adopting a humanistic, communicative-based approach to semiotics, this paper aims at investigating the status of linguistic signs and their interaction with other communicative signs. the status of linguistic sign is first studied in semiotic theories spanning ancient, middle ages and modern era. based on the commonalities envisaged in four contemporary semiotic theories done in the spirit of t...

â â â  â  abstract â â â  this study addressed the semantic vagueness in aljubby's book (sharih ghareeb alfath almudawana) in almaliki terms. it consists of introduction, preface, three sections, and conclusion. the preface stated the semantic obscurity in language and terminology with the definition of the book (almudawana) in maliki fiqh. the first section studied aljubby's method a...

OBJECTIVE Pro-anorexia has emerged as a new and emotionally charged eating disorder phenomenon. This study explored the linguistic markers of differences in Internet self-presentation of self-identified pro-anorexics who defend anorexia as a lifestyle and self-identified anorexics in recovery. METHOD One hundred sixty-two Internet message board entries and 56 homepages originating from either...

Syntactic trees, or phrase markers, have originally been suggested as a representation of syntax in the mind based on purely linguistic grounds. In this paper, the psychological reality of syntactic trees and hierarchical ordering is explored from another perspective -that of the neuropsychology of language breakdown. The study reported here examined several syntactic domains that rely on diffe...

Previous research on children’s use of non-finite verb forms in finite contexts -Root Infinitives (RIs) -distinguished two types of the latter: those that describe an on-going activity (“extensional”), and those that are produced in the context of children’s wishes, desires, or intentions (“intensional”). This study provides a syntactic account of children’s intensional RIs. We argue that the a...

Thirty-five years ago, Noam Chomsky introduced the field of linguistics to new mathematical tools drawn largely from Recursive Function Theory. These were exciting tools that imparted mathematical precision, perhaps for the first time in the history of Linguistics, to the enterprise of grammar construction. The cornerstone of Chomsky’s new theoretical edifice, was the linguistic transformation,...

Like every discipline, theorizing in linguistics crucially involves drawing (often tentative) conclusions about the relation between the available evidence and the theories under consideration. At many points in their research, linguists must decide whether the available evidence (theoretical, empirical, etc.) supports a given theory well enough to accept it, possibly over various competing the...

In this paper, the FEELING system for extracting and building semantic representations of emotions, feelings and psychological states expressed in texts is presented, as well as the linguistic knowledge used by the system. Semantic representations are described by means of a set of feature structures. Letters to the Editor is taken as a domain for the evaluation of this work.