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82 books match the query 'Semantics' and 8 start with c

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Cicero, Catullus, and the Language of Social Performance

Brian A. Krostenko

University of Chicago Press, 2001

Charm, wit, and style were critical, but dangerous, ingredients in the social repertoire of the Roman elite. Their use drew special attention, but also exposed one to potential ridicule or rejection for valuing style over substance. Brian A. Krostenko explores the complexities and ambiguities of charm, wit, and style in Roman literature of the late Republic by tracking the origins, development, and use of the terms that described them, which he calls "the language of social performance."

As Krostenko demonstrates, a key feature of this language is its capacity to express both approval and disdain—an artifact of its origins at a time when the "style" and "charm" of imported Greek cultural practices were greeted with both enthusiasm and hostility. Cicero played on that ambiguity, for example, by chastising lepidus ("fine") boys in the "Second Oration against Catiline" as degenerates, then arguing in his De Oratore that the successful speaker must have a certain charming lepos ("wit"). Catullus, in turn, exploited and inverted the political subtexts of this language for innovative poetic and erotic idioms.

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Color and Cognition in Mesoamerica

Constructing Categories as Vantages

By Robert E. MacLaury

University of Texas Press, 1996

More than 100 indigenous languages are spoken in Mexico and Central America. Each language partitions the color spectrum according to a pattern that is unique in some way. But every local system of color categories also shares characteristics with the systems of other Mesoamerican languages and of languages elsewhere in the world.

This book presents the results of the Mesoamerican Color Survey, which Robert E. MacLaury conducted in 1978-1981. Drawn from interviews with 900 speakers of some 116 Mesoamerican languages, the book provides a sweeping overview of the organization and semantics of color categorization in modern Mesoamerica.

Extensive analysis and MacLaury's use of vantage theory reveal complex and often surprising interrelationships among the ways languages categorize colors. His findings offer valuable cross-cultural data for all students of Mesoamerica. They will also be of interest to all linguists and cognitive scientists working on theories of categorization more generally.

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Complex Predicates in Japanese

A Syntactic and Semantic Study of the Notion 'Word'

Yo Matsumoto

CSLI, 1996

In this thoroughly revised version of 1992 Stanford dissertation, the author presents an extensive discussion of Japanese complex predicates. A broad range of constructions and predicates are discussed, which include predicative complement constructions, light verbs, causative predicates, desiderative predicates, syntactic and lexical compound verbs, and complex motion predicates. A number of new interesting facts are uncovered, and a detailed syntactic and semantic analyses are presented. On the basis of the analyses, the author argues that the notion 'word' must be relativized to at least three different senses: morphological, grammatical (functional), and semantic; and that this observation can be insightfully captured in the theory of Lexical-Functional Grammar. Previous proposals for each type of predicate that involve such mechanisms as argument transfer, incorporation, restructuring, etc. are thoroughly reviewed. Concrete proposals on the constraints on semantic wordhood are also made (an issue rarely discussed in the literature), drawing insights from cognitive linguistics.

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Conceptual Structure, Discourse and Language

Edited by Adele Goldberg

CSLI, 1996

This collection of papers is the outcome of the first Conceptual Structure, Discourse and Language conference (CSDL) held at the University of Califronia, San Diego in October 1995. CSDL was organized with the intention of bringing together researchers from both "cognitive" and "functional" approaches to linguistics. The papers in this volume span a variety of topics, but there is a common thread running through them: the claim that semantics and discourse properties are fundamental to our understanding of language.

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Constraint-Based Syntax and Semantics

Papers in Honor of Danièle Godard

Edited by Anne Abeille and Olivier Bonami

CSLI, 2018

This volume is devoted to the syntax and semantics of various languages, studied with models based on constraints. Both French and international linguists present their work in tribute to Danièle Godard, emeritus research director at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique in France, a member of the Laboratoire de Linguistique Formelle at Université Paris Diderot, and a specialist in the syntax and semantics of French and Romance languages.

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Constraints and Resources in Natural Language Syntax and Semantics

Edited by Gosse Bouma, Erhard Hinrichs, Geert-Jan M. Kruijff, and Richard Oehrle

CSLI, 1999

This collection draws together recent work on constraint-based and resource-sensitive approaches to the grammar of natural languages. Some of the issues addressed are: extraction phenomena in a range of languages, the syntax of nominal phrases, the role of argument structure, defining the interface between syntax and morphology and between semantics and prosody, quantifier scope, remnant movement, construction grammar, and formal and computational aspects of grammar formalisms. This volume brings together the leading linguists, logicians, and computer scientists working on Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar and Categorial Grammar. Derived from two recent conferences on Formal Grammar and Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar in Aix (1997) and Saarbrücken (1998), this volume represents the most current work in these frameworks.

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Constructions

A Construction Grammar Approach to Argument Structure

Adele E. Goldberg

University of Chicago Press, 1995

Drawing on work in linguistics, language acquisition, and computer science, Adele E. Goldberg proposes that grammatical constructions play a central role in the relation between the form and meaning of simple sentences. She demonstrates that the syntactic patterns associated with simple sentences are imbued with meaning—that the constructions themselves carry meaning independently of the words in a sentence.

Goldberg provides a comprehensive account of the relation between verbs and constructions, offering ways to relate verb and constructional meaning, and to capture relations among constructions and generalizations over constructions. Prototypes, frame semantics, and metaphor are shown to play crucial roles. In addition, Goldberg presents specific analyses of several constructions, including the ditransitive and the resultative constructions, revealing systematic semantic generalizations.

Through a comparison with other current approaches to argument structure phenomena, this book narrows the gap between generative and cognitive theories of language.

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Cultural Semantics

Keywords of Our Time

Martin Jay

University of Massachusetts Press, 1998

A selection of Martin Jay's recent writings on contemporary thought and culture, this is a book about ideas that matter—and about why ideas matter. Borrowing from Flaubert's notion of a dictionary of “received ideas” and Raymond Williams's explorations of the “keywords” of the modern age, Jay investigates some of the central concepts by which we currently organize our thoughts and lives. His topics range from “theory” and “experience” to the meaning of “multiculturalism” and the dynamics of cultural “subversion.” Among the thinkers he engages are Bataille and Foucault, Adorno and Lacoue-Labarthe, Walter Benjamin, Christa Wolf, and Jean-François Lyotard.

By looking closely at what “words do and perform,” Jay makes us aware of the extent to which the language we use mediates and shapes our experience. By helping to distance us from much that we now take for granted, he makes it difficult for us to remain comfortably certain about what we think we know.

Elegantly written and richly insightful, this is a work of cultural criticism and intellectual analysis of the first order.

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