Science topic

Linguistic Semantics - Science topic

Explore the latest questions and answers in Linguistic Semantics, and find Linguistic Semantics experts.
Questions related to Linguistic Semantics
  • asked a question related to Linguistic Semantics
Question
7 answers
Hi guys!
I have a question on a framing effect-like issue. Well, everyone of us has the immediate feeling that there's a huge difference between saying - for instance - "you should respect the environment" and "we should respect the environment", or also "the environment should be respected".
The difference might lie in how such sentences are interpreted by our minds and of course it affects the compliance to the described behavior (i.e., "respect the environment").
I'm convinced that I'm no genius and there must be a huge literature behind such an effect; but I'm not skilled in these themes, so I'm calling for help. Any clues?
P.S.: I know that nudge units and behavioral interventions teams in general promote the "make it personal" magic recipe to increase compliance, but I wonder where such strategies come from. I'm particularly interested in understanding the differences between "you should /we should", that is how grammatical phrasing (i.e., switching the person in the phrase) affects the interpretation and the relative compliance.
thanks in advance for any help
all the best,
Alessandro
Relevant answer
Answer
(1) You should do X / (2) we should do X / (3) X should be done — note that this is about deontic utterances, which are performative. They have no truth value but have variable speech act force. That FORCE stems from the authority that backs up the speaker in context. In (1), the back up is, basically: "...because I say so!" = personal authority. In (2), there is a collective morality behind the speaker. And in (3), there is an appeal to rationality, so the speaker speaks in the name of what he thinks is best according to impersonal logics and knowledge.
  • asked a question related to Linguistic Semantics
Question
26 answers
Taxonomists,
What do you think about alternative systems of identification of species? Is DNA barcoding going to replace Linnaean binomial nomenclature? What are the advantages of a numeric system? Nomenclature is the topic of my dissertation and subject of my further research so I am interested in your opinions.
Tanya Kelley
Relevant answer
Answer
Dear Kelly
Even if we get universal marker one day, DNA barcoding will still remain a tool to aid Linnaean binomial nomenclature or Alpha Taxonomy. Dont get offended if I say, DNA barcode is just like the commercial barcode on the back of a toothpaste packet or tube, but it can't replace the name of the toothpaste on the front of the packet or tube.
  • asked a question related to Linguistic Semantics
  • asked a question related to Linguistic Semantics
Question
11 answers
This question comes from a simple observation that really puzzles me.
Constructions (in CxG) are defined as form-function pairings. My focus here is not so much on the function of constructions but rather on their form. If we take the ditransitive construction (as in I sent her a letter), for instance, it is often described to have the form in (1). However, in the literature, you also often find the form of the ditransitive construction to be discussed as in (2), as the ‘double-object’ construction.
(1) NP  V  NP  NP
(2) SUBJ  V  OBJ  OBJ2
The problem for me is that in (2), the 'form' of the ditransitive construction is not described in terms of syntactic properties (such as ‘NP’), but in terms of functional properties (an object is a function, not a form). So my question is simple: why use the description in (2), a semantic/functional description, instead of the description in (1) to talk about the formal properties of the ditransitive construction? Is there a particular purpose for using one instead of the other? Or is it simply because (1) might fail to properly differentiate the ditransitive construction from other syntactic patterns? (e.g. They elected him president, also an <NP V NP NP> pattern, yet supposedly instantiating a different (resultative?) construction) And in the latter case, is that not a problem for the theory?
These questions may have to do with the syntax/semantics interface, but should CxG therefore not address these questions more explicitely?
Relevant answer
Answer
Hi Benoît,
Yes, it's true that (2), SUBJ V OBJ OBJ2, looks less formal and more functional than (1), NP V NP NP. However, just because 'Subject', 'Direct Object', etc. are often referred to as grammatical 'functions', this doesn't mean that we can truly see them as (purely) 'functional' or semantic. Rather, as I know you know, the semantic aspect of the ditransitive construction is formulated in terms of, in the prototypical case, thematic roles such as 'agent', 'recipient' and 'patient'/'theme', and Jackendovian primitives such as CAUSE and RECEIVE. 
