Event-related potentials (ERPs) were used to investigate the time-course of meaning activation of different types of ambiguous words. Unbalanced homonymous ("pen"), balanced homonymous ("panel"), metaphorically polysemous ("lip"), and metonymically polysemous words ("rabbit") were used in a visual single-word priming delayed lexical decision task. The theoretical distinction between homonymy an...

Ideologies use for their conservation and propagation persuasive methods of communication: Rhetoric. Rhetoric is analyzed from the semiotic and logical-mathematical points of view. The following hypotheses are established: 1) Language L is a self-explanatory system, mediated by a successive series of systems of cultural conventions. 2) Connotative significances of an ideological advertising rhe...

In this paper, we propose a frame-based approach to polysemy by analyzing three near-synonymous verbs biaoshi (表示), biaoda (表達) and biaolu (表露). Based on Liu and Wu (2004), this paper further discusses the cross-frame phenomena of near-synonyms with a detailed comparison of their syntactic and collocational patterns. It is shown that polysemy among related verbs may be well defined and manifest...

Based on psychological studies which show that metaphors and other non-literal constructions are comprehended in the same amount of time as comparable literal constructions, some researchers have concluded that literal meaning is not computed during comprehension of non-literal constructions. In this paper, we suggest that the empirical evidence does not rule out the possibility that literal me...

A statistical analysis of polysemy in sixteen English and French dictionaries has revealed that, in each dictionary, the number of senses per word has a near-exponential distribution. A probabilistic model of historical semantics is presented which explains this distribution. This mathematical model also provides a means of estimating the average number of distinct concepts per word, which was ...

The theory of blended spaces of Fauconnier and Turner (1994,1998), also known as the many-space model of conceptual integration, is a bold new theory in cognitive science that unifies metaphor, analogy, metonymy and conceptual combination within a framework of interconnected mental spaces. Through an analysis of cinematic pastiche, a form of creative reuse and structural blending in the develop...

Hierarchy building from dictionaries and free texts is often viewed as an application of NLP for domain modeling. The reversal (i.e. building and using such hierarchy for Word Sense Disambiguation) is also definitively useful in NLP. Indeed, we do observe that, even in very specialized texts, polysemous terms as well as blurring linguistic phenomena like metonymy or metaphor are frequent. Conce...