The introductory article to the special issue dedicated Igor Mel’?uk summarizes main tenets of his “Meaning ? Text” theory, and outlines its contribution development diverse areas modern linguistics. This theory can be characterized as a formalized, semantically oriented, multilevel, structural, functional global model language which explains way speaker generates meaning embodied in text. Both...

Film discourse is a typical of multimodal discourse which contains many semiotic modalities such as image, text, sound and music. Multimodal discourse analysis (MDA) focuses on how meaning is made through the use of multiple modes of communication as opposed to just language. The MDA assisted film discourse analysis helps understand films through the interaction among different modalities as we...

Language is always in flux. Over time new patterns can be observed that are either minor modifications to the linguistic system, as when the meaning of a lexical item changes, or major ones, as when word order changes occur. That language change occurs primarily as a result of acquisition is uncontroversial. There are, however, very different theories and discourses about how to interpret this ...

This paper is concerned with some aspects of the relationship between ontologica! knowledge and natural language understanding. More specifically, I will consider how knowledge of ontological domains and knowledge of lexical meaning work together in the interpretation of linguistic expressions. An essential assumption is that in accordance with ontological distinctions there are various semanti...

‘Meaning is use’ represents an approach to the functional or semantic dimension of linguistic communication. It originated with Wittgenstein (1953) and other pragmatically based philosophers of language, who wanted to combat the idea that meanings are things and instead focus on howpeople use linguistic conventions to achieve social ends. ‘Structure emerges from use’ represents an approach to t...

It is by now well established that toddlers use the linguistic context in which a new word-and particularly a new verb-appears to discover aspects of its meaning. But what aspects of the linguistic context are most useful? To begin to investigate this, we ask how 2-year-olds use two sources of linguistic information that are known to be useful to older children and adults in verb guessing tasks...

In this paper, we present an approach to primarily achieve the semantic interpretation and the region retrieval for an attentive region in a color image. The main components of the system include image feature extraction, indexing process, as well as linguistic inference rules construction and semantic description. Based on these features, each of attentive regions in an image can be described ...

A fundamental principle in Cognitive Linguistics is that semantics is, indeed, primarily cognitive and not a matter of relationships between language and the world (or truth conditions with respect to a model). This principle becomes especially manifest in the research into facets of meaning and grammatical organization which crucially makes use of notions such as ‘perspective’, ‘subjectivity’,...