Books on the topic 'Linguistic formal model'

This chapter summarizes some first neurolinguistic studies conducted in Persian, using patholinguistic data taken from monolingual and bilingual brain-damaged patients, as well as five first neuroimaging studies in healthy native speakers of Persian. The patholinguistic data are extracted from formal clinical linguistic assessments of a heterogeneous group of brain-damaged patients with different etiologies and brain lesion sites. The data are indicative of general agrammatic features of ‘syntactic simplification’ and ‘morphological regression’ reported in cross-language studies, along with language-particular agrammatic features in spoken and written modalities for Persian consequent to brain damage. The present patholinguistic data are also suggestive of a ‘non-unitary’ model of aphasia as a symptom complex phenomenon with disruptions of independent linguistic levels consequent to different lesion sites. The data are not supportive of independent production and comprehension language centres claimed in ‘classical model’ of brain and language but in support of new non-narrow localization brain–language models.

Semantics is the systematic study of linguistic meaning. The past fifty years have seen an explosion of research into the semantics of natural languages. There are now sophisticated theories of phenomena that were not even known to exist mere decades ago. Much of the early work in natural language semantics was accompanied by extensive reflection on the aims of semantic theory, and the form a theory must take to meet those aims. But this meta-theoretical reflection has not kept pace with recent theoretical innovations. The aim of this volume is to re-address these questions concerning the foundations of natural language semantics in light of the current state-of-the-art in semantic theorizing. The volume addresses a range of foundational questions about formal semantics: what is the best methodology for semantic theorizing, and should experimental techniques play a crucial role? How should we understand the use of formal tools such as model theory, and are there better formal alternatives? How should we think about compositionality? What does semantic theory tell us about the language faculty or linguistic competence? What are the advantages of dynamic semantics? How do formal semantic theories relate to philosophical notions of context, content, interpretation, and propositions?

The aim of this chapter is to provide a state-of-the-art survey of classical and especially neo-Gricean pragmatics, focusing on the bipartite model put forward by Horn and the trinitarian model advanced by Levinson. It assesses the role neo-Gricean pragmatics plays in effecting a radical simplification of the lexicon, semantics, and formal syntax in linguistic theory respectively, covering lexical narrowing, lexical cloning, lexical blocking, and lexicalization asymmetry in logical operators, and concentrating on pragmatic intrusion into what is said, Grice’s circle, and the pragmatics–semantics interface, and anaphora and binding.

This chapter considers the extent to which it is still meaningful to conceptualize pro-drop phenomena in parametric terms, introducing a three-factors model in which parameters are emergent, not UG-given. Within this model, it seems possible to distinguish macro, meso, and micro pro-drop systems. The attested systematic variation in even the most familiar instantiations of these putative types, however, raises questions about existing parametric accounts of the acquisition and typological relationship between these systems. Drawing on parallels with a neo-emergentist account of word-order variation, the chapter argues for an approach assuming interdependent parameters (a parameter-hierarchy) where the ‘size’ and precise formal specification of pro-drop in individual grammars is determined by the way the model’s three factors interact, with different formal features playing potentially parallel roles in different systems. The typological picture is thus more variation-rich than previously assumed, but this variation exhibits the kind of cross-linguistic systematicity a parametric approach predicts.

The monograph presents a system-dynamic model of intercultural communication and pedagogy. Authors hailing from eight countries (Armenia, Finland, Georgia, Iraq, Japan, Poland, Russia and Ukraine) examine the principles of interaction of linguistic cultures, components of intercultural dialogue, models and mechanisms of overcoming difficulties in communication between representatives of different cultures. The volume offers answers to a number of crucial questions. Why is it so important to highlight the current trends in intercultural communication? Which factors help and which hinder the development of communication? Which pedagogical methods and techniques are more effective? What is the influence of language on personality formation? How are the individual and the collective mentality, ideology, and culture reflected in language and at the same time formed by it? Among the authors are both those with extensive research experience and young ones. The monograph may be of interest not only to linguists but also to diplomats, sociologists, businesspeople, ethnographers, psychologists, cultural studies scholars, and, more generally, all those who confront these issues in their professional or everyday lives.

