positiva de este trabajo es la de señalar que la teoría de B&C, aunque generalmente ignorada en la literatura relevante, tiene las mismas virtudes teóricas que la teoría de Frege con respecto a los datos que se han considerado aquí.
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de, Long Shauna P. A. "What Is the Relationship between Learning Spelling and Meaning Incidentally during Reading?" Kent State University / OhioLINK, 2019. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=kent1558543156973626.
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Stojanovic, Isidora. "What Is Said. An Inquiry into Reference, Meaning, and Content." Phd thesis, May be available electronically:, 2007. http://proquest.umi.com/login?COPT=REJTPTU1MTUmSU5UPTAmVkVSPTI=&clientId=12498.
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鄭佩芳 and Pui-fong Cheng. "A study on parts of speech, word formation, and the change of word meaning in modern Chinese." Thesis, The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong), 1994. http://hub.hku.hk/bib/B31234124.
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Danks, Warwick. "The Arabic verb : form and meaning in the vowel-lengthening patterns." Thesis, University of St Andrews, 2010. http://hdl.handle.net/10023/961.
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The research presented in this dissertation adopts an empirical Saussurean structuralist approach to elucidating the true meaning of the verb patterns characterised formally by vowel lengthening in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA). The verbal system as a whole is examined in order to place the patterns of interest (III and VI) in context, the complexities of Arabic verbal morphology are explored and the challenges revealed by previous attempts to draw links between form and meaning are presented. An exhaustive dictionary survey is employed to provide quantifiable data to empirically test the largely accepted view that the vowel lengthening patterns have mutual/reciprocal meaning. Finding the traditional explanation inadequate and prone to too many exceptions, alternative commonalities of meaning are similarly investigated. Whilst confirming the detransitivising function of the ta- prefix which derives pattern VI from pattern III, analysis of valency data also precludes transitivity as a viable explanation for pattern III meaning compared with the base form. Examination of formally similar morphology in certain nouns leads to the intuitive possibility that vowel lengthening has aspectual meaning. A model of linguistic aspect is investigated for its applicability to MSA and used to isolate the aspectual feature common to the majority of pattern III and pattern VI verbs, which is determined to be atelicity. A set of verbs which appear to be exceptional in that they are not attributable to atelic aspectual categories is found to be characterised by inceptive meaning and a three-phase model of event time structure is developed to include an inceptive verbal category, demonstrating that these verbs too are atelic. Thus the form-meaning relationship which is discovered is that the vowel lengthening verbal patterns in Modern Standard Arabic have atelic aspectual meaning.
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Macleod, Morgan Dylan. "The perfect in Old English and Old Saxon : the synchronic and diachronic correspondence of form and meaning." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2012. https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/242374.
Full textAbstract:
Most of the Germanic languages developed new tense forms allowing the grammatical expression of fine semantic distinctions, including periphrastic perfects and pluperfects; previously, the preterite alone had been used to express semantic content of this sort. In the absence of robust quantitative data regarding the subsequent development of these forms and distribution in the early Germanic languages, a relatively uncomplicated model has generally been assumed, in which there is little synchronic variation in their use and a steady, though not necessarily continuous, diachronic progress toward the state observed in the modern languages. The goal of this work is to provide accurate quantitative data regarding the apportionment of these semantic domains among the available grammatical forms in Old English and Old Saxon, in order to provide meaningful measurements of the synchronic and diachronic use of the periphrastic forms. Very different patterns were found in the use of these forms in the two languages. In Old Saxon the periphrastic forms are used freely, with a frequency similar to or greater than that of the preterites. In Old English there are no significant diachronic trends, but considerable variation exists synchronically among texts, with some making free use of the periphrastic forms and others preferring the preterite almost exclusively. A number of factors potentially responsible for this variation have been investigated, but none can account for the entire range of observed variation on its own. In the absence of any other account for the observed variation, the hypothesis is proposed that the periphrastic forms and the preterite differed in their perceived stylistic value, in a manner whose exact nature may be no longer recoverable; such a hypothesis would be in keeping with previous findings regarding languages such as Middle English and Middle High German. Old English and Old Saxon would therefore differ in the extent to which they make use of the potential for variation created by the absence of a paradigmatic opposition among the relevant grammatical categories.
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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.
Full textAbstract:
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.