Colour Name ‘Shkhue’ in Adyghe Linguistic Culture: Etymology, Internal Form, Semantics

2 Cross - Linguistic Semantics

Rooth & Partee (1982) and Rooth (1985) have shown that the English-specific rule-by-rule system of PTQ can be factores out into function application plus two transformations for resolving type mismatch (type lifting and variable binding). Building on these insights, this article proposes a universal system for type-driven translation, by adding two more innovations: local type determination for...

Using Statistics for Cross-linguistic Semantics: A Quantitative Investigation of the Typology of Colour Naming Systems

The paper presents a statistical evaluation of the typological data about color naming systems across the languages of the world that have been obtained by the World Color Survey. In a first step, we discuss a principal component analysis of the categorization data. This leads to a small set of easily interpretable features that are dominant in color categorization. These features were used for...

Linguistic and Computational Semantics

We argue that because the very concept of computation rests on notions of interpretation, the semantics of natural languages and the semantics of computational formalisms are in the deepest sense the same subject. The attempt to use computational formalisms in aid of an explanation of natural language semantics, therefore, is an enterprise that must be undertaken with particular care. We descri...

Medical Etymology

Call-by-name linguistic side effects

We propose a typed call-by-name λ-calculus with shift, reset and strict functions and describe its linguistic applications, improving on the previous continuation-based analyses of quantification, binding, raised and in-situ wh-questions, binding in wh-questions, and superiority. The evaluation order is not fixed left-to-right: rather, it is determined by the demand for values exerted by reset ...