The notion of context unavoidably plays a role in theories of meaning. In the "folk linguistics" that we all learn along with the difference between adverbs and adjectives, prefixes and suffixes, it is a commonplace, for example, that context can influence the meanings of pronouns. In the sentence 'John just sold his car' the context lets us know that it is John's car that was sold—that the pro...

This article concerns the general functional features of an adjective in modern English, and in particular multistate lexical item “just”, which carries different meanings in different variants of combinatorics. The authors analyze the combinations used with the adjectival lexeme item “just” and reveal the categories that determine the degree of semantic content of each given statement. The nee...

In learning the meanings of words, children are guided by a set of constraints that give privilege to some potential meanings over others. These word-learning constraints are sometimes viewed as part of a specifically linguistic endowment. However, several recent computational models suggest concretely how word-learning - constraints included - might emerge from more general aspects of cognitio...

Rabinow starts his search for new anthropological methods with the question of what the contemporary is. He identifies two meanings. The first is the ordinary English-language meaning: contemporary means that something occurs at the same period of time as something else. The issue is not when something happened, but that it happened at the same period of time. Cicero was the contemporary of Cae...

The GovStat Statistical Interactive Glossary (SIG) is intended to allow users of federal statistical agency websites to look up meanings of statistical terms they encounter on the websites without interrupting their tasks. This kind of just-in-time, just-inplace help is one approach to integrating help with users’ tasks as seamlessly as possible. We discuss implications of an evaluation study o...