This book presents a theory of enriched meanings for natural language interpretation. Certain expressions that exhibit complex effects at the semantics/pragmatics boundary live in an enriched meaning space while others live in a more basic meaning space. These basic meanings are mapped to enriched meanings just when required compositionally, which avoids generalizing meanings to the worst case. The theory is captured formally using monads, a concept from category theory. Monads are also prominent in functional programming and have been successfully used in the semantics of programming languages to characterize certain classes of computation. They are used here to model certain challenging linguistic computations at the semantics/pragmatics boundary. Part I presents some background on the semantics/pragmatics boundary, informally presents the theory of enriched meanings, reviews the linguistic phenomena of interest, and provides the necessary background on category theory and monads. Part II provides novel compositional analyses of the following phenomena: conventional implicature, substitution puzzles, and conjunction fallacies. Part III explores the prospects of combining monads, with particular reference to these three cases. The authors show that the compositional properties of monads model linguistic intuitions about these cases particularly well. The book is an interdisciplinary contribution to Cognitive Science: These phenomena cross not just the boundary between semantics and pragmatics, but also disciplinary boundaries between Linguistics, Philosophy and Psychology, three of the major branches of Cognitive Science, and are here analyzed with techniques that are prominent in Computer Science, a fourth major branch. A number of exercises are provided to aid understanding, as well as a set of computational tools (available at the book's website), which also allow readers to develop their own analyses of enriched meanings.

While much of semantic theorizing is based on intuitions about logical phenomena associated with linguistic constructions—phenomena such as consistency and entailment—it is rare to see axiomatic treatments of linguistic fragments. Given a fragment interpreted in some class of formally specified models, it is often possible to ask for a characterization of the reasoning patterns validated by the class of models. Axiomatizations provide such a characterization, often in a perspicuous and efficient manner. This chapter highlights some of the benefits of providing axiomatizations for the purpose of semantic theorizing. Three examples from the study of modality provide an illustration of these benefits.

Communication between deities and human beings rests on the use of language. Religious language has peculiarities such as the use of a formal voice, reductions in first-person and elevation of third-person pronoun use, archaistic elements, and an abundance of speech acts—features that reflect and facilitate the binding of the individual to conceived ultimate reality and value, decentering the Self while focusing on the deity. Explorations of the neurologic correlates of these cognitive and linguistic processes may be useful to identify constraints on neurocognitive models of religious language, and metaphor. The key brain regions that may mediate religious language include neural networks known to be involved in computational assessments of value, future-oriented simulations, Self-agency, Self-reflection, and attributing intentionality of goals to others. Studies indicate that some of the areas involved in those processes are active during personal prayer, whereas brain regions related to habit formation appear active during formal prayer. By examining religious language, and the brain areas engaged by it, we aim to develop more comprehensive neurocognitive models of religious cognition.

Abstract While there has been much debate between minimalists and contextualists about the nature of what is said, both sides assume that some such notion must be appealed to in modelling linguistic communication. This book challenges that assumption, arguing that from the perspective of basic linguistic interpretation, nothing is said. To do this, the book draws a distinction between linguistic communication proper and behavioural communication, and then draws on Situation Theory and Relevance Theory to develop a model of the former that makes no appeal to any notion of what is said. Rather, what is said is introduced later as part of a reflective competence underlying sophisticated behavioural communication, such as irony and insinuation. The notions of implicature employed in these two types of communication are shown to be distinct, and to play different explanatory roles. With the division between linguistic and behavioural communication established, the book goes on to reconsider a number of areas of linguistic investigation that have received considerable attention in recent years. These include lexical modulation, scalar implicature, lying vs. otherwise misleading, and the correct characterisation of assertion and asserted content. The final chapter of the book relates the ideas developed to the discursive-commitment framework proposed by Robert Brandom. In doing so it considers, among other things, the notion of public language in relation to linguistic theorising, and the developmental relationship between language use and theory of mind.

