The mapping of space onto the domain of benefaction and some unpredicted trends in semantic change

Linguistics ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 54 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Silvia Luraghi
Keyword(s):  
Frequent Pattern ◽  
Semantic Role ◽  
Semantic Change ◽  
Spatial Concept ◽  
Semantic Extension ◽  
Complex Patterns

AbstractMorphemes that encode the semantic role of Beneficiary display complex patterns of polysemy. Such patterns have arisen through diachronic processes which are for the most part still unexplored. In the paper I discuss common assumptions about the directionality of semantic extension and about expected and unexpected polysemies. I show that, next to the often mentioned polysemy of Beneficiary, Recipient, Purpose and Direction, another frequent pattern includes Beneficiary, Purpose and Cause. Morphemes that exhibit such polysemy have original spatial meanings which include Location or Path, but not Direction. Notably, such original spatial meanings have been dropped in the course of semantic developments described in the paper. After discussing some well-attested diachronic developments, I show that, at least in the languages of Europe, markers of Beneficiary, Purpose, and Cause underwent an unpredicted semantic extension that led them to also indicate Direction. Such extension provides evidence for a rare development that has led a concrete spatial concept to be denoted by a morpheme that had an abstract meaning.

scholarly journals Dative by Genitive Replacement in the Greek Language of the Papyri: A Diachronic Account of Case Semantics

2015 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 91-121 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joanne Vera Stolk
Keyword(s):  
Semantic Similarity ◽  
Semantic Analysis ◽  
Semantic Role ◽  
Greek Language ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Verbal Form ◽  
Semantic Extension ◽  
Dative Case ◽  
Genitive Case

Semantic analysis of the prenominal first person singular genitive pronoun (μου) in the Greek of the documentary papyri shows that the pronoun is typically found in the position between a verbal form and an alienable possessum which functions as the patient of the predicate. When the event expressed by the predicate is patient-affecting, the possessor is indirectly also affected. Hence the semantic role of this affected alienable possessor might be interpreted as a benefactive or malefactive in genitive possession constructions. By semantic extension the meaning of the genitive case in this position is extended into goal-oriented roles, such as addressee and recipient, which are commonly denoted by the dative case in Ancient Greek. The semantic similarity of the genitive and dative cases in these constructions might have provided the basis for the merger of the cases in the Greek language.

scholarly journals Semantic Roles of The Verb “To See” in Javenese of Kertosono

2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 122-129
Author(s):  
A.A.A Ngr. Adriyanti Weda Ningrat ◽  
I Nyoman Kardana ◽  
Mirsa Umiyati
Keyword(s):  
Qualitative Research ◽  
Data Analysis ◽  
Role Theory ◽  
Shape Function ◽  
Semantic Role ◽  
Semantic Roles ◽  
Qualitative Research Design ◽  
Semantic Fields ◽  
General Semantic

This study reveals the semantic fields from the "to see" verb in Javanese. The aims of this research is to describe the shape, function, meaning and role of semantic of each variant of the verb "to see". To realize this goal, qualitative research design was applied in this study and the semantic role theory of Vole and Van Valin (1984). Was also oriented in data analysis. Verbs that have semantic fields that are associated with the "to see" verb with intentional entities numbering 33. Each of them is ndêlok, ndêlêng, ningali, mirsani, ndeleng sacleraman, ndêlêng tênanên, ningali saestu, mirsani saestu, ningali sekedhap, mirsani sekedhap, mlengos, ngwasi, ngêmatake, ngematakên, ndhangak, dingkluk, nginceng, ngêlirêk, mêntêlêngi, ndelok mburi, and maca. The semantic roles of the arguments of each verb consist of agents and themes. This study only sheds light on the meaning field verb "to see" of the type of variant and a little about the general semantic role. For this reason, a more detailed study of the specific role of each variant of the verb is a topic that can be raised in the next study.

The semantic role of the wh-element and subject position in Spanish and Catalan

2010 ◽  
Vol 63 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Aria Adli
Keyword(s):  
Experimental Results ◽  
Subject Position ◽  
Semantic Role ◽  
The Subject

AbstractThis work presents experimental results on the position of the subject in

scholarly journals Idioms and the syntax/semantics interface of descriptive content vs. reference

Linguistics ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 57 (4) ◽  
pp. 769-814
Author(s):  
Berit Gehrke ◽  
Louise McNally
Keyword(s):  
Syntactic Structure ◽  
Semantic Role ◽  
Semantic Type ◽  
Descriptive Content ◽  
Discourse Referent ◽  
Semantic Modelling

AbstractThe syntactic literature on idioms contains some proposals that are surprising from a compositional perspective. For example, there are proposals that, in the case of verb-object idioms, the verb combines directly with the noun inside its DP complement, and the determiner is introduced higher up in the syntactic structure, or is late-adjoined. This seems to violate compositionality insofar as it is generally assumed that the semantic role of the determiner is to convert a noun to the appropriate semantic type to serve as the argument to the function denoted by the verb. In this paper, we establish a connection between this line of analysis and lines of work in semantics that have developed outside of the domain of idioms, particularly work on incorporation and work that combines formal and distributional semantic modelling. This semantic work separates the composition of descriptive content from that of discourse referent introducing material; our proposal shows that this separation offers a particularly promising way to handle the compositional difficulties posed by idioms, including certain patterns of variation in intervening determiners and modifiers.