Besides, 'SUBJ' etc. may capture more cases than just 'NP', the latter being only a typical but not the exclusive way in which subjects can be instantiated. The subject in the ditransitive construction could also be a clause: 
(3) [That Trump is now the President of the US] gives [many people] [a headache].
Likewise, OBJ2 could also be a clause:
(4) [The teacher] told [the pupils] [that they would go on a picnic].
That is why it's preferable, perhaps, to formulate the syntactic side of argument structure constructions in terms of grammatical functions rather than phrase-structure categories (maximal projections). Another advantage is the one you mention, namely that there might be semantically different constructions, notably the one instantiated by e.g.They elected him president, share the same (preferential) phrase structure categories as the ditransitive.
Finally, and related to this, by labelling the elements as 'SUBJ', '(Indirect) OBJ', etc., we have a more precise of how these constituents behave syntactically. For instance, we know that the element labelled as a (Direct) Object (i.e. OBJ2) might quite likely be used as the SUBJ in a corresponding passive sentence, something which is not the case for the second post-verbal NP in the construction we find in They elected him president:
(5) That they would go on a picnic was told to the pupils.
(6) *President was elected to him.
So, labels such as 'SUBJ', 'OBJ', etc. are quite formal things after all. They just name different aspects of 'form' or 'syntax' than labels such as 'NP' do.
  • asked a question related to Linguistic Semantics
Question
4 answers
Hello,
I am looking for a suitable estimate of semantic similarity (between two words) which is based on comparison of two binary vectors (each word has a vector of "0s" and "1s" where each 0 or 1 represents association or dissociation with/from a semantic feature).
E.g. (the 10 columns represent 10 semantic features)
Word A: 0-0-0-0-0-1-1-1-1-1
Word B: 0-1-1-0-0-0-0-1-1-1
The problem with the common metrics (such a correlation) is that if the both words are dissociated from a feature (e.g. first column = 0 for both), this is counted as "match", so the similarity is increased. An extreme case, if the two vectors are composed of 0s only, the correlation is r = 1 even thou there is no overlapping semantic feature.
So, I would need a measure of similarity that increases with matching features (a column for both words is 1),decreases with mismatching features (one word has 1 and the other 0 in a column or vice versa), and does nothing when both words do not match to a semantic feature (two 0s).
Thank you for any advice!
Martin
Relevant answer
Answer
Hi Martin,
It looks like you're describing the dot product (or inner product) of binary vectors as the measure of similarity (in your answer to Chris), and that the Manhattan distance (aka l_1 distance) could serve as the measure of dissimilarity.
--John
  • asked a question related to Linguistic Semantics
Question
2 answers
Hi everyone,
I am currently stuggling with finding an appropriate English word for what I am trying to say.
I want to investigate whether the antecedents and consequences of a certain construct change over time (e.g., some antecedents become insignficant, the effect of the construct on a consequence increases over time, etc.).
I am currently using the term "nomological network" for it, but it seems that this term is more tied to the measurement of the particular construct.
So I wonder whether I could use this term or if not, which term seems more suitable? conceptual framework? theoretical framework? conceptual network?
Looking forward to your advice!
Best,
Matthias
Relevant answer
Answer
Dear Luisa,
thank you, this website is exactly the source I got my info from.
However, since I still have no better term, I will continue to use it.
Best,
Matthias
  • asked a question related to Linguistic Semantics
Question
3 answers
I want to use the semantic feature for sarcasm analysis in Hindi text. Can anyone give an example and explain to me how I can use it?
  • asked a question related to Linguistic Semantics
Question
4 answers
Would look something like this:  σ˙κ
Relevant answer
Answer
P.S. The Church Slavonic ms. is written in Old Cyrillic. The Church Slavonic liturgical texts were translations from a fairly late Greek source (9th-cen., probably), and many Bulgarian scribes knew Greek well.
  • asked a question related to Linguistic Semantics
Question
9 answers
I'm currently trying to construct a philosophical paper that proves/disproves that  the meaning of source text and the meaning of translated text is retained or still has the same meaning despite the inevitable 'loss' in the translation process. I'm currently looking for articles or philosophers that denies the notion that meaning is retained and claims that the source text and translated text are different from each other OR that even though the translator is successful in interpreting and translating meaning the two texts are still essentially 'different'.
