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Cognitive Semantics
Cognitive semantics is part of the cognitive linguistics movement. Semantics is the study of linguistic meaning. Cognitive semantics holds that language is part of a more general human Cognition, cognitive ability, and can therefore only describe the world as people conceive of it. It is implicit that different linguistic communities conceive of simple things and processes in the world differently (different cultures), not necessarily some difference between a person's conceptual world and the real world (wrong beliefs). The main tenets of cognitive semantics are: * That grammar manifests a conception of the world held in a culture; * That knowledge of language is acquired and contextual; * That the ability to use language draws upon general cognitive resources and not a special language module. Cognitive semantics has introduced innovations like prototype theory, conceptual metaphors, and Frame semantics (linguistics), frame semantics, and it is the linguistic paradigm/framework t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cognitive Linguistics
Cognitive linguistics is an interdisciplinary branch of linguistics, combining knowledge and research from cognitive science, cognitive psychology, neuropsychology and linguistics. Models and theoretical accounts of cognitive linguistics are considered as psychologically real, and research in cognitive linguistics aims to help understand cognition in general and is seen as a road into the human mind. There has been scientific and terminological controversy around the label "cognitive linguistics"; there is no consensus on what specifically is meant with the term. Background The roots of cognitive linguistics are in Noam Chomsky’s 1959 critical review of B. F. Skinner’s ''Verbal Behavior''. Chomsky's rejection of behavioural psychology and his subsequent anti-behaviourist activity helped bring about a shift of focus from empiricism to mentalism in psychology under the new concepts of cognitive psychology and cognitive science. Chomsky considered linguistics as a subfield ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Dirk Geeraerts
Dirk Geeraerts (born 24 October 1955) is a Belgian linguist. He is professor emeritus of theoretical linguistics at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, University of Leuven, Belgium. He is the founder of the research unit Quantitative Lexicology and Variational Linguistics (QLVL). His main research interests involve the overlapping fields of lexical semantics, lexicology, and lexicography, with a theoretical focus on cognitive semantics. His involvement with cognitive linguistics dates from the 1980s, when in his PhD thesis he was one of the first in Europe to explore the possibilities of a Prototype (linguistics), prototype-theoretical model of categorization. As the founder of the journal ''Cognitive Linguistics'' and as the editor (with Hubert Cuyckens) of the ''Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics'', he played an instrumental role in the international expansion of cognitive linguistics. Geeraerts is one of the outspoken advocates of the implementation of empirical methodolog ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Polysemy
Polysemy ( or ; ) is the capacity for a sign (e.g. a symbol, a morpheme, a word, or a phrase) to have multiple related meanings. For example, a word can have several word senses. Polysemy is distinct from ''monosemy'', where a word has a single meaning. Polysemy is distinct from homonymy—or homophony—which is an accidental similarity between two or more words (such as ''bear'' the animal, and the verb ''bear''); whereas homonymy is a mere linguistic coincidence, polysemy is not. In discerning whether a given set of meanings represent polysemy or homonymy, it is often necessary to look at the history of the word to see whether the two meanings are historically related. Dictionary writers often list polysemes (words or phrases with different, but related, senses) in the same entry (that is, under the same headword) and enter homonyms as separate headwords (usually with a numbering convention such as ''¹bear'' and ''²bear''). Polysemes A polyseme is a word or phrase wit ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cognitive Anthropology
Cognitive anthropology is an approach within cultural anthropology and biological anthropology in which scholars seek to explain patterns of shared knowledge, cultural innovation, and transmission over time and space using the methods and theories of the cognitive sciences (especially experimental psychology and cognitive psychology) often through close collaboration with historians, ethnographers, archaeologists, linguists, musicologists, and other specialists engaged in the description and interpretation of cultural forms. Cognitive anthropology is concerned with what people from different groups know and how that implicit knowledge, in the sense of what they think subconsciously, changes the way people perceive and relate to the world around them. History Cognitive anthropology arose as part of efforts designed to understand the relationship between language and thought, with linguistic anthropologists of North America in the 1950s spearheading the effort to approach cognitio ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cognitive Psychology
Cognitive psychology is the scientific study of mental processes such as attention, language use, memory, perception, problem solving, creativity, and reasoning. Cognitive psychology originated in the 1960s in a break from behaviorism, which held from the 1920s to 1950s that unobservable mental processes were outside the realm of empirical science. This break came as researchers in linguistics and cybernetics, as well as applied psychology, used models of mental processing to explain human behavior. Work derived from cognitive psychology was integrated into other branches of psychology and various other modern disciplines like cognitive science, linguistics, and economics. The domain of cognitive psychology overlaps with that of cognitive science, which takes a more interdisciplinary approach and includes studies of non-human subjects and artificial intelligence. History Philosophically, ruminations on the human mind and its processes have been around since the times of the a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Open Sentence
