A number of linguistic and stylistic devices are employed in text-based discourse for the purposes of introducing, defining, refining, and re-introducing discourse entities. This paper looks at one of the most pervasive of these mechanisms, anaphora, and addresses the question of how current computational approaches to anaphora scale up to building, and maintaining, a richer model of text struc...

This paper analyzes changes in the null subject parameter in Caribbean Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese varieties. Assuming a Minimalist framework that ascribes parametric variation to differences in lexical settings, it is argued that increased frequency of overt pronominals and an anti-locality principle against Spec, head grammatical interactions trigger a shift from interpretable to unintep...

In this paper I defend the “Standard View” of the semantics of ‘I’ – according to which ‘I’ is a pure, automatic indexical – from a challenge posed by “deferred reference” cases, in which occurrences of ‘I’ are (allegedly) not speaker-referential, and thus non-automatic. In reply, I offer an alternative account of the cases in question, which I call the “Description Analysis” (DA). According to...

The main differences between symbolic and morphic formal systems: Instead of the Kleene star for the symbolic universes, morphic universes are generated by the Stirling cross. Symbolic substitution and concatenation is preserving production concatenation. Morphic substitution/concatenation is opening up a system of interactive complexions of derivations. Comparison of substitution based product...

This essay describes computational semantic networks for a philosophical audience and surveys several approaches to semanticnetwork semantics. In particular, propositional semantic networks (exemplified by SNePS) are discussed; it is argued that only a fully intensional, Meinongian semantics is appropriate for them; and several Meinongian systems are presented. 1. Meinong, Philosophy, and Artif...

In this paper, we propose a formal theory of knowledge and action that accommodates in dexical knowledge and reflects the dependence of action upon i t . The model-theoretic semantics of belief given characterizes an agent's belief state not only in terms of the ways the wor ld might be if his beliefs are t rue, but also in terms of how the wor ld must look f rom his perspective. We then propos...

Roy Wagner at University of Virginia in 2009. (Photograph by Johannes Neurath) Wagner, a visionary theorist cultural meaning and creativity, died on September 10, 2018, his home Charlottesville, Virginia. He was known for work kinship, ritual, myth Papua New Guinea experiments representing anthropological thought as “reciprocity perspectives” that helped to inspire the “ontological turn” well r...

The growing interest in public sociologies marks an increasing gap between the ethos of sociologists and social, political, and economic tendencies in the wider society. Public sociology aims to enrich public debate about moral and political issues by infusing them with sociological theory and research. It has to be distinguished from policy, professional, and critical sociologies. Together the...

ion today is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it. Henceforth, it is the map that precedes the territory precession of simulacra it is the map that ...