Relevant answer
Answer
Modern philosophy and, more importantly, experimental psychology have discarded the proposition that an untranslated work imparts any specific meaning to all who read it.
Reading itself is a translation process. One in which any initial meaning generated by the process of reading will not be retained beyond certain elements that receive great attention after a certain amount of time. In many cases the "certain amount of time" is the test on the reading. Fully voluntary reading is much more variable.
A reader also will not generate the same meaning from the same reading material upon additional readings. The overlap will depend on duration between readings, but immediate re-reading is not necessarily the best way to retain information.
As for readings of translations, you would have another level of information intermediating between the reader and the original author. An important element is the skill of the translator. But what holds true for reading holds true for translating: a translator will probably not produce the same translation from the same text at two different times.
However, I'm curious as to why you think that there can be philosophical "proof" of these things. The way to find out how similar translations are to their originals is to test how real live people read the texts. If you want to know how language functions, you investigate language use. It's not hard. People talk all the time. If you're at a university, there's frequently a captive audience who must do these sorts of things for course credit. If not, small amounts of money can serve as inducements.
Best of all, when you approach the problem in this way, you really have to think about what kind of evidence you would need to answer your question in a satisfactory manner, and what methods you would need to use to obtain that evidence. What does the term "meaning" mean? Can the issue of the meaning of translated texts be addressed coherently and productively without a firm understanding of how textual meaning functions in response to non-translated texts?
Or you could go with the bureaucratic approach. Under EU law, translations of EU regulations must be made in all main languages of the member nations (this will happen very quickly for the large nations, while Malta and Cyprus can wait, and you will have to accept French and Spanish even if you want Basque or Corsican). These translations must be accepted as fully equivalent to each other, i.e., the translations must have the same meaning for legal purposes.
So try poking around for the documents the EU uses to validate its translation process. Here we're dealing with the rights and responsibilities of almost 500 million people. I'd go with what they've worked out as a source of information before I'd go with what any philosopher had to say about language.
Because the problem is that the philosophers who addressed language in the late 19th to mid 20th century got to the point where they had addressed the range of possibilities. At this point, in academia, cognitive psychologists used the work of people like Quine and Wittgenstein as resources for examining how people use language. In government and policy, the United Nations and the entities that became the EU dealt with the practical issue of providing equivalent translations of large amounts of information into multiple languages. And, on a level of totally reshaping the world for billions of people, computer scientists and engineers created technologies based on their understanding of the works of these philosophers. Philosophy gives ways to ask questions, but does not give ways to answer them. When your question is "How do we break the code used by the German military before our nation is bombed and starved to death?" you really need an answer.
But whatever you do, the thing you really need to think about is time, even if you aren't being bombed. If you are asking about the impact of reading a text, for any reason, you are asking a question about memory. And memory generally involves forgetting almost everything you ever do. There is indeed an "inevitable loss" to memory for all things, translated or not. So at what point in time after a person has read a text will their knowledge of the meaning of the text be tested? A static notion of meaning is meaningless.
  • asked a question related to Linguistic Semantics
Question
30 answers
Suggest some background literature.
Relevant answer
Answer
Howdy, all,
   No one has mentioned the old Italian pun, "traductore, tradittore" (translator, traitor). I recall a comment by an interpreter at the UN on interpreting a speech by Kruschev. When he told a traditional Russian story to illustrate a point, the interpreter realized that the story would make no sense to English hearers, so he quickly realized this and substituted a completely different story which would be familiar and make the same point. 
  Research has shown that, even at a literal level, different languages "pack" different kinds of information in, for example, verbs. Both English and Spanish have a general verb of motion, "go"/"ir", but Spanish has a verb "salir", which would be translated by the Verb + Particle combination "go out", which separates the motion and direction. Translations of novels from English to Spanish and vice-versa show differences in the amount of information omitted or added. 
  Even in technical translation, people working in a field have standard expressions which a translator unfamiliar with the field would be unfamiliar with. A professional translator hired by an archeology journal to translate article summaries into Spanish produced odd literal translations because she was unfamiliar with the field. Literary translation, of course, is vastly more complex because it includes a great deal of cultural and emotional content, and poetry in particular requires a complete re-casting. I have heard it said that the English translation of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam is better than the original. 
