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The Semantics of Plurals, Focus, Degrees, and Times: Essays in Honor of Roger Schwarzschild
by Daniel Altshuler Jessica RettThis volume is a tribute to Roger Schwarzschild's immense contributions in the formal semantics of nouns, focus, degrees and space, and tense and aspect. Collectively, the papers in the volume reveal parallels across ontological domains, in particular in the context of elements with internal structure, like plural sets, alternative sets, degree intervals, temporal intervals, and vectors. This research suggests that the structure of an entity could inform the semantic behavior of that entity just as much (if not more) than its semantic type or lexical category. And because these structures dictate the formation of semantic alternatives, it can help inform focus semantics and scalar implicature as well. Old questions on plurals, focus and degree expressions get new answers in this collection of papers in honor of Roger Schwarzchild. Roger Schwarzschild is one of the leading scholars in semantics, and the editors have been highly successful in requesting contributions by his teachers, peers and former students. Some papers have circulated in draft form for many years, and find their final home in this edited volume, which well reflects the state of the art in the field. Prof. dr. Henriëtte de Swart, Utrecht University, The Netherlands
The Semantics of the Future (Outstanding Dissertations in Linguistics)
by Bridget CopleyThis book builds a semantics for several kinds of future-referring expressions, including will sentences, be going to sentences, and futurates. While there exists previous work on future-referring expressions, this is the first treatment of such a variety of expressions in a formal semantic framework. Arguments presented herein explicate the meanings of these expressions, and account for similarities and differences among them. Shared is a future-oriented model with a systematic alternation between inertial and bouletic ordering sources that provide a new way of understanding the age-old future Law of the Excluded Middle, evident in all of the future-referring expressions. A difference found among these meanings is the presence or absence of progressive- or generic-like aspect in a position higher than the future modal. These very high aspectual operators affect the temporal argument of the modal's accessibility relation, with detectable effects that can be used to determine scope relations in future conditionals. Copley's analysis thus addresses a number of issues of great interest to formal semanticists, from modal and aspectual semantics, to the mapping of functional elements in the clause, to the logical form of conditionals.
Semantics, Tense, and Time: An Essay in the Metaphysics of Natural Language
by Peter LudlowOne of the central goals of this book is to illustrate how one can study metaphysical questions from a linguistic/semantical perspective. The specific issue that the author has chosen to investigate is the well-entrenched dispute between A-theorists and B-theorists about the nature of time.
Semantisch-konzeptuelle Vernetzungen im bilingualen mentalen Lexikon: Eine psycholinguistische Studie mit deutsch-türkischsprachigen Jugendlichen (Linguistik in Empirie und Theorie/Empirical and Theoretical Linguistics)
by Sebastian VeletićDas bilinguale mentale Lexikon weist eine komplexe netzwerkartige Struktur auf, die in diesem Buch theoretisch ergründet und empirisch untersucht wird. Sebastian Veletić diskutiert prominente Modelle des bilingualen mentalen Lexikons und entwirft auf der Grundlage eines deutsch-türkischen Bildbenennexperiments ein Modell des bilingualen mentalen Lexikons deutsch-türkischsprachiger Jugendlicher. Das Modell zeigt, wie deutsche und türkische Lexikoneinträge semantisch-konzeptuell miteinander vernetzt sind.
The Semblance of Identity: Aesthetic Mediation in Asian American Literature
by Christopher LeeThe history of Asian American literature reveals the ongoing attempt to work through the fraught relationship between identity politics and literary representation. This relationship is especially evident in literary works which claim that their content represents the socio-historical world. The Semblance of Identityargues that the reframing of the field as a critical, rather than identity-based, project nonetheless continues to rely on the logics of identity. Drawing on the writings of philosopher and literary critic Georg Lukacs, Christopher Lee identifies a persistent composite figure that he calls the "idealized critical subject," which provides coherence to oppositional knowledge projects and political practices. He reframes identity as an aesthetic figure that tries to articulate the subjective conditions for knowledge. Harnessing Theodor Adorno's notion of aesthetic semblance, Lee offers an alternative account of identity as a figure akin to modern artwork. Like art, Lee argues, identity provides access to imagined worlds that in turn wage a critique of ongoing histories and realities of racialization. This book assembles a transnational archive of literary texts by Eileen Chang, Frank Chin, Maxine Hong Kingston, Chang-rae Lee, Michael Ondaatje, and Jose Garcia Villa, revealing the intersections of subjectivity and representation, and drawing our attention to their limits.
