the study of “context” has obtained a significant place in contemporary linguistic studies and many linguistic scholars, both in early and modern times, spent much effort on this domain until it became a fully-fledged theory by the english scholar firth. in the past, scholars paid attention to the “context” and its effect on the meaning studied the conditions surrounding the speech cont...

1. Meanings are a " terrible " problem for science Unlike philosophers, who rely only on conceptual analysis, reasoning, and discussion with other philosophers, both living and dead, scientists must ultimately judge the goodness of their theories and hypotheses by comparing these theories and hypotheses with systematically and objectively observed empirical phenomena. Hence, the possibility of ...

the implication of transposition in the structure of positive and negative sentences has been studied from the point of abd al-qāhir al-jurjānī's view in present essay. transposition is a rhetorical subject being discussed in generative-transformative grammar. jurjānī believed that words set in order in a sentence on the basis of their meanings, and emphasized that if the order of words in...

Abstract This paper argues, first, that the information problem poses a foundational challenge to mainstream semantics. It proposes, second, address this by drawing on notions from Kit Fine’s essentialist framework. More specifically, it claims can be avoided strengthening standard truth theories, employing an operator expressing notion of relative constitutive semantic requirement . As result,...

Quantitative analysis has usually highlighted the random nature of linguistic forms (Zipf, 1949). We zoom in on three structured samples of language (numerals; playing cards; and a corpus of artificial languages from Kirby, Cornish & Smith 2008) to quantitative explore and illustrate the idea that linguistic forms are nonrandom in that their structure reflects the structure of the meanings they...

From a plausible cognitive hypothesis explaining how little children develop complex meaning structures, we come to the conclusion that linguistic meanings are planned. The plans, we call them discourse plans, are tree-like structures composed of primitive situations and establishing referential links between the situations and the context. Linguistic meanings are second order Lambda-terms deri...

According to G. Leech’s classification of meaning, the denotative meaning of a word is different from its connotative one. The denotation of a linguistic sign may be the same in different languages, but their connotations may be quite different. The paper makes a contrastive analysis of the connotative meaning of linguistic signs in English and Chinese, such as Color terms, Kinship terms, Anima...