  Pedagogically, translation provides an important "boot-strapping" which speeds access into the target language. Learning a second language in a school setting can be likened to gaining familiarity with another country and its culture by looking at pictures in a book, or reading descriptions. Only by gradual steps does one gain greater sociolinguistic and cultural knowledge, but only living in the other country gives one the experiential and existential sensibility for deeper knowledge. (Even then, of course, no one can ever become a complete native of a second culture.) All second language learners necessarily begin with translation, overt or covert, until their linguistic competence reaches the point at which they can use the L2 without conscious awareness, but even then, psycholinguistic research shows that the L1 is being activated, suggesting that translation is still taking place subliminally.
   Rudy Troike
   University of Arizona
   Tucson, Arizona, USA
  • asked a question related to Linguistic Semantics
Question
2 answers
Inspired by something I read from Diana Deutsch, I'd like to see if the same word, articulated by African tone language speakers but separated by a period of time (say two weeks), will have the same F0 profile.
If you are a speaker of an African tone language, and is willing to provide some recordings for me, please write to me at lianhee@hkbu.edu.hk. I shall share with you my findings for some other languages too as soon as I am done with the experiment. Forgive me for not being able to provide more details at the moment since that would spoil the game.
Many thanks in advance.
Lian-Hee
  • asked a question related to Linguistic Semantics
Question
2 answers
If would be grateful to anyone who has some data on hypocoristics in Tashlhiyt Berber (or any other variety). I need examples like 3blq (< Abdelqader), bihi (<Brahim).
Many thanks
Relevant answer
Answer
Thanks Susanne. I will. I am also native Berber but I found only a few examples on this phenomenon.
  • asked a question related to Linguistic Semantics
Question
5 answers
I need to implement n-gram language model to calculate information content for semantic similarity. I found some corpus like AQUAINT-2 and NICIR-8. But these are not freely available. 
Relevant answer
Answer
The most famous one is the Reuters-21578:
and the RCV1:
There are others in the second link, they are free but you need to fill an agreement form to ask for them.
We used the first data set for several experiments in the attached papers.
  • asked a question related to Linguistic Semantics
Question
3 answers
Hi - I need some open source tools for complex text semantic analysis and co referencing.
OpenNLP fails to perform co referencing if text is long. What algorithm is used for co-referencing?
Thanks
Relevant answer
Answer
Dear Satish,
It is possible to perform semantic text analysis. The approach consists in most cases to proceed by syntactic preprocessing step to reduce noise at the semantic comparison phase.
In addition to realize the semantic comparison, it would be appropriate to use an external resource such as dictionary or other language resource for determining what we call semantic equivalent. Thereafter, the comparison is that the crossing of the two sets considered as two bag words. 
There are several existing tools that have addressed this aspect, two of which are cited through the links below, you can even perform some word sense disambiguation treatments  :
  • asked a question related to Linguistic Semantics
Question
3 answers
Can someone please clarify English evaluative adjectives, adverbs, verbs and nouns? their semantis, classifications and lists of common ones
Relevant answer
Answer
Dear Yang,
The best way to check grammatical categories is to use test frames. For instance, a test frame like " It is very.........." can help identify the full range of gradable adjectives. I refer you to Radford (2013).
Best regards,
R. Biria
  • asked a question related to Linguistic Semantics
Question
2 answers
The central problem of language, the one that must be solved if human language is to emerge, is that relatively few linguistic patterns—such as words, syntactic patterns, and suprasegmental patterns—must be applicable to vast ranges of conceptual structure. Language must be available to be used in any and every situation.
Relevant answer
Answer
Dear Svetlana Pesina'
The question you have posed is a very interesting issue. Clearly, the theory offers insightful implications for understanding the complexities concerning the constitution of meaning in every day life encounters.In this operation, mental spaces are constructed for assembling double scope integration of selected inputs for regulating the interconnection between language and thought. According to generative theory of language, the syntactic component  mediates between the worlds of cognition and ideation via the semantic interface on the one hand and to the worlds of articulation and audition via the phonologic interface on the other hand. the specific nature of cultures and environments certainly particularizes the thinking patterns of the speakers so much so double-scope integration and thinking processes and language structures much depend on the context to which speakers belong. The works by John Lucy (2004) can be quite helpful. Good luck.