Semi-Detached: The Aesthetics of Virtual Experience since Dickens
by John PlotzWhen you are half lost in a work of art, what happens to the half left behind? Semi-Detached delves into this state of being: what it means to be within and without our social and physical milieu, at once interacting and drifting away, and how it affects our ideas about aesthetics. The allure of many modern aesthetic experiences, this book argues, is that artworks trigger and provide ways to make sense of this oscillating, in-between place. John Plotz focuses on Victorian and early modernist writers and artists who understood their work as tapping into, amplifying, or giving shape to a suspended duality of experience.The book begins with the decline of the romantic tale, the rise of realism, and John Stuart Mill’s ideas about social interaction and subjective perception. Plotz examines Pre-Raphaelite paintings that take semi-detached states of attention as their subject and novels that treat provincial subjects as simultaneously peripheral and central. He discusses how realist writers such as Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Henry James show how consciousness can be in more than one place at a time; how the work of William Morris demonstrates the shifting forms of semi-detachment in print and visual media; and how Willa Cather created a form of modernism that connected aesthetic dreaming and reality. Plotz concludes with a look at early cinema and the works of Buster Keaton, who found remarkable ways to portray semi-detachment on screen.In a time of cyberdependency and virtual worlds, when it seems that attention to everyday reality is stretching thin, Semi-Detached takes a historical and critical look at the halfway-thereness that audiences have long comprehended and embraced in their aesthetic encounters.
Semi-Peripheral Realism: Nation and Form on the Borders of Europe (New Comparisons in World Literature)
by Christinna HazzardThis book explores the geopolitical and symbolic borders of Europe through the concept of the semi-periphery. Focusing on the North Atlantic island nations, Iceland and the Faroe Islands, and Turkey – a set of very different social and cultural landscapes – the book compares the semi-peripheral aesthetics of Halldór Laxness’s and William Heinesen’s novels with the semi-peripheral city and borderscapes in works by Orhan Pamuk and Latife Tekin. It offers new readings of texts such as Laxness’s The Atom Station and Pamuk’s Snow, and provides original readings of works that little has been written about in English, such as Heinesen’s The Black Cauldron and Tekin’s Swords of Ice. Making use of the theory of uneven and combined development and world systems theory, the book illustrates that the experience of nation-building and capitalist modernisation in the semi-periphery results in a particular realist aesthetic that is remarkably similar across different regional literatures. The book’s world-literary method shows that the semi-periphery constitutes a vital and productive area of study both for world literature and for broadening our understanding of colonialism and imperialism on the margins of continental Europe.
Semi-Supervised Dependency Parsing
by Wenliang Chen Min ZhangThis book presents a comprehensive overview of semi-supervised approaches to dependency parsing. Having become increasingly popular in recent years, one of the main reasons for their success is that they can make use of large unlabeled data together with relatively small labeled data and have shown their advantages in the context of dependency parsing for many languages. Various semi-supervised dependency parsing approaches have been proposed in recent works which utilize different types of information gleaned from unlabeled data. The book offers readers a comprehensive introduction to these approaches, making it ideally suited as a textbook for advanced undergraduate and graduate students and researchers in the fields of syntactic parsing and natural language processing.
Semicolon: The Past, Present, and Future of a Misunderstood Mark
by Cecelia Watson“Delightful.” —Mary Norris, The New YorkerA page-turning, existential romp through the life and times of the world’s most polarizing punctuation markThe semicolon. Stephen King, Hemingway, Vonnegut, and Orwell detest it. Herman Melville, Henry James, and Rebecca Solnit love it. But why? When is it effective? Have we been misusing it? Should we even care?In Semicolon, Cecelia Watson charts the rise and fall of this infamous punctuation mark, which for years was the trendiest one in the world of letters. But in the nineteenth century, as grammar books became all the rage, the rules of how we use language became both stricter and more confusing, with the semicolon a prime victim. Taking us on a breezy journey through a range of examples—from Milton’s manuscripts to Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letters from Birmingham Jail” to Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep—Watson reveals how traditional grammar rules make us less successful at communicating with each other than we’d think. Even the most die-hard grammar fanatics would be better served by tossing the rule books and learning a better way to engage with language.Through her rollicking biography of the semicolon, Watson writes a guide to grammar that explains why we don’t need guides at all, and refocuses our attention on the deepest, most primary value of language: true communication.