scholarly journals Semantic Imagination as Condition to our Linguistic Experience

2018 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
pp. 339-378
Author(s):  
Nazareno Eduardo De Almeida
Keyword(s):  
Essential Feature ◽  
Necessary Condition ◽  
Semantic Role ◽  
Cognitive Sciences ◽  
Linguistic Experience ◽  
Semantic Function ◽  
Sign Systems ◽  
Counterfactual Thought ◽  
Semiotic Perspective

The main purpose of this article is, from a semiotic perspective, arguing for the recognizing of a semantic role of the imagination as a necessary condition to our linguistic experience, regarded as an essential feature of the relations of our thought with the world through signification processes (and the sign systems they perform); processes centered in but not reducible to discourse. The text is divided into three parts. The first part presents the traditional position in philosophy and cognitive sciences that had barred until recent times the possibility to investigate the semantic function performed by imagination, mainly due to the anti-psychologist arguments on which it is based. After that, I situate my perspective inside of the recent research panorama in philosophy and cognitive science. The second part presents the semiotic framework on the relation between thought, language, and world, conceived through the concepts of signification processes and sense-conditions. Within this framework, I introduce the concept of linguistic experience, characterizing semantic imagination as one of its sense-conditions. In the third part, several pieces of evidence for corroborating the semantic function of imagination are discussed. These pieces come from the fields of phenomena denoted as diagrammatic thought and counterfactual thought. Diagrammatic thought, briefly discussed, points out the semantic work of imagination in the semi-discursive sign systems constructed in mathematics, logic, and natural science. After defending a widening of the concept of counterfactual thought, and its intrinsic relation with semantic imagination, the role of semantic imagination is briefly discussed in some types of counterfactual thought found in our conceptions of modal concepts, in thought experiments, in apagogical arguments, and in the creative discursive devices.

Psychopathology and Development: II. Childhood Experiences and Personality Development

1984 ◽  
Vol 18 (4) ◽  
pp. 314-327 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Rutter
Keyword(s):  
Social Context ◽  
Cognitive Skills ◽  
Social Cognitive ◽  
Personality Development ◽  
Personality Structure ◽  
Childhood Experiences ◽  
Reciprocal Interactions ◽  
Single Mechanism ◽  
Complex Patterns

Concepts and empirical findings are reviewed with regard to personality development and to the role of childhood experiences in that process. It is concluded that personality development cannot be reduced to the stabilisation of behavioural traits, to the production of a fixed personality structure or to the acquisition of social-cognitive skills, although there is some form of personality organisation in terms of habits, attitudes, concepts and styles of behaviour. Personality development takes place in a social context, with both continuities and discontinuities stemming from maturational and experiential factors and interactions between them. Chains of indirect linkages result from complex patterns of circular processes involving reciprocal interactions between children and their environments. No single mechanism is responsible and no one theory provides an explanation.

Polysemy through metonymy

2004 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 363-386
Author(s):  
Shobhana L. Chelliah
Keyword(s):  
Northeast India ◽  
The Other ◽  
Semantic Change ◽  
Salient Characteristic ◽  
The One

In Meithei, a Tibeto-Burman language of Northeast India, the noun pí ‘grandmother’ has undergone divergent paths of semantic change, developing on the one hand into a productive nominalizer and on the other into suffixes whose meanings are derived through metonymical extensions (SMALLER VERSION, BEST EXEMPLAR, SALIENT CHARACTERISTIC, PROJECTION, INSTRUMENT and AGENT). The Meithei data illustrate the role of culture in metonymic change and the role of metonymic change in creation of productive and lexicalized morphology.

THE SEMANTIC ROLE OF QUALITATIVE CONTENT

1989 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 125-133 ◽  
Author(s):  
Theodore W. Schick
Keyword(s):  
Semantic Role

scholarly journals Coding Betweenness in Swedish and Norwegian Translations from English

2016 ◽  
Vol 60 (3) ◽  
pp. 576-598 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gudrun Rawoens ◽  
Thomas Egan
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Semantic Role ◽  
Parallel Corpus ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Source Data ◽  
Semantic Notion ◽  
Primary Focus ◽  
Tertium Comparationis

This paper examines the way in which the semantic notion of ‘betweenness’ is coded in Swedish and Norwegian translations of the same English source texts. The study takes its starting point in the contention that the original English expressions of ‘betweenness’ containing the prepositionbetweenconstitute a viabletertium comparationisfor translations of that form into the other two languages. A classification of all occurrences ofbetweenin the English source texts in The English-Swedish Parallel Corpus (ESPC) and The English-Norwegian Parallel Corpus (ENPC) in terms of the semantic role of the landmarks in the predications is followed by an analysis of the translations, both congruent and divergent. The primary focus, however, is not on the correspondences between the English original and its translations into Swedish and Norwegian, but on the parallels between the two sets of translations. To this end comparisons are drawn between the Swedish and Norwegian renderings of the various meanings ofbetweenin the source data. The analysis shows that Swedish and Norwegian resemble one another closely in the means employed to code the various senses ofbetween. The last part of the study offers a complementary perspective in comparing occurrences of the most common translation equivalents ofbetween,mellanin Swedish andmellomin Norwegian, in contexts where they do not translatebetweenin the English source texts. This approach reveals that, despite the lack ofbetweenin the original texts, the two sets of translators both employ the cognate prepositions in over 25% of cases.

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