Abstract Through its readings of Charles Baudelaire’s collection Le Spleen de Paris and other prose poems from the nineteenth century, this book considers the practice of reading prose poetry and how it might be different from reading poetry in verse. Among the numerous factors that helped shape the nascent modernity in Baudelaire’s poetic prose are the poems’ themes, forms, linguistic qualities, and modes. The contradictions identifiable at the level of prose poetry’s discourse are similarly perceptible in other aspects of Baudelaire’s poetic language, beyond the discursive: in the poems’ formal considerations, which retain recognizable traces of verse despite their prose presentation; and, with respect to both poetic form and thematics, in the sights and sounds that contribute to their poeticity. With a focus on what makes prose texts poetic, this study sheds light on Baudelaire the practitioner of the prose poem, as he navigated and complicated the boundaries between verse, prose, and poetry. Rather than rejecting those categories, Baudelaire forges a poetic space in which the notions of poetry and prose are recast, juxtaposed in a delicate balance in a textual space they manage to share. This coexistence of poetry and prose—previously thought of as incompatible—is the underlying tension and framework that contributes importantly to the modernity of his prose poetry. In turn, this new mode of poetry calls for new modes of reading poetry and new ways of engaging with a text.

Computational linguistics is the scientific study of language from a computational perspective. It aims is to provide computational models of natural language processing (NLP) and incorporate them into practical applications such as speech synthesis, speech recognition, automatic translation and many others where automatic processing of language is required. The use of good linguistic resources is crucial for the development of computational linguistics systems. Real world applications need resources which systematize the way linguistic information is structured in a certain language. There is a continuous effort to increase the number of linguistic resources available for the linguistic and NLP Community. Most of the existing linguistic resources have been created for English, mainly because most modern approaches to computational lexical semantics emerged in the United States. This situation is changing over time and some of these projects have been subsequently extended to other languages; however, in all cases, much time and effort need to be invested in creating such resources. Because of this, one of the main purposes of this work is to investigate the possibility of extending these resources to other languages such as Spanish. In this work, we introduce some of the most important resources devoted to lexical semantics, such as WordNet or FrameNet, and those focusing on Spanish such as 3LB-LEX or Adesse. Of these, this project focuses on FrameNet. The project aims to document the range of semantic and syntactic combinatory possibilities of words in English. Words are grouped according to the different frames or situations evoked by their meaning. If we focus on a particular topic domain like medicine and we try to describe it in terms of FrameNet, we probably would obtain frames representing it like CURE, formed by words like cure.v, heal.v or palliative.a or MEDICAL CONDITIONS with lexical units such as arthritis.n, asphyxia.n or asthma.n. The purpose of this work is to develop an automatic means of selecting frames from a particular domain and to translate them into Spanish. As we have stated, we will focus on medicine. The selection of the medical frames will be corpus-based, that is, we will extract all the frames that are statistically significant from a representative corpus. We will discuss why using a corpus-based approach is a reliable and unbiased way of dealing with this task. We will present an automatic method for the selection of FrameNet frames and, in order to make sure that the results obtained are coherent, we will contrast them with a previous manual selection or benchmark. Outcomes will be analysed by using the F-score, a measure widely used in this type of applications. We obtained a 0.87 F-score according to our benchmark, which demonstrates the applicability of this type of automatic approaches. The second part of the book is devoted to the translation of this selection into Spanish. The translation will be made using EuroWordNet, a extension of the Princeton WordNet for some European languages. We will explore different ways to link the different units of our medical FrameNet selection to a certain WordNet synset or set of words that have similar meanings. Matching the frame units to a specific synset in EuroWordNet allows us both to translate them into Spanish and to add new terms provided by WordNet into FrameNet. The results show how translation can be done quite accurately (95.6%). We hope this work can add new insight into the field of natural language processing.

Abstract This book investigates the semantics and pragmatics of a representative sample of parenthetical constructions. These constructions are argued to fall into two major classes: pure and impure. Pure parentheticals comment on some part of the descriptive content of the root sentence but are otherwise relatively independent of it. Impure parentheticals modify components of the illocutionary force and affect the felicity or the truth of the root sentence. The book studies parentheticals from three theoretical viewpoints: illocutionary effects, scopal properties, and discourse status. It establishes and explicates the notion of parenthetical meaning in a formally precise and predictive dynamic semantic model. As a result, parentheticality is brought to bear on linguistic phenomena such as entailment and presupposition, binding and anaphora, evidentiality and modality, illocutionary force, and polarity.

