Structure within Morphemic Meaning

The entire conceptual content represented by a single morpheme—its plenary meaning—is in general both copious and structured. This structuring consists of both the patterning of its content and the distribution of attention over that pattern. With respect to the patterning of its content, a morpheme’s plenary meaning can be divided into a core meaning and an associated meaning. In turn, its associated meaning can be subdivided into five sectors: the holistic, infrastructure, collateral, disposition, and attitude sectors. And with respect to its distribution of attention, eight specific attentional factors and three general attentional principles are cited. The main attentional factor is that a morpheme’s core meaning is generally more salient than its associated meaning or any of the sectors therein. But another attentional factor holds that the attitude sector, especially its expletivity type, can challenge or exceed the core meaning in salience.

A semantic violation account for the reading of negated general disjunctions

Few previous studies have investigated how people read the negation of a general disjunction that refers to a set of objects (It is not true that xs are p or q). We develop four alternative accounts for the negation. The original mental model theory interprets the negation as the negation of the disjunction of possibilities allowed by the general disjunction. The revised mental model theory interprets it as the negation of the conjunction of possibilities allowed by the general disjunction. The probabilistic violation account interprets it as the probabilistic violation of the general disjunction by introducing nonnegligible exceptions. A normative semantic violation account interprets the negation as the semantic qualitative violation of the general disjunction by introducing exceptions. Three experiments systematically investigated the reading of negated general disjunctions in different possibility and truth judgment tasks. Participants’ possibility and truth judgments provide convergent evidence that a negated general disjunction is consistent with only sets containing ¬p¬q cases regardless of whether other cases are present or not, and people prefer to the semantic violation interpretation of negated general disjunctions. These findings favour the semantic violation account over the other accounts. This implies that the core meaning of a general disjunction is the rule represented by it, but not the set of possibilities referred to by it.

The Centrality of Rivalry

The aim of this article is to argue that the old-fashioned idea of rivalry remains central to the concept of effective competition and, in turn, to the promotion of the competitive process. Rivalry was the core meaning of competition among the early economists. The concern with vigorous, sustained actual rivalry may have been lost sight of, but it ought not to have been. Rivalry cannot of course be the exhaustive focus for many other factors and influences affect the level of effective competition. But a searching rivalry inquiry provides a valuable initial screen. By reemphasizing the primacy of rivalry, we may also foster the ability of competition law to act not just as a key driver of economic efficiency and growth, but also as a pro-democratic vehicle to check powerful private centers of economic power.

From Data to Wisdom: A Case Study of OPOP Model

The purpose of this research is to: (1) clarify the scope and connotation of the OPOP (One Product/Project/Performance, One Paper) model comprehensively; (2) show its application in design and creative teaching; (3) introduce this model to more people. First, the author reviews the design doctoral education system and its shortcomings and analyzes the similarities and differences between “Ph.D. of Design” and “Master of Design”; second, the researcher discusses the DIKW (Data, Information, Knowledge, Wisdom) pyramid, cognition and communication theory separately. The author also interviewed the two teachers who created the OPOP model to clarify its core meaning and goals. Finally, the author invited students who participated in an OPOP forum to fill out a questionnaire in order to analyze and understand their responses and suggestions. The OPOP model allows participants to realize that “creativity” and “interpretation” are equally important and to gradually learn to use academic papers to transform personal “tips” and “experience” into “knowledge” that can be imparted. The author hopes that the OPOP model and the general frameworks mentioned in this study can inspire all readers, enabling them to continuously explore the connotation and further possibilities of OPOP in light of the actual situation.

The Legal Balance Between Liberty and Equality

The paper explores the specific legal balance between liberty and equality, distinguishing it from political theories and constitutional settings, where they are often considered in opposition. In order to find the specific legal balance between liberty and equality, and after identifying some of their relevant meanings for the purpose, it becomes necessary to focus on the rule of law, and to examine the relationship between liberty and equality in its different versions. Once the core meaning of the rule of law in terms of liberty and equality is enucleated, it is possible to consider extending it to the international field.

On the discursive construction of the multiple meanings of francophonie/francophone viewed through the prism of argumentative semantics

This paper addresses the issue of polysemy, and more precisely of multiple meanings in the case of the words francophonie/francophone from the perspective of argumentative semantics. The aim of the paper is to examine the mechanisms that account for the multiple meanings of francophonie/francophone, i.e. the semantic and discursive mechanisms involved in the (re)construction of lexical meaning as the words occur in discourse. The data analysed in this paper consists of a set of discourse fragments about francophone identity, discourses that vary according to the speaker, the geographical location and the media support. The study is carried out within the framework of the SAP theory (Semantics of Argumentative Possibilities), following a procedure based on a pre-built reference meaning – i.e. a description of the argumentative potential of the lexeme – that will be used when analysing the discursive occurrences. First, the paper briefly presents the SAP theory and the pre-built reference meaning of the lexemes francophonie/francophone (described in terms of core-elements, stereotypes and argumentative possibilities). It then illustrates several discursive mechanisms of meaning construction. The analysis highlights a series of meaning construction mechanisms: transgressive activation of the argumentative potential, reconfiguration by scission of the core-elements or by deletion of one of the elements, modality addition, transgressive reconstruction of the core meaning, and finally core circularity. Thus, the paper indicates, from the perspective of argumentative semantics, that the multiple meanings of the words francophonie/francophone, i.e. the various semantic configurations attached to these words, can be seen as reconfigurations of a single lexical meaning.

Grand Strategy and Military Power

This chapter examines military power through the lens of grand strategy. It begins by identifying the First World War as the main origin of the distinctive idea of grand strategy resulting in its core meaning and ambivalence. It then shows how grand strategy acts as a force multiplier, before exploring the ways in which military successes and failures affect grand-strategic effectiveness. Finally, it discusses the ways in which military power as a component of peacetime grand strategy can produce its psychological effects on the will of the adversary through the display and threat of force or competitive defense procurement rather than actual fighting. The chapter concludes by arguing that the specific characteristics of military power help identify some of the limits of grand strategy, notably its underestimation of contingency arising from the dynamic interaction with a thinking adversary.

Child-directed speech is optimized for syntax-free semantic inference

The way infants learn language is a highly complex adaptive behavior. This behavior chiefly relies on the ability to extract information from the speech they hear and combine it with information from the external environment. Most theories assume that this ability critically hinges on the recognition of at least some syntactic structure. Here, we show that child-directed speech allows for semantic inference without relying on explicit structural information. We simulate the process of semantic inference with machine learning applied to large text collections of two different types of speech, child-directed speech versus adult-directed speech. Taking the core meaning of causality as a test case, we find that in child-directed speech causal meaning can be successfully inferred from simple co-occurrences of neighboring words. By contrast, semantic inference in adult-directed speech fundamentally requires additional access to syntactic structure. These results suggest that child-directed speech is ideally shaped for a learner who has not yet mastered syntactic structure.