La semilla del odio: De la invasión de Irak al surgimiento del ISIS
by Mónica G. Prieto Javier Espinosa¿En qué momento se desató el caos e imperó el horror en Oriente Próximo? En La semilla del odio los reporteros Mónica G. Prieto y Javier Espinosa revisan la historia reciente de la región más convulsa del mundo para esclarecer las causas que originaron el conflicto. La invasión ilegal de Bagdad en 2003 y el desgobierno posterior levantó a la población de Irak en armas, pero también resucitó el odio sectario que había permanecido enterrado durante la dictadura de Sadam Hussein. El ascenso al poder de la mayoría chií, reprimida por la minoría suní durante décadas, y la impunidad de los ocupantes alimentó la aparición de una insurgencia nacionalista que en su lucha contra las fuerzas extranjeras se alió con los yihadistas, más proclives a sembrar el terror con atentados suicidas y secuestros que a combatir los soldados de la alianza liderada por EEUU, en la que participó España. El auge de los radicales liderados por el jordano Abu Musab al Zarqaui terminó así por imponer un califato del terror en amplias regiones del país, exportando su agenda a todo Oriente Próximo. En La Semilla del Odio, Mónica G. Prieto y Javier Espinosa realizan un exhaustivo repaso a una década de vivencias en una de las zonas más convulsa del mundo y reconstruyen, mediante palpitantes y estremecedores reportajes, los pasos que llevaron a una región a quedar secuestrada por el Estado Islámico de Irak, origen del ISIS.
La semilla del odio
by Mónica G. Prieto Javier Espinosa¿En qué momento se desató el caos e imperó el horror en Oriente Próximo? En La semilla del odio los reporteros Mónica G. Prieto y Javier Espinosa revisan la historia reciente de la región más convulsa del mundo para esclarecer las causas que originaron el conflicto. La invasión ilegal de Bagdad en 2003 y el desgobierno posterior levantó a la población de Irak en armas, pero también resucitó el odio sectario que había permanecido enterrado durante la dictadura de Sadam Hussein. El ascenso al poder de la mayoría chií, reprimida por la minoría suní durante décadas, y la impunidad de los ocupantes alimentó la aparición de una insurgencia nacionalista que en su lucha contra las fuerzas extranjeras se alió con los yihadistas, más proclives a sembrar el terror con atentados suicidas y secuestros que a combatir los soldados de la alianza liderada por EEUU, en la que participó España. El auge de los radicales liderados por el jordano Abu Musab al Zarqaui terminó así por imponer un califato del terror en amplias regiones del país, exportando su agenda a todo Oriente Próximo. En La Semilla del Odio, Mónica G. Prieto y Javier Espinosa realizan un exhaustivo repaso a una década de vivencias en una de las zonas más convulsa del mundo y reconstruyen, mediante palpitantes y estremecedores reportajes, los pasos que llevaron a una región a quedar secuestrada por el Estado Islámico de Irak, origen del ISIS.
The Seminary Student Writes
by Deborah CoreDeborah Core offers practical guidance for beginning seminary students who feel overwhelmed and under-prepared to write the number and quality of papers their courses require. The book begins with reflections on writing as a sacred action, then addresses such practical matters as choosing and researching a topic; outlining, drafting, and polishing a paper; and using the proper format for footnotes and bibliography. Also included are sample papers in MLA and Chicago styles and an overview of grammar and usage.