This chapter develops a contextualist account of normative language, focusing on broadly normative readings of modal verbs. The account draws on a more general framework for implementing a contextualist semantics and pragmatics, Discourse Contextualism. The aim of Discourse Contextualism is to derive the discourse properties of normative language from a contextualist interpretation of an independently motivated formal semantics, along with principles of interpretation and conversation. In using normative language, interlocutors can exploit their grammatical and world knowledge, and general pragmatic reasoning skills, to manage an evolving system of norms. Discourse Contextualism provides a perspicuous framework for further philosophical theorizing about the nature of normativity, normative language, and normative judgment. Delineating these issues can help refine our understanding of the space of overall theories and motivate more fruitful ways the dialectics may proceed. Discourse Contextualism provides a linguistic basis for a more comprehensive theory of normativity and normative discourse and practice.

Among the “higher” functions, language and its cerebral networks is the most intensively explored through behavioral or clinical studies and, more recently, through functional neuroimaging. From the former studies, several models (only partially congruent) have emerged during the past three centuries regarding the organization and topography of the brain mechanisms of the acoustic, phonological, semantic, syntactic, and pragmatic operations in which psycholinguists have divided the language function. The main task of this chapter is to extract from the vast functional neuroimaging literature of language reliable evidence that would be used to disconfirm the various hypotheses comprising the current language models. Most of these hypotheses concern the anatomical structures that could be considered nodes or hubs of the neuronal networks mediating the above-mentioned linguistic operations. Using the same criteria, the authors present neuroimaging evidence relevant to the issue of the neuronal mediation of sign languages, reading, and dyslexia.

This book is about one of the most intriguing features of human communication systems: the fact that words which go together in meaning can occur arbitrarily far away from each other. The kind of long-distance dependency that this volume is concerned with has been the subject of intense linguistic and psycholinguistic research for the last half century, and offers a unique insight into the nature of grammatical structures and their interaction with cognition. The constructions in which these unbounded dependencies arise are difficult to model and come with a rather puzzling array of constraints which have defied characterization and a proper explanation. For example, there are filler-gap dependencies in which the filler phrase is a plural phrase formed from the combination of each of the extracted phrases, and there are filler-gap constructions in which the filler phrase itself contains a gap that is linked to another filler phrase. What is more, different types of filler-gap dependency can compound, in the same sentence. Conversely, not all kinds of filler-gap dependencies are equally licit; some are robustly ruled out by the grammar whereas others have a less clear status because they have graded acceptability and can be made to improve in ideal contexts and conditions. This work provides a detailed survey of these linguistic phenomena and extant accounts, while also incorporating new experimental evidence to shed light on why the phenomena are the way they are and what important research on this topic lies ahead.

The category of mood is widely used in the description of languages and the formal analysis of their grammatical properties. It typically refers to features of a sentence’s form (or a class of sentences which share such features), either individual morphemes or grammatical patterns, which reflect how the sentence contributes to the modal meaning of a larger phrase or which indicates the type of fundamental pragmatic function it has in conversation. The first subtype, verbal mood, includes the categories of indicative and subjunctive subordinate clauses; the second sentence mood, encompasses declaratives, interrogatives, and imperatives. This work presents the essential background for understanding semantic theories of mood and discusses the most significant theories of both types. It evaluates those theories, compares them, draws connections between seemingly disparate approaches, and with the goal of drawing out their most important insights, it formalizes some of the literature’s most important ideas in new ways. Ultimately, this work shows that there are important connections between verbal mood and sentence mood which point the way towards a more general understanding of how mood works and its relation to other topics in linguistics, and it outlines the type of semantic and pragmatic theory which will make it possible to explain these relations.

