this article examines the mu‘tazilite qādī ‘abd al-jabbār’s views on the denotation of miracles according to his own particular methodology. despite his acceptance of the celebrated method of the theologians in the denotation of miracles with respect to the authenticity of prophets, i.e., resorting to divine wisdom, qādī ‘abd al-jabbār instead proposed the issue within the structure of conven...

This paper presents a semiotic technique as a means of exploring meaning and understanding in interface design and use. This is examined through a study of the interaction between the ‘file’ metaphor and ‘save as’ command metaphor. The behaviour of these (from a functional or computational basis) do not exactly match, or map onto, the meaning of the metaphor. We examine both the denotation of a...

Semantic parsers translate language utterances to programs, but are often trained from utterance-denotation pairs only. Consequently, parsers must overcome the problem of spuriousness at training time, where an incorrect program found at search time accidentally leads to a correct denotation. We propose that in small well-typed domains, we can semi-automatically generate an abstract representat...

This paper considers the link between lexical category and lexical semantics, examining variation in the category of property concept (PC) words (Dixon, 1982; Thompson, 1989)—words introducing the descriptive content in translational equivalents of sentences whose main predicate is an adjective in languages with large open classes of them. Francez and Koontz-Garboden (2015) conjecture that nomi...

Henkin, Monk and Tarski gave a compositional semantics for first-order predicate logic. We extend this work by including function symbols in the language and by giving the denotation of the atomic formula as a composition of the denotations of its predicate symbol and of its tuple of arguments. In addition we give the denotation of a term as a composition of the denotations of its function symb...

Although some words may be considered to have similar meanings, they cannot be substituted for one anothel without changing the message. Words with similar meanings have similar denotations . Often, however, words with a similar denotation do not have the same connotations. “Denote implies all that strictly belongs to the definition of the word, connote aU of the ideas that are suggested by the...

the characteristic of denotation (imāra) is its typical speculative exposition (kāshifiyyat), for which the legislator devises validity in respect to this characteristic. in contrast to it is the practical principle that is not concerned with reality and is used simply for getting rid of confusion in practice. in the meantime, the confirming principle (aṣli muḥriz) is set forth, which both enjo...