Theory and Experimentation Regarding the Semantic Properties of Adverbs of Frequency

HAN-GEUL ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 82 (4) ◽  
pp. 1031-1061
Author(s):  
Inn-young Paik
Keyword(s):  
2002 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stanley B. Klein ◽  
Leda Cosmides ◽  
Kristi A. Costabile ◽  
Lisa Mei
Keyword(s):  

2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 353-384 ◽  
Author(s):  
Muriel Norde ◽  
Sarah Sippach

Libfixes are parts of words that share properties with both blends, compounds and affixes. They are deliberate formations, often with a jocular character, e.g. nerdalicious ‘delicious for nerds’, or scientainment ‘scientific entertainment’. These are not one-off formations – some libfixes have become very productive, as evidenced by high type frequency in a single corpus. Libfix constructions are particularly interesting for a network analysis for three reasons: they do not always have discrete morpheme boundaries, they feature a wide variety of bases (including phrases, as in give-me-a-break-o-meter), and they may be the source of back formations such as infotain. In this paper, we present a corpus-based analysis of eight English libfixes (cracy, fection, flation, gasm, licious, (o-)meter, tainment, and tastic), detailing their formal and semantic properties, as well as their differences and similarities. We argue that libfixes are most fruitfully analysed in a Bybeean network model, in which nodes are connected on the basis of phonological similarity, which allows for both fully compositional and non-compositional constructions to be linked without an exhaustive analysis into morphemes.


Author(s):  
Mark Sainsbury

Display theory predicts that no inferential relations among attitude attributions are based on the logical or semantic properties of the expressions in attribution complements. This chapter shows various ways in which there may be an illusion that such relations obtain. One common basis for the illusion is that we implicitly appeal to psychological facts. Since there is no reason to think these are necessary, the inferences are not truth preserving of necessity, even if they generally have true conclusions when they have true premises. They are examples of “plausible reasoning”. Wanting and fearing are discussed in detail as potential sources of the apparently inferential phenomena.


Concepts stand at the centre of human cognition. We use concepts in categorizing objects and events in the world, in reasoning and action, and in social interaction. It is therefore not surprising that the study of concepts constitutes a central area of research in philosophy and psychology. Since the 1970s, psychologists have carried out intriguing experiments testing the role of concepts in categorizing and reasoning, and have found a great deal of variation in categorization behaviour across individuals and cultures. During the same period, philosophers of language and mind did important work on the semantic properties of concepts, and on how concepts are related to linguistic meaning and linguistic communication. An important motivation behind this was the idea that concepts must be shared, across individuals and cultures. However, there was little interaction between these two research programs until recently. With the dawn of experimental philosophy, the proposal that the experimental data from psychology lacks relevance to semantics is increasingly difficult to defend. Moreover, in the last decade, philosophers have approached questions about the tension between conceptual variation and shared concepts in communication from a new perspective: that of ameliorating concepts for theoretical or for social and political purposes. The volume brings together leading psychologists and philosophers working on concepts who come from these different research traditions.


Author(s):  
Nicholas Shea

The varitel accounts of content allow us to see how the practice of representational explanation works and why content has an explanatory role to play. They establish the causal-explanatory relevance of semantic properties and are neutral about causal efficacy. Exploitable relations give the accounts an advantage over views based only on outputs. Content does valuable explanatory work in areas beyond psychology, but it need not be explanatorily valuable in every case. The varitel accounts illuminate why there should be a tight connection between content and the circumstances in which a representation develops. The accounts have some epistemological consequences. Representations at the personal level are different in a variety of ways that are relevant to content determination. Naturalizing personal-level content thus becomes a tractable research programme. Most importantly, varitel semantics offers a naturalistic account of the content of representations in the brain and other subpersonal representational systems.


1980 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 63-73 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. A. Fodor

AbstractThe paper explores the distinction between two doctrines, both of which inform theory construction in much of modern cognitive psychology: the representational theory of mind and the computational theory of mind. According to the former, propositional attitudes are to be construed as relations that organisms bear to mental representations. According to the latter, mental processes have access only to formal (nonsemantic) properties of the mental representations over which they are defined.The following claims are defended: (1) That the traditional dispute between “rational” and “naturalistic” psychology is plausibly viewed as an argument about the status of the computational theory of mind. Rational psychologists accept a formality condition on the specification of mental processes; naturalists do not. (2) That to accept the formality condition is to endorse a version of methodological solipsism. (3) That the acceptance of some such condition is warranted, at least for that part of psychology which concerns itself with theories of the mental causation of behavior. This is because: (4) such theories require nontransparent taxonomies of mental states; and (5) nontransparent taxonomies individuate mental states without reference to their semantic properties. Equivalently, (6) nontransparent taxonomies respect the way that the organism represents the object of its propositional attitudes to itself, and it is this representation which functions in the causation of behavior.The final section of the paper considers the prospect for a naturalistic psychology: one which defines its generalizations over relations between mental representations and their environmental causes, thus seeking to account for the semantic properties of propositional attitudes. Two related arguments are proposed, both leading to the conclusion that no such research strategy is likely to prove fruitful.


2013 ◽  
Vol 43 (5-6) ◽  
pp. 575-589 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ben Caplan ◽  
Chris Tillman ◽  
Brian McLean ◽  
Adam Murray

In recent work, Peter Hanks and Scott Soames argue for the type view, according to which propositions are types whose tokens are acts, states, or events. Hanks and Soames think that one of the virtues of the type view is that it allows them to explain why propositions have semantic properties. But, in this paper, we argue that their explanations aren't satisfactory.


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