Best regards,
 R. Biria
  • asked a question related to Linguistic Semantics
Question
7 answers
In Basque when you say "five euros" you do not add the plural morpheme to the noun which follows the number, thus you say "bost euroØ" (i.e. five euro). In questions when you are asking the quantity, you do not need any plural marking either, e.g. "Zenbat etxeØ dago?" (i.e. "How many apple?"). I would like to know what languages share the same characteristics with Basque.
Relevant answer
Answer
A very interesting angle in these languages since in the context of many African languages. the plural form is attached to many other lexical items that go with the noun.
  • asked a question related to Linguistic Semantics
Question
17 answers
To semantically match two strings.
Example:
String 1: The book is on the table
String 2: The novel is on the desk
The two strings String 1 and String 2 have the same meaning. Thus match semantically.
Searching for an efficient way to implement the concept into a program. 
Relevant answer
Answer
Actually, they do not have the same extent in meaning.
Novel belongs to a subset of book, while desk and table belong to the same set of objects.
Books can be of many types, novels, biographies, etc.
With respect to books, desk and table belong to the set of objects that books can be put to rest on.
In semantics everything rests on the notion of relative sets and subsets, which is characteristics of all languages.
  • asked a question related to Linguistic Semantics
Question
5 answers
I'mresearching Enlgish noun phrases. I want to know the difference between first use and secondary use of noun phrase, and whether the secondary use is the predicative use of noun phrase.
Relevant answer
Answer
Dear Ningyuan,
I reckon the secondary  usage can indicate non-core, connotative, idiomatic, figurative, nonliteral applications. 
  • asked a question related to Linguistic Semantics
Question
12 answers
Colleagues,
  any suggestions on where I can download a Persian/Farsi monolingual corpus?  I want to do keyness testing--compare actual frequencies of words in a corpus of interest against expected frequencies from a reference corpus of general language.  The Tehran Monolingual Corpus seems like a good choice, but although I have written to the listed contact email address (hfaili@ut.ac.ir) I haven't gotten a response.  Thanks!
Relevant answer
Answer
William,
You can compile a web corpus (for almost any language) yourself by a tool called SpiderLing:
(There are also other useful corpus-related tools to be found at the site.)  I do not know for Farrsi, but for "large" langages you can expect to download as much as  billion tokens a day :-)
Best,
Vlado B, 10:25
  • asked a question related to Linguistic Semantics
Question
3 answers
I am making a research to create indexes that will contain names and other keywords. My resource texts are written in Greek polytonic characters. I think that it would be very useful to find a way to make them editable and searchable. Furthermore, in order to summarize and classify the information mined, I believe that a software with stylometry function is needed. For the above reasons I am looking for: a) OCR software, b) stylometry software.
Any kind of help will be greatly appreciated! Thank you!
Relevant answer
Answer
Hi, are you aware of the following open-source system?
I don't have any personal experience with the program but it seems it might worth a try. 
  • asked a question related to Linguistic Semantics
Question
11 answers
Some researchers assert that language ideologies precede language attitudes, and that language ideologies are the mother of language attitudes. Even, some go further to claim that what researchers are talking of as 'attitudes' are indeed ideologies. That's why, I'm wondering how the conceptual clarity between these concepts can be determined in scholarly discussions. 
Relevant answer
Hello Ali,
We have a text about ideology and discursive chain, where we discuss about  State as previous evidence to subject, as previous evidence to the struggle between two forces,as space, the ground for such struggle, so as to produce-reproduce subjects (and attitudes) as "natural" evidence.
The file is attached
Best regards,
Dionéia
  • asked a question related to Linguistic Semantics
Question
3 answers
I'm looking at gender differences in the use of African American English among adults in two narrative conditions: story-retelling and story generation. I need to determine if there are significant differences in the use of AAE features. Would Mann-Whitney U test be appropriate?