An open formula is a formula that contains at least one free variable. An open formula does not have a truth value assigned to it, in contrast with a closed formula which constitutes a proposition and thus can have a truth value like ''true'' or ''false''. An open formula can be transformed into a closed formula by applying quantifiers or specifying of the domain of discourse of individuals for each free variable denoted x, y, z....or x1, x2, x3.... This transformation is called capture of the free variables to make them bound variables, bound to a domain of individual constants. For example, when reasoning about natural numbers, the formula "''x''+2 > ''y''" is open, since it contains the free variables ''x'' and ''y''. In contrast, the formula " ∃''y'' ∀''x'': ''x''+2 > ''y''" is closed, and has truth value ''true''. An example of closed formula with truth value ''false'' involves the sequence of Fermat numbers :F_ = 2^ + 1, studied by Fermat in connection to the primality ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Interlocutor (linguistics)
In linguistics, discourse analysis, and related fields, an interlocutor is a person involved in a conversation or dialogue. Two or more people speaking to one another are each other's interlocutors. The terms ''conversation partner'', ''hearer'', or ''addressee'' are often used interchangeably with ''interlocutor''. According to Paul Grice, the behavior of interlocutors in ordinary conversation is governed by the cooperative principle. See also *Addressee honorific *Clusivity *Common ground (linguistics) *Conversation analysis *Discourse Discourse is a generalization of the notion of a conversation to any form of communication. Discourse is a major topic in social theory, with work spanning fields such as sociology, anthropology, continental philosophy, and discourse analysis. ... References Linguistics Pragmatics {{ling-stub ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Intension
In any of several fields of study that treat the use of signs — for example, in linguistics, logic, mathematics, semantics, semiotics, and philosophy of language — an intension is any property or quality connoted by a word, phrase, or another symbol. In the case of a word, the word's definition often implies an intension. For instance, the intensions of the word ''plant'' include properties such as "being composed of cellulose", "alive", and "organism", among others. A '' comprehension'' is the collection of all such intensions. Overview The meaning of a word can be thought of as the bond between the ''idea the word means'' and the ''physical form of the word''. Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913) contrasts three concepts: # the ''signifier'' – the "sound image" or the string of letters on a page that one recognizes as the form of a sign # the ''signified'' – the meaning, the concept or idea that a sign expresses or evokes # the ''referent'' – the actu ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Extension (semantics)
In any of several fields of study that treat the use of signs — for example, in linguistics, logic, mathematics, semantics, semiotics, and philosophy of language — the extension of a concept, idea, or sign consists of the things to which it applies, in contrast with its comprehension or intension, which consists very roughly of the ideas, properties, or corresponding signs that are implied or suggested by the concept in question. In philosophical semantics or the philosophy of language, the 'extension' of a concept or expression is the set of things it extends to, or applies to, if it is the sort of concept or expression that a single object by itself can satisfy. Concepts and expressions of this sort are monadic or "one-place" concepts and expressions. So the extension of the word "dog" is the set of all (past, present and future) dogs in the world: the set includes Fido, Rover, Lassie, Rex, and so on. The extension of the phrase "Wikipedia reader" includes each person ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Propositional Function
In propositional calculus, a propositional function or a predicate is a sentence expressed in a way that would assume the value of true or false, except that within the sentence there is a variable (''x'') that is not defined or specified (thus being a free variable), which leaves the statement undetermined. The sentence may contain several such variables (e.g. ''n'' variables, in which case the function takes ''n'' arguments). Overview As a mathematical function, ''A''(''x'') or ''A''(''x'', ''x'', ..., ''x''), the propositional function is abstracted from predicates or propositional forms. As an example, consider the predicate scheme, "x is hot". The substitution of any entity for ''x'' will produce a specific proposition that can be described as either true or false, even though "''x'' is hot" on its own has no value as either a true or false statement. However, when a value is assigned to ''x'' , such as lava, the function then has the value ''true''; while one assigns to ''x ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Donald Davidson (philosopher)
Donald Herbert Davidson (March 6, 1917 – August 30, 2003) was an American philosopher. He served as Slusser Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, from 1981 to 2003 after having also held teaching appointments at Stanford University, Rockefeller University, Princeton University, and the University of Chicago. Davidson was known for his charismatic personality and the depth and difficulty of his thought. His work exerted considerable influence in many areas of philosophy from the 1960s onward, particularly in philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, and action theory. While Davidson was an analytic philosopher, and most of his influence lies in that tradition, his work has attracted attention in continental philosophy as well, particularly in literary theory and related areas. Personal life Davidson was married three times. His first wife was the artist Virginia Davidson, with whom he had his only child, a daughter, Elizabeth (Davidson) Boyer ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Alfred Tarski
Alfred Tarski (, born Alfred Teitelbaum;School of Mathematics and Statistics, University of St Andrews ''School of Mathematics and Statistics, University of St Andrews''. January 14, 1901 – October 26, 1983) was a Polish-American logician and mathematician. A prolific author best known for his work on model theory, metamathematics, and algebraic logic, he also contributed to abstract algebra, topology, geometry, measure theory, mathematical logic, set theory, and analytic philosophy. Educated in Poland at the University of Warsaw, and a member of the Lwów–Warsaw school of logic and the Warsaw school of mathematics, he immigrated to the United States in 1939 where he became a naturalized citizen in 1945. Tarski taught and carried out research in mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley, from 1942 until his death in 1983. Feferman A. His biographers Anita Burdman Feferman and Solomon Feferman state that, "Along with his contemporary, Kurt Gödel, he cha ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
