Search results for "Semantic property"
showing 4 items of 4 documents
Models, information and meaning
2018
Abstract There has recently been an explosion of formal models of signaling, which have been developed in order to learn about different aspects of meaning. This paper discusses whether that success can also be used to provide an original naturalistic theory of meaning in terms of information or some related notion. In particular, it argues that, although these models can teach us a lot about different aspects of content, at the moment they fail to support the idea that meaning just is some kind of information. As an alternative, I suggest a more modest approach to the relationship between the informational notions used in models and semantic properties in the natural world.
Noun/pronoun asymmetry in Polish: Against the nominal perspective and the DP-hypothesis
2020
AbstractThis paper argues that the Polish noun-pronoun asymmetry in which the intensifier sam ‘self’ precedes nouns and follows pronominals is not a simple case of configuration in the DP, whereby pronouns, unlike nominals, target D0 for referential reasons (cf. Rutkowski 2002, 2012). Such viewpoints, in the case of Polish, are unfortunate because they appear to underlyingly work on and draw from the syntax of nominal projections characteristic of English or Italian i.e., languages with articles. We show that the asymmetry pertains to various semantic interpretations of sam, the different semantic specification of nominals and pronominals, and the flexible word order property. What we need,…
Prepositions and pronouns in connected discourse of individuals with aphasia
2018
The lexical-grammatical divide has been a widely addressed topic in aphasia. Speech parts are generally classified as either belonging to a lexical or a grammatical category based on the frequency of acquisition of new members in their paradigms (open vs. closed classes), thus neglecting heterogeneity within categories. Such an approach has led to contradictory findings. First, prepositions form closed classes, but are classically taken as lexical items. Pronouns, also belonging to a closed class, are analyzed as grammatical elements. Second, both within the group of prepositions and pronouns, forms with different syntactic and semantic properties co-exist. Following the theoretical notions…
Cognitive representations of predicates and the use of past tenses in French: a developmental approach
1997
Two experiments examine how French 10-year-old children and adults relate past tenses to the semantic properties of predicate types in writing. Experiment 1 involved two tasks: graphically coding two predicate dimensions (durativity and resultativity), a task designed to assess cognitive representations of these predicates; and selecting past tenses in sentences which included previously evaluated verbs. Results show that (a) 10-year-olds and adults have comparable representations of durativity, but different ones for resultativity, (b) the adults associate process charac teristics and past tenses, but 10-year-olds do not. In Experiment 2, subjects only had to code graphically two dimensio…