The monograph reflects the problems of Russian psycholinguistics from the moment of its inception in Russia to the present day and presents its main directions that are currently developing. In addition, theoretical developments and practical results obtained in the framework of different directions and research centers are described in a concise form. The task of the book is to reflect, as far as it is possible in one edition, firstly, the history of the formation of Russian psycholinguistics; secondly, its methodology and developed methods; thirdly, the results obtained in different research centers and directions in different regions of Russia; fourthly, to outline the main directions of the further development of Russian psycholinguistics. There is no doubt that in the theoretical, methodological and applied aspects, the main problems and the results of their development by Russian psycholinguistics have no analogues in world linguistics and psycholinguistics, or are represented by completely original concepts and methods. We have tried to show this uniqueness of the problematics and the methodological equipment of Russian psycholinguistics in this book. The main role in the formation of Russian psycholinguistics was played by the Moscow psycholinguistic school of A.A. Leontyev. It still defines the main directions of Russian psycholinguistics. Russian psycholinguistics (the theory of speech activity - TSA) is based on the achievements of Russian psychology: a cultural-historical approach to the analysis of mental phenomena L.S. Vygotsky and the system-activity approach of A.N. Leontyev. Moscow is the most "psycholinguistic region" of Russia - INL RAS, Moscow State University, Moscow State Linguistic University, RUDN, Moscow State Pedagogical University, Moscow State Pedagogical University, Sechenov University, Moscow State University and other Moscow universities. Saint Petersburg psycholinguists have significant achievements, especially in the study of neurolinguistic problems, ontolinguistics. The most important feature of Russian psycholinguistics is the widespread development of psycholinguistics in the regions, the emergence of recognized psycholinguistic research centers - St. Petersburg, Tver, Saratov, Perm, Ufa, Omsk, Novosibirsk, Voronezh, Yekaterinburg, Kursk, Chelyabinsk; psycholinguistics is represented in Cherepovets, Ivanovo, Volgograd, Vyatka, Kaluga, Krasnoyarsk, Irkutsk, Vladivostok, Abakan, Maikop, Barnaul, Ulan-Ude, Yakutsk, Syktyvkar, Armavir and other cities; in Belarus - Minsk, in Ukraine - Lvov, Chernivtsi, Kharkov, in the DPR - Donetsk, in Kazakhstan - Alma-Ata, Chimkent. Our researchers work in Bulgaria, Hungary, Vietnam, China, France, Switzerland. There are Russian psycholinguists in Canada, USA, Israel, Austria and a number of other countries. All scientists from these regions and countries have contributed to the development of Russian psycholinguistics, to the development of psycholinguistic theory and methods of psycholinguistic research. Their participation has not been forgotten. We tried to present the main Russian psycholinguists in the Appendix - in the sections "Scientometrics", "Monographs and Manuals" and "Dissertations", even if there is no information about them in the Electronic Library and RSCI. The principles of including scientists in the scientometric list are presented in the Appendix. Our analysis of the content of the resulting monograph on psycholinguistic research in Russia allows us to draw preliminary conclusions about some of the distinctive features of Russian psycholinguistics: 1. cultural-historical approach to the analysis of mental phenomena of L.S.Vygotsky and the system-activity approach of A.N. Leontiev as methodological basis of Russian psycholinguistics; 2. theoretical nature of psycholinguistic research as a characteristic feature of Russian psycholinguistics. Our psycholinguistics has always built a general theory of the generation and perception of speech, mental vocabulary, linked specific research with the problems of ontogenesis, the relationship between language and thinking; 3. psycholinguistic studies of speech communication as an important subject of psycholinguistics; 4. attention to the psycholinguistic analysis of the text and the development of methods for such analysis; 5. active research into the ontogenesis of linguistic ability; 6. investigation of linguistic consciousness as one of the important subjects of psycholinguistics; 7. understanding the need to create associative dictionaries of different types as the most important practical task of psycholinguistics; 8. widespread use of psycholinguistic methods for applied purposes, active development of applied psycholinguistics. The review of the main directions of development of Russian psycholinguistics, carried out in this monograph, clearly shows that the direction associated with the study of linguistic consciousness is currently being most intensively developed in modern Russian psycholinguistics. As the practice of many years of psycholinguistic research in our country shows, the subject of study of psycholinguists is precisely linguistic consciousness - this is a part of human consciousness that is responsible for generating, understanding speech and keeping language in consciousness. Associative experiments are the core of most psycholinguistic techniques and are important both theoretically and practically. The following main areas of practical application of the results of associative experiments can be outlined. 1. Education. Associative experiments are the basis for constructing Mind Maps, one of the most promising tools for systematizing knowledge, assessing the quality, volume and nature of declarative knowledge (and using special techniques and skills). Methods based on smart maps are already widely used in teaching foreign languages, fast and deep immersion in various subject areas. 2. Information search, search optimization. The results of associative experiments can significantly improve the quality of information retrieval, its efficiency, as well as adaptability for a specific person (social group). When promoting sites (promoting them in search results), an associative experiment allows you to increase and improve the quality of the audience reached. 