Semiotic Agency: Science beyond Mechanism (Biosemiotics #25)
by Alexei Sharov Morten TønnessenThis book invites readers to embark on a journey into the world of agency encompassing humans, other organisms, cells, intracellular molecular agents, colonies, populations, ecological systems, and artificial autonomous systems. We combine mechanistic and non-mechanistic approaches in the analysis of the function and evolution of organisms, their subagents, and multi-organism systems, and in this way offer a theoretical platform for integrating biosemiotics with both natural science and the humanities/social sciences. Agents are autonomous systems that incorporate knowledge on how to make sense of their environment and use it to achieve their goals. The functions of all agents are supported by mechanisms at the lowest level; however, the explanatory power of mechanistic analysis is not sufficient for complex agents. Non-mechanistic methods rely on the goal-directedness of agents whose dynamics follow self-stabilized dynamic attractors. The properties of attractors depend on stable or slowly changing factors, and such dependencies can be interpreted as sign relations if they are adaptive in nature. Agents can replace or redirect mechanisms on demand in order to preserve their functions; for performing higher-level semiotic functions, mechanisms are thus only means. We assume that mechanism and semiosis are not mutually exclusive, and that simple agents can interpret signs mechanistically. This assumption allows us to extend semiotic analysis to all agents, including ribosomes in cells, computers, and robots. This book challenges established traditions in natural science and the humanities/social sciences: semiotics no longer appears as restricted to humans and rational thinking, and biology is no longer limited to rely exclusively on mechanistic reasoning.
A Semiotic Methodology for Animal Studies (Biosemiotics #19)
by Pauline DelahayeThis monograph is about new perspective in animal studies methodology, by using concepts and tools from the field of semiotics. It proposes a reflexion on current challenges and issues in the ethology field, and introduces different semiotics – biosemiotics, zoosemiotics – as potential methodological solutions. The chapters cover many aspects of ethology where semiotics can be a helpful hand: studies of language, culture, cognition or emotions, issues about complex, endangered or variable species. It explains why these points are difficult to study for actual ethology, why they still matter for researchers, biodiversity actors or wildlife programs, and how an interdisciplinary study with a semiotic point of view can help understand them. This book will appeal to a wide readership, from researchers and academics in living sciences as well as in linguistics fields, to other professionals – veterinarian, wildlife managers, zookeepers, and many others – who feel the need to better understand some aspects of animals they are working with. Students with animal focus should read this book as an introduction to interdisciplinary methodology, and a proposition to work differently with animals.
Semiotic Perception and Dynamic Forms of Meaning (Lecture Notes in Morphogenesis)
by Antonino Bondi David Piotrowski Yves-Marie VisettiWhat do we mean by semiotic perception? Why should the concepts of perception and expressivity be reinterpreted within the encompassing framework of a dynamic theory of semiotic fields and forms? Can we redeploy the concept of form in such a way as to make explicit such a native solidarity (‘chiasmatic’ would have said Merleau-Ponty) between perception, praxis and expression -- and first and foremost in the activity of language, right to the heart of the life of the social and speaking animal that we are? What then would be the epistemological and ontological consequences, and how might this affect the way we describe semiolinguistic forms? This book aims to provide answers to these questions by opening up avenues of research on how to understand the linguistic and semiotic dimensions at work in the constitution of experience, both individual and collective.
Semiotic Perspectives (Routledge Library Editions: Semantics and Semiology)
by Sándor HerveyFirst published in 1982, this book looks at a wide variety of issues concerning the vast field of study that is ‘semiotics. It begins by tracing the beginnings of modern semiotics in the works two pioneering figures — Saussure and Peirce — in order to present fundamental assumptions, notions and distinctions which provide an essential background to the more recent developments. The author then goes on to look at Behavioural Semiotics, Luis Prieto’s idea of "l’Acte Semique", Austin’s theory of ‘Speech Acts’ and Searle’s elaborations, Barthes’ move away from philosophical and scientific approaches in his ideology of Socio-Cultural Signification, Functionalism and Axiomatic Functionalism, style as a form of communication, semiotics of the cinema, and communicative behaviour in non-human species.