Relevant answer
Answer
The first task would be to specify and then quantify the salient or key linguistic features and patterns known to be produced by other speakers of the dialect or variety being studied, in this instance African American English. Once the key linguistic features and patterns are identified, a Dialect Density Measure (DDM) can be calculated.  For additional information on coding these features in African American English, see Van Hofwegen, Janneke and Walt Wolfram. 2010. Coming of age in African American English: A longitudinal study. Journal of Sociolinguistics 14: 427-455.
The literature mentions 3 ways of calculating DDM.  They are: 1) number of utterances with one or more pattern divided by the total number of utterances produced by the speaker; 2) number of patterns produced by the speaker divided by the total number of utterances produced by the speaker; 3) number of patterns produced by the speaker divided by the total number of word produced by the speaker.
In an article "Methods for characterizing participants' nonmainstream dialect use in child language research" that appears in the Journal of Speech Lang Hearing Research. 2002 Jun;45(3):505-18, and focuses on dialect use in child language research Oetting & McDonald demonstrate that the 3 approaches are highly correlated.  
  • asked a question related to Linguistic Semantics
Question
30 answers
metonymy in the cognitive sense.
the relation between metaphor and metonymy.
the application of metomymy in our life.
Relevant answer
Answer
Hello Gabor,
What an interesting article! When I got to your example of wolf (Hung. farkas) being named for an important bodFy part, the tail, I was reminded of the Chinese system of measure words for nouns. Almost every noun in Chinese is enumerated by a so-called measure word. English uses some of the very same words, as "a sheet of paper" - Chinese also says "a sheet of paper", "a sheet of bed" for many things that are wide and flat. But what intrigued me was that a dog is measured in tails. "one tail of dog". We also have "a tail of snake", "a tail of river", etc. for things that are long and skinny.
I wonder what the relationship is between metonymy and such systems of enumeration. (Maybe none, but maybe something that goes deep into the way our brain makes sense of the world.)
For anyone who is interested in such things, many of the Niger-Congo languages (this includes the Bantu languages) do something that smacks me as similar. Each noun is put into one of (depending on the language, as many as 20 or more) noun classes. One of those classes is for long skinny (but especially long) objects, and into that class fall, yes, snakes, rivers, and many of the other things that are measured in tails in Chinese.
Coincidence? Maybe but maybe not. Has anyone studied such relationships?
Best, Martha
  • asked a question related to Linguistic Semantics
Question
7 answers
Relevant answer
Answer
Dear Dr. Cleary,
Derrida has always shown that the deconstruction affect any object of culture, and not only metaphysical texts. In fact, the late production of the philosopher applies deconstructive experience no longer exclusively to paper-based systems of the philosophical tradition, but also to the historical and conceptual ones close to us (at least apparently), right where the deconstructive movement find us unprepared: "gift" ,  '"hospitality", "forgiveness", up to the system which concerns and involves us all: "democracy".
Unfortunately, I have no plan to publish  on Derrida and metaphysics more formally.
Anyway I thank you for being so nice to me.
Best wishes, Gianrocco Tucci
  • asked a question related to Linguistic Semantics
Question
3 answers
It is in the context of Fiction analysis in systemic functional linguistics/grammar
Relevant answer
Answer
You may find my chapter "Deonstemic Modals in Legal Discourse: The Cognitive Semiotics of Layered Actions" (available in penultimate draft form on researchgate useful. Cognitive Linguistic approaches to modality and mood share many commitments with SFG.
  • asked a question related to Linguistic Semantics
Question
4 answers
"Every" involves downward entailment as "Every person is driving" entails "Every drunk person is driving". But why is it an entailment relationship between "Few people are driving" and "Few drunk people are driving"? Any intuitive explanation? 
Relevant answer
Answer
The ambiguity is a well described one in the semantic literature, typically referred to as the opposition between the weak, or cardinal, and the strong, or proportional interpretation of quantifiers. So in order to check the entailment relations you have to keep constant the type of interpretation, as well as the restriction. Switching from a generic kind of restriction (few people) to a narrowed one (few drunk people among the people who are driving) means you're no more looking for the entailingness of the same quantifier. The same if you switch from the weak interpretation to th strong or vice versa.
  • asked a question related to Linguistic Semantics
Question
3 answers
Hi everybody. 