3. Translation studies, translation automation. An associative experiment can significantly improve the quality of translation, take into account intercultural and other social characteristics of native speakers. 4. Computational linguistics and automatic word processing. The results of associative experiments make it possible to reveal the features of a person's linguistic consciousness and contribute to the development of automatic text processing systems in a wide range of applications of natural language interfaces of computer programs and robotic solutions. 5. Advertising. The use of data on associations for specific words, slogans and texts allows you to predict and improve advertising texts. 6. Social relationships. The analysis of texts using the data of associative experiments makes it possible to assess the tonality of messages (negative / positive moods, aggression and other characteristics) based on user comments on the Internet and social networks, in the press in various projections (by individuals, events, organizations, etc.) from various social angles, to diagnose the formation of extremist ideas. 7. Content control and protection of personal data. Associative experiments improve the quality of content detection and filtering by identifying associative fields in areas subject to age restrictions, personal information, tobacco and alcohol advertising, incitement to ethnic hatred, etc. 8. Gender and individual differences. The data of associative experiments can be used to compare the reactions (and, in general, other features of thinking) between men and women, different social and age groups, representatives of different regions. The directions for the further development of Russian psycholinguistics from the standpoint of the current state of psycholinguistic science in the country are seen by us, first of all:  in the development of research in various areas of linguistic consciousness, which will contribute to the development of an important concept of speech as a verbal model of non-linguistic consciousness, in which knowledge revealed by social practice and assigned by each member of society during its inculturation is consolidated for society and on its behalf;  in the expansion of the problematics, which is formed under the influence of the growing intercultural communication in the world community, which inevitably involves the speech behavior of natural and artificial bilinguals in the new object area of psycholinguistics;  in using the capabilities of national linguistic corpora in the interests of researchers studying the functioning of non-linguistic and linguistic consciousness in speech processes;  in expanding research on the semantic perception of multimodal texts, the scope of which has greatly expanded in connection with the spread of the Internet as a means of communication in the life of modern society;  in the inclusion of the problems of professional communication and professional activity in the object area of psycholinguistics in connection with the introduction of information technologies into public practice, entailing the emergence of new professions and new features of the professional ethos;  in the further development of the theory of the mental lexicon (identifying the role of different types of knowledge in its formation and functioning, the role of the word as a unit of the mental lexicon in the formation of the image of the world, as well as the role of the natural / internal metalanguage and its specificity in speech activity);  in the broad development of associative lexicography, which will meet the most diverse needs of society and cognitive sciences. The development of associative lexicography may lead to the emergence of such disciplines as associative typology, associative variantology, associative axiology;  in expanding the spheres of applied use of psycholinguistics in social sciences, sociology, semasiology, lexicography, in the study of the brain, linguodidactics, medicine, etc. This book is a kind of summarizing result of the development of Russian psycholinguistics today. Each section provides a bibliography of studies on the relevant issue. The Appendix contains the scientometrics of leading Russian psycholinguists, basic monographs, psycholinguistic textbooks and dissertations defended in psycholinguistics. The content of the publications presented here is convincing evidence of the relevance of psycholinguistic topics and the effectiveness of the development of psycholinguistic problems in Russia.

This book is about media, mediation, and meaning. It focuses on a set of interrelated processes whereby seemingly human-specific modes of meaning become automated by machines, formatted by protocols, and networked by infrastructures—that is, the way computation replaces interpretation, information effaces meaning, and infrastructure displaces interaction. The book asks: what does it take to automate, format, and network meaningful practices; what difference does this make for those who engage in such practices; and what are the stakes? Reciprocally it questions how can we better understand computational processes from the standpoint of meaningful practices; how can we leverage such processes to better understand such practices; and what lies in wait. In answering these questions, this book stays very close to fundamental concerns of computer science as they emerged in the middle part of the twentieth century. Rather than foreground the latest application, technology, or interface, it tries to account for processes that underlie each and every digital technology being deployed today. And rather than use the tools of conventional social theory to investigate such technologies, it leverages key ideas of American pragmatism—a philosophical stance that understands the world, and our relation to it, in a way that avoids many of the conundrums and criticisms of twentieth-century social theory. It puts this stance in dialogue with certain currents and key texts in anthropology and linguistics, science and technology studies, critical theory, computer science, and media studies.