Semiotics and Communication: Signs, Codes, Cultures (Routledge Communication Ser.)
by Wendy Leeds-HurwitzCommunication is, among other things, about the study of meaning -- how people convey ideas for themselves and to one another in their daily lives. Designed to close the gap between what we are able to do as social actors and what we are able to describe as social analysts, this book introduces the language of semiotics -- a language that provides
Semiotics and Pragmatism: Theoretical Interfaces
by Ivo Assad IbriThis collection of essays brings together a selection of some of the most important studies of Professor Ivo Assad Ibri about the work of Charles Sanders Peirce. In the last decades, Prof. Ibri made important contributions to Peirce studies by showing that the various individual aspects of Peirce’s work actually form a coherent philosophical system, a metaphysical architecture, as he describes it in his previous book Kósmos Noetós (Springer, 2017). Now this new book brings together a selection of 24 articles and book chapters originally published in both Portuguese and English on different topics and aspects of Peirce’s work, such as philosophy of art, heuristic logic, theories of beliefs and habits, objective idealism, pragmatism and pragmaticism. By bringing together this collection of essays in a single publication, Semiotics and Pragmatism: Theoretical Interfaces will be a valuable source for scholars interested in Prof. Ibri’s unique contributions to the study of the philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce. “In recognizing Ivo Assad Ibri as one the leading exponents of qualitative interpretations of Peirce in the world today, I refer especially to Ibri’s concentration on Peirce’s later-phase metaphysical writings. Ibri’s expertise will be seen to consist in his precise reformulations of Peirce’s full-fledged philosophy, not just pursuing specialized minor topics.” David A. Dilworth Professor of Philosophy, Stonybrook University “Ivo Ibri’s collected essays brims with clarifying insights from beginning to end. He manages to reveal plenty of aspects of Peirce’s thought from angles the traditional scholarship has not been equipped to notice. How not to miss such kairotic theoretical opportunities and how to exploit them to heuristic advantage is a lesson well taught in this outstanding book.” André De Tienne Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Peirce Edition Project, Indiana University
Semiotics and Verbal Texts
by Jane GravellsThis book offers an innovative approach to analysing written texts, grounded in principles of semiotics. Envisaging whole news media representations as 'signs', and using the real-world example of the BP Deepwater Horizon crisis, the author demonstrates how business crises are constructed through language. Gravells identifies patterns of language which show a progression from one kind of 'current news' representation to a different kind of coverage. This coverage positions the crisis as having symbolic and conventional meaning within varied social contexts, including the arts, business and the environment. Using a wealth of examples from the BP story to illustrate her practical research approach, Gravells draws 'language maps' of different phases of the crisis representation, showing how an early 'iconic' phase of representation moves through an 'indexical' to a 'symbolic' phase, and projects a return to a 'naturalised icon'. This book will be of interest to researchers and students of semiotics, those exploring research methods and linguists with an interest in business and media communications.
Semiotics: The Basics (The Basics)
by Daniel ChandlerThis fourth edition of the bestselling textbook, now available in print, eBook, and audiobook, has been fully updated, continuing to provide a concise introduction to the key concepts of semiotics in accessible and jargon-free language. Demystifying what is a complex, highly interdisciplinary field, key questions covered include: what are signs and codes? What can semiotics teach us about representation and reality? What tools does it offer for analysing texts and cultural practices? The fourth edition of Semiotics: The Basics focuses in particular on its application to communication and cultural studies. It has been extensively revised and extended, with an entirely new section on cognitive semiotics, many more illustrations, and a new glossary. With updates to theory, further examples, and suggestions for review and further reading, this must-have resource is both the ideal introductory text and an essential reference guide for students at all levels of language and communication, media, and cultural studies.
Semiotics in Mathematics Education
by Norma Presmeg Luis Radford Wolff-Michael Roth Gert KadunzThis volume discusses semiotics in mathematics education as an activity with a formal sign system, in which each sign represents something else. Theories presented by Saussure, Peirce, Vygotsky and other writers on semiotics are summarized in their relevance to the teaching and learning of mathematics. The significance of signs for mathematics education lies in their ubiquitous use in every branch of mathematics. Such use involves seeing the general in the particular, a process that is not always clear to learners. Therefore, in several traditional frameworks, semiotics has the potential to serve as a powerful conceptual lens in investigating diverse topics in mathematics education research. Topics that are implicated include (but are not limited to): the birth of signs; embodiment, gestures and artifacts; segmentation and communicative fields; cultural mediation; social semiotics; linguistic theories; chains of signification; semiotic bundles; relationships among various sign systems; intersubjectivity; diagrammatic and inferential reasoning; and semiotics as the focus of innovative learning and teaching materials.
