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.

One of a Kind

Noun categorization devices, or classifiers, of all types are a means of classifying referents in terms of basic cognitively salient parameters. These include humanness, animacy, sex, shape, direction and orientation, consistency, and function. In large systems of classifiers, one finds additional terms whose application is restricted to a limited set of referents, or even just to a single referent. For instance, numerous languages of Mainland Southeast Asia have elaborate sets of specific classifiers in the domain of social hierarchies and human interactions. Languages with multiple classifier systems spoken in riverine environment will be likely to have a special classifier for ‘canoe’. Rather than categorizing entities in terms of general features, such classifiers with specific meanings serve to highlight items important for the socio-cultural environment of the speakers and their means of subsistence. Specific classifiers are likely to be lost if a practice or a hierarchy they reflect undergoes attrition. They occupy a singular place in language acquisition and the history of development of classifier systems.

How Many Moods Are There in Polish? The Case of the Polish Subjunctive

The present paper is concerned with the Polish construction introduced with the subordinating complementizer żeby. The construction is interesting for its mood properties, which have been subject of a long-standing debate in Polish linguistics. The paper explores the semantic range of the construction and illuminates its mood properties. More specifically, it argues that żeby clauses represent a subjunctive mood and as such should be distinguished from indicative and conditional constructions. This distinction is described in terms of Langacker’s model of control and Givón’s theory of semantic binding. It is argued that the żeby construction constitutes an intermediate category between indicative mood, which grants the speaker a high degree of control over a proposition described in the complement clause, on the one hand, and conditional mood, which situates a proposition outside the conceptualizer’s dominion of control, on the other. The paper also highlights the iconic and metonymic motivation behind the distribution of żeby clauses in present-day Polish.

Differences in Sameness: A Semantic Account of Ambiguity and Argument Structure of Predicate Same

This article is an investigation and analysis of the word same. It focuses first on the ambiguous nature of same, in that the same x can be (i) one entity seen on different occasions, or (ii) two different entities of the same kind. I discuss the empirical differences associated with these two readings, and hypothesize that they can be explained in terms of the formal semantic concepts of extension and intension: Reading (i) is extensional while reading (ii) is intensional (a “kind of” reading). In addition, I suggest that the two readings do not mean that there are two completely different meanings to same, but rather that the reading of same is determined by context and the nouns being modified by it; indeed, this polysemy exists largely below the speaker’s conscious awareness. I then provide a formal representation of the syntax and semantics of same as a two-place predicate. I show that when either of the two arguments we expect to be obligatory is not overt, it is because same has undergone a derivation to license this null argument—one derivation type in extensional cases of same, and a different derivation in intensional cases.

‘Changing’ and ‘Becoming’: New Perspectives from Cross-Linguistic Cognitive Semantics

This paper examines the conceptual and semantic relation between ‘changing’ and ‘becoming’ in cross-linguistic perspective to demonstrate that: (i) the assumption that ‘becoming’ is conceptually and semantically related to ‘changing’ is invalidated in at least two cases in which the meaning of ‘becoming’ does not encompass ‘changing’; (ii) the main verbs of ‘becoming’ in different languages are highly polysemous and therefore are not cross-translatable in all contexts of use; (iii) differences in meaning reflect different conceptualizations of ‘becoming’ across languages. These results emerge from a contrastive semantic analysis between the main verbs of ‘changing’ and ‘becoming’ in English, Italian and Japanese made adopting the methodology of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage. This paper also makes a strong case for the epistemic nature of the predicative complements licensed by verbs of ‘becoming’ by showing that a semantic component ‘it is like this, I know it’ emerges consistently from cross-linguistic comparison.

Mathematics in Language

Elementary mathematics is deeply rooted in ordinary language, which in some respects anticipates and supports the learning of mathematics, but which in other respects hinders this learning. This paper explores a number of areas of arithmetic and other elementary areas of mathematics, considering for each area whether it helps or hinders the young learner: counting and larger numbers, sets and brackets, algebra and variables, zero and negation, approximation, scales and relationships, and probability. The conclusion is that ordinary language anticipates the mathematics of counting, arithmetic, algebra, variables and brackets, zero and probability; but that negation, approximation and probability are particularly problematic because mathematics demands a different way of thinking, and different mental capacity, compared with ordinary language. School teachers should be aware of the mathematics already built into language so as to build on it; and they should also be able to offer special help in the conflict zones.

An Event Conflation Model based on the Realization Event

In this theoretical analysis, we first identify four event components essential to the conceptualization of Realization – manner salience, agentivity, the intended result and the real-world result. We move on to establish an event conflation model which reflects their interplay in an attempt to outline the speech generation mechanisms behind different lexicalization patterns. By offering alternative interpretations for some well-established findings in the Motion domain from the Realization perspective, we also explore the possibility of applying unified analysis to different macro-event types.

Semantic Unilocality

If a language regularly places a particular closed class in syntactic construction with an open class—for example, nominal affixes with noun roots, or satellites with verbs—any conceptual category expressed by the closed class tends not to be expressed by the open class. This proposed tendency is here called “semantic unilocality”. Cognitively, semantic unilocality in language may arise from several more general tendencies, including one to avoid redundancy and one to segregate the representation of different conceptual categories. Both of these may in turn arise from a still more general tendency toward communicative efficiency. Historically, the rise, extended presence, decline, or extended absence of a closed class that expresses a particular conceptual category may foster certain diachronic processes in a syntactically associated open class. These processes include leaching, culling, shift, filtering, and abstention.