Do you know or have corpora for chat summarization in English? The corpora should have a document with its human verse summary.
Relevant answer
  • asked a question related to Linguistic Semantics
Question
5 answers
I traied CLAN, TRANSCRIBER but it seems that are not working for arabic dialect.
Relevant answer
Answer
Dear Fetita,
I didn't come up with such a system that deals with Arabic dialectics. All research focus on classical Arabic language since all articles, news, ads, etc are written in the classical Arabic language. some dialectics word have the same Arabic characters but pronounced differently according to the dialectics.  Other words are synonyms that are used more frequent in a country than another country. As a result, any program will just replace the word with its synonym in the destination dialectics.
I hope this helps you. If you have specific research interest I may help you or find some one who can help.
kind regards 
  • asked a question related to Linguistic Semantics
Question
4 answers
Koptjevskaja-Tamm's "Action nominal constructions in the langauges of Europe" describes action nominals as being a parasite:
"ANC Universal 1: ANC a parasite
No language has syntactic means (dependent-marking, head-marking, word order) which are exclusively used in ANCs."
Are there other constructions that follow this definition? If so, what are they and is there more information on this category of a "parasite"?
Relevant answer
Answer
I'd advise you not to waste your time searching in Chomsky or any of the other luminaries mentioned. Better to do some thinking and some empirical research to see whether Koptjevskaya-Tamm's 'universal' has any content. She is writing in the framework of linguistic typology, which is concerned with attempting to generalize across languages. Try and imagine what is meant by 'syntactic means'. One syntactic means that is found in ANCs is the double occurrence of a possessive: "Iraqi's invasion of Kuwait", for example. If that is a "syntactic means", then it is one that only occurs in ANCs. But if you just take "possessive" to be a syntactic means, without counting the occurrences, then it occurs in ANC and in ordinary NP's like "Iraq's army". So I'm not sure that the universal is formulated clearly enough for anyone to be able to prove it or disprove it.
  • asked a question related to Linguistic Semantics
Question
6 answers
Harris who tutored Noam Chomsky was an avowed structuralist. However, Chomsky has made his own strong positions sometimes different from his mentor.  A lot of materials in the literature either support or discount this fact. What was his actual  attitude towards structuralism?  
Relevant answer
Answer
Generally, Chomsky suggests that the basic principles of any language are determined in the mind and that all human beings share the same principal linguistic structure, regardless of socio-cultural differences. For a starting point, see his Syntactic Structures and Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory (1955, 75).
  • asked a question related to Linguistic Semantics
Question
4 answers
In cognitive linguistics, natural languages are divided into three categories known as nouns (to-be), verbs (to-do), and modifiers. Therefore, the semantics of “to-do” structures in linguistics needs to be dealt with by suitable mathematical means such as behavioral process algebra and semantic algebra.
  • asked a question related to Linguistic Semantics
Question
1 answer
Me: a hard believer in linguistic analysis as a tool to discover why processes don't go the way we want them to go and presuming that there are a lot of taboos in talking business in OI (maybe to maintain 'face' (Goffman))
The work field: sees a lot of problems trying to get (potential) partners to speak up about their expectations and contributions in an OI collaboration, feels things can improve a lot in order to achieve a higher succes ratio for projects
The professor: things may not be that problematic and simple managerial skills and courses may solve, what is is essentially, a lack of assertiveness 
You: good references, sources, ideas that will support either of the three views
Thank you a lot for thinking along!
Relevant answer
Answer
I think there is a discrepancy between the concept of Open Innovation in economics and
in linguistic . Here, to my mind, is an interesting twisting of the very function of language. According to Jacobson's model the sentence " open innovation" has an informative function but Henry Chesbrough was able to transform its function into the aesthetic and consequently he literally objectified language and made it fulfill his aesthetic propaganda. Apart from concluding that Jacobson's model is flexible from the outside ( the user) ,this very instance proves that Heidegger was wrong. We are not prisoners of our own language-actually that are various instances where we can get out of the system and return very quickly. In other words we can leave the system for a short while but we are doomed to return to our prison. 
  • asked a question related to Linguistic Semantics
Question
50 answers
Whereas it is used as a term in the English-language scientific articles and monographs?