Semiotics of Animals in Culture: Zoosemiotics 2. 0 (Biosemiotics Ser. #17)
by Gianfranco Marrone Dario ManganoTo place animals within the realm of nature, means inserting them among the articulations of culture and the social. Semiotics has never avoided this chiasmus, choosing to deal from the outset with the problem of the languages of animals following the old admonition of Montaigne: it is not that animals do not talk, it is us who do not understand them.Recent research in the field of the anthropology of nature and sociology of sciences and techniques allow to think about the Zoosemiotic issue in a different way. Instead of transplanting the language structures – gestures, LIS, etc. – for a semiotic study of the forms of the human and social meaning, it seems more apt to look at their discourse, and as such, the actual interactions, communicative and scientific as well as practical and functional, between humans and non-humans. This book aims to investigate precisely this hypothesis, known here as Zoosemiotics 2.0, working on several fronts and levels:· Anthropology· Languages of the image and visual representations, from art history to cinema· Old and new media. From literature to comics, from cartoons to TV documentaries but also advertising, music, Web and social networks. All those cultural products that talk about the role of human and non-human in society implicitly proposing (and in some way imposing) a form of articulation of such a relationship.· Food and feeding rites· Animalist, vegetarian and vegan movements · Philosophy: metaphysics, ethics, aesthetics
The Semiotics of Exile in Literature
by Hong ZengFurthering the scholarship on writers and artists as diverse as Lord Byron, Edvard Munch, Sylvia Plath, and Jorge Luis Borges, Zeng probes the semiotics of exile. In artistic traditions the world over, exile exerts a potent and complex mythmaking power - whether it is manifest as a geographical dislocation or as a sense of cultural or psychological alienation.
Semiotics of International Law
by Evandro Menezes de CarvalhoLanguage carries more than meanings; language conveys a means of conceiving the world. In this sense, national legal systems expressed through national languages organize the Law based on their own understanding of reality. International Law becomes, in this context, the meeting point where different legal cultures and different views of world intersect. The diversity of languages and legal systems can enrich the possibilities of understanding and developing international law, but it can also represent an instability and unsafety factor to the international scenario. This multilegal-system and multilingual scenario adds to the complexity of international law and poses new challenges. One of them is legal translation, which is a field of knowledge and professional skill that has not been the subject of theoretical thinking on the part of legal scholars. How to negotiate, draft or interpret an international treaty that mirrors what the parties, - who belong to different legal cultures and who, on many occasions, speak different mother tongues - ,want or wanted to say? By analyzing the decision-making process and the legal discourse adopted by the WTO's Appellate Body, this book highlights the active role of language in diplomatic negotiations and in interpreting international law. In addition, it also shows that the debate on the effectiveness and legitimacy of International Law cannot be separated from the linguistic issue.
The Semiotics of Law in Legal Education
by Jan M. Broekman Francis J. Mootz IIIThis book offers educational experiences, including reflections and the resulting essays, from the Roberta Kevelson Seminar on Law and Semiotics held during 2008 - 2011 at Penn State University's Dickinson School of Law. The texts address educational aspects of law that require attention and that also are issues in traditional jurisprudence and legal theory. The book introduces education in legal semiotics as it evolves in a legal curriculum. Specific semiotic concepts, such as "sign", "symbol" or "legal language," demonstrate how a lawyer's professionally important tasks of name-giving and meaning-giving are seldom completely understood by lawyers or laypeople. These concepts require analyses of considerable depth to understand the expressiveness of these legal names and meanings, and to understand how lawyers can "say the law," or urge such a saying correctly and effectively in the context of a natural language that is understandable to all of us. The book brings together the structure of the Seminar, its foundational philosophical problems, the specifics of legal history, and the semiotics of the legal system with specific themes such as gender, family law, and business law.