In this paper, we present a new approach to the syntax and semantics of wh-questions. On the basis of an appropriate type hierarchy whose members model contributions of lexical items to sentence mood, we introduce a head-interrogative schema that licences wh-sentences syntactically and contributes the semantic interrogative operator. This syntactic basis allows the compositional construction of...

This paper shows that there are some syntactic and semantic discrepancies among three seemingly semantically equivalent verbs denoting one of the most basic actions in any language, i.e. the verbs meaning ‘kill’ in English, Chinese and Thai. Specifically, it examines the possibility of these verbs to appear in two syntactic patterns in which English is used as the metalanguage: (A) X kill Y dea...

In Anglophone public discourse, the word crisis plays a significant role in discussion of critical events and situations across wide range domains. This paper discusses word’s status as keyword mainstream unpacks its semantic contents through natural semantics metalanguage corpus-assisted collocational analysis, explores ideological cultural assumptions underpinning usage. It finds that idea “g...

Convention dictates that the design of a language begins with its syntax. The authors of this chapter argue that early emphasis should be placed instead on the identification of general, compositional semantic domains, and that grounding the design process in semantics leads to languages with more consistent and more extensible syntax. They demonstrate this semantics-driven design process throu...

This paper is a contribution to the reconstruction of Tarski’s semantic background and to the history of metalanguage and truth. Although in his 1933 monograph Tarski credits his master, Stanisław Leśniewski, with crucial negative results on the semantics of natural language, the conceptual relationship between the two logicians has never been investigated in a thorough manner. This paper shows...

One of the problems with contemporary semantic theories of natural language, such as Situation Semantics, Discourse Representation Theory and Dynamic Semantics, is that although they address similar semantic phenomena their widely diiering syntax and semantics make it diicult to compare their treatments of similar natural language semantic phenomena. It would be useful to describe these diieren...

A pervasive challenge in programming theory and practice are feature combinations. Here, we propose a semantic framework that combines monad-based computational effects (e.g. store, nondeterminism, random), underdefined or free operations (e.g. actions in process algebra and automata, exceptions), and recursive definitions (e.g. loops, systems of process equations). The joint treatment of these...

In this paper, the author proposes Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) semantic decompositions of four difficult-to-translate quranic Arabic words using (Goddard Wierzbicka 2014, 2021). This is first study to propose an explicit explication these core Islamic lexical items, which are foundational for spiritual worldview almost two billion followers Islam in world today. The word considered ras?...

Following Adam Smith’s line of argument, we examine the semantics four economic principles in Chapter III Wealth Nations that compose his famous proposition “that division labour is limited by extent market.” We apply Natural Semantic Metalanguage framework linguistics to produce a series explications are clear and plain, cross-translatable into any language, intelligible twenty-first-century r...