Grammar encodes meaning (Wierzbicka 1988). “Grammar is simply the structuring and symbolization of semantic content” (Langacker 1987). Grammatical variation is largely the result of a compromise between the differing requirements for the encoding of both semantic and discourse pragmatic aspects of meaning (Givón 1984). “One should prefer a semantic theory that explains otherwise arbitrary gener...

Literal meaning has been defined as linguistic meaning, i.e., as nonfigurative, coded, fully compositional, context-invariant, explicit, and truth conditional (Katz, Jerrold J., 1977. Propositional structure and illocutionary force. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell). Nonliteral meaning is seen as its counterpart, i.e., as extralinguistic, figurative, indirect, inferred, noncompositional, context-dep...

the phoneme is considered as the  smallest linguistic unit that is used to distinguish words from each other.  relation between phonology and semantics is  placed in the context of relation between signifier and signified. and disagreement  between linguists continue until now. some of them believe that there are functional roles for phonemes in  innovative text. whereas others believe   that t...

The purpose of this study is to analyse how three idioms, in English, French and Swedish, despite different lexical compositions are capable of conveying the same meaning. The idioms in question are a thorn in the side, une épine au pied/dans le pied and en nagel i ögat. This study is concerned with how different metaphorical images are used to express the same meaning. Furthermore, it examines...

Recent research in language and cognitive science proposes that the linguistic system evolved to provide an "executive" control system on the evolutionarily more ancient conceptual system (e.g., Barsalou et al., 2008; Evans, 2009, 2015a,b; Bergen, 2012). In short, the claim is that embodied representations in the linguistic system interface with non-linguistic representations in the conceptual ...

Linguistic encoding is seen as playing a necessary but not solely sufficient role in speaker meaning by philosophers of Ordinary Language, such as Grice and Strawson. Despite wellrehearsed problems with some of Grice's and Strawson's specific theories, this general model has much to recommend it to present day linguistics. Recent accounts have tended either overfly to deny the existence of a co...

Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT, Lakoff & Johnson 1980; Lakoff, 1983, 1987, 1993, 2008, 2009), the most prominent cognitive approach to metaphor comprehension, argues that the nature of interconnections within the conceptual system is inherently metaphoric-analogical and that systematic patterns in linguistic metaphor reveal these cognitive interconnections. Relevance Theory (RT, Sperber & Wils...

The issue of intended meaning is an open problem in the study of linguistic processes. The paper presents a notion of intended meaning based on the idea of speaker’s preference for a state of affairs to which a sentence refers. Its argument has two components. The first is the conception of meaning developed by analytic philosophy of language; that is, the meaning of a sentence depends on the t...

What is the relevant unit for a linguistic analysis? We have gradually extended the context seen as necessary for explicating linguistic phenomena from the syntacticians’ S, to the larger linguistic text (see [Halliday and Hasan, 1976], [Stalnaker, 1978], [Gazdar, 1979]), and even to encyclopedic, general knowledge stored in our memory ([Prince, 1981b], [Clark and Marshall, 1981]). The relevanc...