Some Muslim thinkers have had disagreements over the use of the word “‘ishq” in religious texts since many years ago. The main claim made by those who prohibit the use of this word for the sacred associations such as God, the Prophet (s), and Imāms is that the meaning of this word is appropriate only to the material and carnal issues and so, it has not been used in religious texts and its conce...

Recapitulation of Lecture 1 Aim of semantics and pragmatics: to give us a theory of linguistic meaning. Semantics: literal non-situation specific meaning of words + the meaning of the way words are combined = the starting point from which the whole meaning of utterance is constructed. Pragmatics: the meaning the speaker intends to communicate in a particular utterance. One of the questions sema...

In their commentary on our paper (Soja, Carey, & Spelke, 1991), Landau, Jones and Smith (1992) (hereafter LJS) clarify the position taken by Landau, Smith, and Jones (1988), and briefly describe results from several subsequent papers. As they describe their research program, they are concerned with the relations between the syntactic category of a newly heard word (count noun, adjective, prepos...

In linguistics, context carries tremendous importance in disambiguation of meanings as well as in understanding the actual meaning of words. Therefore, understanding the context becomes an important task in the area of applied linguistics, computational linguistics, lexical semantics, cognitive linguistics, as well as in other areas of linguistics as context triggers variation of meaning and su...

Children face ve central diiculties when learning the vocabulary of their native language: learning from multi-word utterances, bootstrapping from an empty mental lexicon, referential uncertainty, noise, and homonymy. These diiculties are modeled formally via a simpliied lexical acquisition task called the mapping problem. Algorithms for solving this mapping problem are developed, based on the ...

In this paper, we explore the interaction between lexical semantics and pragmatics. Linguistic processing is informationally encapsulated and utilises relatively simple ‘taxonomic’ lexical semantic knowledge. On this basis, defeasible lexical generalisations deliver defeasible parts of logical form. In contrast, pragmatics is open-ended and involves arbitrary knowledge. Two axioms specify when ...

In this paper, we outline a model of semantics that integrates aspects of discourse-sensitive logics with the compositional mechanisms available from lexically-driven semantic interpretation. Specifically, we concentrate on developing a composition logic required to properly model complex types within the Generative Lexicon (henceforth GL), for which we employ SDRT principles. As we are present...

Word sense disambiguation (WSD) is an old and important task in computational linguistics that still remains challenging, to machines as well as to human annotators. Recently there have been several proposals for representing word meaning in context that diverge from the traditional use of a single best sense for each occurrence. They represent word meaning in context through multiple paraphras...

Processes of word meaning generation, word association and understanding are known to be impaired in schizophrenia and related diseases. Word meaning selection requires the involvement of prefrontal cortex and processes of working memory and selective attention. Under the dopaminergic hypothesis of schizophrenia, the normal neuromodulatory activation of prefrontal cortex for the performance of ...

How do native speakers interpret new words when they read or hear them? How much help and what kind of help are they given by the immediate context in which the new word occurs? These are questions which we set out to investigate on the basis of a large corpus of newspaper English. We were working within the framework of the APRIL project, which is a three year, EPSRC-funded research project ai...