This study was conducted in Malaysia to discover how meaning and appreciation were construed among 35 Form Five students. Panofsky’s theory was employed to discover the levels of reasoning among students when various types of posters were displayed. The independent variables used were posters that carried explicit and implicit meanings; the moderating variable was students’ visual literacy leve...

Aspects of utterance meaning It is widely accepted within pragmatics that there is a distinction to be made between the explicit content and the implicit import of an utterance. There is much less agreement about the precise nature of this distinction, how it is to be drawn, and whether any such two-way distinction can do justice to the levels and kinds of meaning involved in utterance interpre...

We distinguish between two versions of descriptivism. What we label “explanatory descriptivism” is a program for explaining how words get meaning and reference. Meaning descriptivism, on the other hand, is the view that many syntactically simple terms are synonymous with descriptions. It is a claim about what the meaning of such terms is, not about how the facts determine what the meaning is. E...

This discussion presents several alternative strategies for approaching the problem of semantic interoperability, based on recent projects to develop software agents and systems that attempt to reconcile ontological differences without explicit ontologies. The difficulties of reconciling explicit ontologies are discussed, and possibilities for meaning negotiation through implicit approaches are...

Most previous studies on negation have generally only focused on sentential negation (not), reporting cost and delay associated with computing its meaning. In an ERP study (Experiment 1), we make use of the negation-sensitivity of negative polarity items (NPIs) and examine the time course of processing different kinds of negation. Four kinds of NPI-licensing environments were examined: the nega...

Research on the effect of implicit and explicit instruction on developing learners’ explicit knowledge by the use of measures of explicit knowledge abounds in the literature. However, measuring learners’ implicit knowledge employing fine-grained measures has rarely been the concern of researchers in the field. Therefore, the present study is an attempt to scrutinize the effectiveness of implici...