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82 books match the query 'Semantics' and 6 start with l

cover of Language Files: Materials for an Introduction to Language and Linguistics, 13th Edition

Language Files

Materials for an Introduction to Language and Linguistics, 13th Edition

The Ohio State University Department of Linguistics

The Ohio State University Press, 2022

Language Files has become one of the most widely adopted, consulted, and authoritative introductory textbooks to linguistics ever written. The scope of the text makes it suitable for use in a wide range of courses, while its unique organization into student-friendly, self-contained sections allows for tremendous flexibility in course design. 
 
The thirteenth edition has been revised, clarified, and updated throughout to ensure that it remains the most comprehensive and accessible introductory linguistics textbook on the market. The revised chapter on morphology includes a more thorough discussion of allomorphy and adds sections on templatic morphology, suprasegmental morphology, and morphological metathesis to give students a more complete picture of all morphological phenomena. The chapter on language and computers has been updated with new sections on deep learning, artificial neural networks, and on other areas of computational linguistics, providing readers with a better sense of current research and applications in this rapidly developing field. Other additions include new sections on syntactic non-constituents and non-generative rule systems in the syntax chapter and a complete rewrite to the creole languages file in the language contact chapter. We have also adopted the use of the singular they when referring to a generic person whose gender is unknown or irrelevant. Exercises and lists of other readings have been updated throughout.
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cover of Language and the Rise of the Algorithm

Language and the Rise of the Algorithm

Jeffrey M. Binder

University of Chicago Press, 2022

A wide-ranging history of the algorithm.

Bringing together the histories of mathematics, computer science, and linguistic thought, Language and the Rise of the Algorithm reveals how recent developments in artificial intelligence are reopening an issue that troubled mathematicians well before the computer age: How do you draw the line between computational rules and the complexities of making systems comprehensible to people? By attending to this question, we come to see that the modern idea of the algorithm is implicated in a long history of attempts to maintain a disciplinary boundary separating technical knowledge from the languages people speak day to day.
 
Here, Jeffrey M. Binder offers a compelling tour of four visions of universal computation that addressed this issue in very different ways: G. W. Leibniz’s calculus ratiocinator; a universal algebra scheme Nicolas de Condorcet designed during the French Revolution; George Boole’s nineteenth-century logic system; and the early programming language ALGOL, short for algorithmic language. These episodes show that symbolic computation has repeatedly become entangled in debates about the nature of communication. Machine learning, in its increasing dependence on words, erodes the line between technical and everyday language, revealing the urgent stakes underlying this boundary.
 
The idea of the algorithm is a levee holding back the social complexity of language, and it is about to break. This book is about the flood that inspired its construction.

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cover of Lessons from a Quechua Strongwoman: Ideophony, Dialogue, and Perspective

Lessons from a Quechua Strongwoman

Ideophony, Dialogue, and Perspective

Janis B. Nuckolls

University of Arizona Press, 2010

Using the intriguing stories and words of a Quechua-speaking woman named Luisa Cadena from the Pastaza Province of Ecuador, Janis B. Nuckolls reveals a complex language system in which ideophony, dialogue, and perspective are all at the core of cultural and grammatical communications among Amazonian Quechua speakers.

This book is a fascinating look at ideophones—words that communicate succinctly through imitative sound qualities. They are at the core of Quechua speakers’ discourse—both linguistic and cultural—because they allow agency and reaction to substances and entities as well as beings. Nuckolls shows that Luisa Cadena’s utterances give every individual, major or minor, a voice in her narrative. Sometimes as subtle as a barely felt movement or unintelligible sound, the language supports an amazingly wide variety of voices.

Cadena’s narratives and commentaries on everyday events reveal that sound imitation through ideophones, representations of dialogues between humans and nonhumans, and grammatical distinctions between a speaking self and an other are all part of a language system that allows for the possibility of shared affects, intentions, moral values, and meaningful, communicative interactions between humans and nonhumans.
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cover of Lexical Semantics in LFG

Lexical Semantics in LFG

Edited by Miriam Butt and Tracy Holloway King

CSLI, 2006

Available for the first time in years, Lexical Semantics in LFG is a reissue of the groundbreaking "Papers in Lexical Functional Grammar." It spans a diverse range of topics, including Italian unaccusatives, Malayalam causatives, derived nominals, resultatives, and non-nominative subjects in Icelandic. With its emphasis on representations of lexical semantic information that allow operations on predicate-argument relations and grammatical relations to be independent of structural configurations, the text will be of interest to both scholars and students of linguistics.
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cover of Linguistic Individuals

Linguistic Individuals

Almerindo E. Ojeda

CSLI, 1993

The goal of semantics is the insightful identification of the set of meanings that human language can express- the contruction of what has been called the metaphysics of natural language. A formal attempt to contruct such a metaphysics has generally involved identifying a set of individuals referred to as the universe of discourse. Until recently, however, semanticists have had little to say about the structure of this set. Ojeda argues that the structure of the set of linguistic individuals is a mereology, that is, the domain of discourse is made up of kinds and the instantiations of kinds. His argument forms the four main slections of this work. The first examines the semantics of countability (countable stems, number inflection, adjectives of measure, and determiners); the second explores the semantics of uncountability (the individuation of reference, and non-Boolean mass predicates); the third takes up the semantics of nominality (the mereological homogenetiy of mouns and the constraints on nouns in classifier languages); and the last investigates the semantics of the conceptional neauter, a pronominal category discussed by Otto Jesperson. Ojeda's investigations contribute to the characterization of linguistiv individuals and proide for a new basis for the semantics of individuation. Almerindo E. Ojeda is a professor of linguistics at the University of California at Davis. Center for the Study of Language and Information- Lecture Notes, Number 7
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cover of Linking by Types in the Hierarchical Lexicon

Linking by Types in the Hierarchical Lexicon

Anthony R. Davis

CSLI, 2001

Actions are described by verbs whose subjects, objects, and other complements refer to various participants in those actions. What linguistic principles determine which participants are referred to by each component of a verb?

Many previous approaches to this problem have employed a set of thematic roles, such as agent and patient, to classify varieties of participants. The alternative developed here fits within the framework of Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar while utilizing typed feature structures, certain basic features of verb meaning, a hierarchical classification of verb meanings, and constraints from more general to more specific word classes. Relying on no special mechanisms or components of grammar, this book is unique in its ability to account for the observed range of verb types in human languages with a simple yet widely applicable set of principles.
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