( Петров Р.В. Иммунология.  М.: Медицина 1987. 416 с.
Петров Р. В., Хаитов Р. М., Манько В. М., Михайлова А. А. Контроль и регуляция иммунного ответа. – М.: Медицина, 1981. – 312 с.
Хаитов  Р.М., Игнатьева Г.А., Сидорович И.Г.  Иммунология. 2-е изд., перераб. и доп. -М.: Медицина, 2002.-536 с.)
Relevant answer
Answer
Dr. Jan-Gert Nel! Yes. Therefore, the Academic (MD, Professor) RV Petrov
coined the term "non-specific resistance of the organism." It is widely used by researchers not only Russia, but also in other countries.
  Later (2000-2002) the Academic (MD, Professor) RM Khaitov offered less felicitous term "doimmunnye - (previous immunity) - biological mechanisms of resistance to infection." This term is rarely used.
  • asked a question related to Linguistic Semantics
Question
4 answers
Is syntactic analysis merely sufficient?
What are the roles of semantic analysis and synthesis?
Relevant answer
Answer
The notion that we understand natural language primarily on the basis of syntax is flawed. When interacting with nonnative speakers of English, for example, a native speaker will to a significant degree ignore the syntax (for it is often incorrect) and focus on intention and meaning.
  • asked a question related to Linguistic Semantics
Question
18 answers
I am trying to find a semantic database (preferably in Dutch) that yields semantic similarities between words. I know the Latent Semantic Analysis Boulder online tool can do this, but the results ( at least using only single terms with the Matrix option), are sometimes really weird, and don't follow common sense ("shoe" is linked stronger than "key" with "door"). Does anyone know about any alternatives?
Relevant answer
Answer
While wordnet is built by hand and has sometimes a strong focus on biology, uni-leipzig wortschatz is an unsupervised (i.e. Automatic) system that builds up from automatically crawled data.
  • asked a question related to Linguistic Semantics
Question
3 answers
Seeking formal models of cognitive linguistics.
Relevant answer
Answer
According to semantic algebra [Wang. 2013] and cognitive linguistics [Wang & Berwick, 2012], any sentence expressed in a natural language is either:
- A semantic equivalence (to-be |=): S |= O
or
- A behavioral denotation (to-do |>): S |> P(O)
where P is a behavioral process, S subject, O object, and P(O) denotes a behavior P applied on O.
Any complex sentences can be treated as a composition of the “to-be” and “to-do” semantics in cognitive linguistics.
  • asked a question related to Linguistic Semantics
Question
2 answers
Support for arabic language
Relevant answer
Answer
Salem Hussein,
I don't see what you mean by technique !
If you mean the approaches for modeling the language, I think there is three of them : knowledge-based, stochastic and artificial intelligence approach.
In my knowledge, the NLP for arabic language is still in its beginning. So we can find research works in different approaches.
You can see the recent arabic NLP of Nizar Habash : Habash 2010, N. Y. Habash, Introduction to arabic natural language processing, Synthesis lectures on humain language technologies, ISBN: 9781598297959 paperback ISBN: 9781598297966 ebook, Morgan & Claypool, USA 2010
  • asked a question related to Linguistic Semantics
Question
6 answers
I am investigating polysemy using semantic priming paradigms. Usually, context words appear before a prime word, biasing its interpretation (between alternative senses). However I would like to use a context word after the prime, and before target. Do you know any experiments like this?
Relevant answer
Answer
If you haven't done so yet, do have a look at Klein & Murphy (2001, JML), Foraker & Murphy (2012, JML), and Klepousniotou, Titone, & Romero (2008, JEP: LMC).
Best of luck,
Steven
  • asked a question related to Linguistic Semantics
Question
13 answers
I'm collecting essays written by Chinese and British students to compare the cohesion structures and linguistic features of these written productions. The problem is it's hard to find essays with similar topics written by both Chinese and British college students. So, can I ignore the limitation of the topics and collect essays with different topics?
Relevant answer
Answer
I agree with Gary and Zahra - the topic is not importantbut the genre should be the same. Maybe not even the same departmental field, but certainly the same faculty.