This paper proposes a new approach to the interpretation of reciprocal expressions using the Strongest Meaning Hypothesis of Dalrymple et al. (1998). We propose a system in which reciprocal meanings are derived directly from semantic restrictions using the SMH, and characterize this derivation process. We present methods to construct a linguistic test for the availability of a reciprocal meanin...

Categorial grammar has traditionally used the λ-calculus to represent meaning. We present an alternative, dependency-based perspective on linguistic meaning and situate it in the computational setting. This perspective is formalized in terms of hybrid logic and has a rich yet perspicuous propositional ontology that enables a wide variety of semantic phenomena to be represented in a single meani...

The idea that the syntactic behaviour of words is connected with their meaning has been the assumption behind research in elds such as lexical semantics and automatic clustering of words based on statistical methods. In particular much work has been done to describe the relation between the semantic characteristics of verbs and their syntactic patterns, among many Fillmore (1970) and Levin (199...

Neural network based models are a very powerful tool for creating word embeddings, the objective of these models is to group similar words together. These embeddings have been used as features to improve results in various applications such as document classification, named entity recognition, etc. Neural language models are able to learn word representations which have been used to capture sem...

The notion of meaning is central to theories of language. However, there appears to be considerable confusion regarding what a theory of meaning should do, and how it pertains to other linguistic issues. In this paper, I attempt to rectify one aspect of this confusion, namely, the relation of literal meaning, sentence meaning, and speaker meaning. To do so, I present two polar opposites, a stan...

According to the syntactic bootstrapping hypothesis, language learners use structural cues in the linguistic context to infer the meaning of novel words. Many studies support this hypothesis by showing that structure knowledge facilitates learning new words in a familiar language, but few have investigated the concurrent acquisition of word meaning and syntactic structure in a new language. In ...

In recent years, studies have suggested that gestures influence comprehension of linguistic expressions, for example, eliciting an N400 component in response to a speech/gesture mismatch. In this paper, we investigate the role of gestural information in the understanding of metaphors. Event related potentials (ERPs) were recorded while participants viewed video clips of an actor uttering metaph...

The meaning of a novel word can be acquired by extracting it from linguistic context. Here we simulated word learning of new words associated to concrete and abstract concepts in a variant of the human simulation paradigm that provided linguistic context information in order to characterize the brain systems involved. Native speakers of Spanish read pairs of sentences in order to derive the mea...

Emojis are used frequently in social media. A widely assumed view is that emojis express the emotional state of the user, which has led to research focusing on the expressiveness of emojis independent from the linguistic context. We argue that emojis and the linguistic texts can modify the meaning of each other. The overall communicated meaning is not a simple sum of the two channels. In order ...

This study begins from two observations. The first is that linguistic variation is socially meaningful (see Labov 1963, Ochs 1992, California Style Collective 1993, Eckert 2000, Irvine 2001, Podesva et al. 2001, Bucholtz and Hall 2005, Campbell-Kibler 2006, inter alia). The second is that speakers use their knowledge of language (i.e., linguistic competence) to engage in various linguistic acti...