Languages, Misc

In Kalaallisut (Eskimo-Aleut:Greenland) verbs inflect for illocutionary mood (declarative, interrogative, imperative, or optative). In addition, the language has an evidential (reportative) clitic which is compatible with all illocutionary moods and gives rise to a variety of readings. These<br>lecture notes exemplify the attested combinations and readings by means of a representative sample of mini-discourses and mini-dialogs.

to appear in Lisa Matthewson (ed.), Cross-linguistic perspectives on the semantics of quantification, Elsevier.

Conceptual engineers seek to revise or replace the devices we use to speak and think. If this amounts to an effort to change what natural language expressions mean, conceptual engineers will have a hard time. It is largely unfeasible to change the meaning of e.g. ‘cause’ in English. Conceptual engineers may therefore seem unable to make the changes they aim to make. This is what I call ‘the implementation problem’. In this paper, I argue that the implementation problem dissolves if (...) we expand our view of how conceptual engineers could implement the products of their work. I describe four implementation options: Standing Meaning, Meaning Modulation, Speaker-Meaning and Different Language. I query the feasibility and worth of pursuing these options. Unless each option fails because it is unfeasible or not worthwhile, conceptual engineers do not face an implementation problem worth worrying about. I argue that some of the options are feasible and worthwhile, and therefore, that conceptual engineers do not face an implementation problem worth worrying about. (shrink)

In this paper, we investigate the possibility of translating a fragment of natural deduction system (NDS) for natural language semantics into modern type theory (MTT), originally suggested by Luo (2014). Our main goal will be to examine and translate the basic rules of NDS (namely, meta-rules, structural rules, identity rules, noun rules and rules for intersective and subsective adjectives) to MTT. Additionally, we will also consider some of their general features.

Статтю присвячено проблемі функціонування білінгвізму та диглосії у столиці України. На матеріалах декількох опитувань проаналізовано тенденції використання української та російської мов у формальному і неформальному спілкуванні киян. Результати засвідчили помітне зростання обсягу української мови у столиці від початку ХХІ ст. і до сьогодні, проте вона все ще залишається на периферії багатьох сфер суспільного життя, особливо неформального.

The paper addresses the issues about grammatical intuitions in a programmatic sketch. The first part deals with epistemology of such intuitions and defends a moderate Voice-of-competence view in discussion with Michael Devitt, the ordinarist, who sees them as products of general intelligence or Central Processing Unit. The second part deals with the problem for their validity and offers a compromise solution: linguistic intuitions are valid because their object the standard linguistic entities, are production- and response-dependent. Competence does dictate what is (...) correct, and what is not, the order of determination goes from the internal to the external, or external-seeming language items. An external token string has linguistic properties because it would be interpreted as having them by the normal language-hearer and would be produced by a process that would form it respecting the nature of these properties. The solution is briefly situated on the map of general response-dependentism. (shrink)

I confront arbitrariness of the sign to a criterion assessing the quality of language, logical system, psychometrics and art.

У статті здійснено аналіз понять комунікативної тактики, схарактеризовано білінгвальність комунікативної тактики у текстах українськомовного маркетингового дискурсу на матеріалі українських веб-ресурсів.

In this paper, after outlining the methodological role Wittgenstein's appeal to language-games is supposed to play, I examine the picture of language which his discussion of such games and their relations to what Wittgenstein calls forms of life suggests. It is a picture according to which language and its employment are inextricably connected to wider contexts—they are embedded in specific natural and social environments, they are tied to purposive activities serving provincial needs, and caught up in distinctive ways of life (...) which creatures of a certain sort enjoy. In the remainder of the paper, I consider whether Wittgenstein's emphasis on the link between language and the circumstances surrounding its use points in the direction of an influential view widespread in contemporary philosophy of language, namely, semantic contextualism. I examine carefully a number of passages which scholars have appealed to in support of the claim that Wittgenstein advances contextualism and argue that they in fact provide no such support. The connection which Wittgenstein sees between what is expressed in the use of words and the circumstances in which they are used is not the connection the contextualist insists on. (shrink)

Dieser Band befasst sich mit einem wichtigen Aspekt der Ars didactica: Er diskutiert zwar keine neuen „Übersetzungsmethoden“, will aber dazu anregen, das Übersetzen als eine unverzichtbare Kulturtechnik zu lehren und zu lernen. Er will dazu ermuntern, das Übersetzen nicht auf die informationstheoretischen bzw. nachrichtentechnischen Vorgänge des Rekodierens und Dekodierens zu reduzieren, sondern als eine anspruchsvolle und bisweilen auch kreative Leistung ernst zu nehmen, seine ästhetische Dimension nicht aus den Augen zu verlieren und den Respekt vor dem Original erkennen zu lassen.

Journal Name: Cognitive Linguistics Issue: Ahead of print.

Much of the scholarship in the history of science has undervalued the significance of the debates around language choice and language use. After surveying various historiographical trends characterizing the relationship of science to language, this introduction explores the role of language-choice in nation-building, education, publication and transnational exchanges. It concludes with a brief summary of the four case studies in this special issue, which explore the German, Greek, English and Russian languages in the context of the sciences in nineteenth-century Europe.

In the first part of this paper, I will briefly introduce the concept of incongruity and its relation to humor and seriousness, connecting the ideas of Arthur Schopenhauer and the contemporary work of John Morreall. I will reveal some of the relations between Schopenhauer's notion of "seriousness" and the existentialists such as Jean Paul Sartre, Simone Be Beauvoir, and Lewis Gordon. In section II, I will consider the relationship between playfulness and incongruity, noting the role that enjoyment of incongruity plays (...) in creative, non-dogmatic thinking. In section III, I will critique Morreall's arguments against the efficacy of humor as a means of serious protest, analyzing the complex relationship between the ambiguous terms "seriousness" and "playfulness". In the final section, I contend that Morreall's conception of humor, with which I generally agree, fails to adequately address subversive humor. He is cognizant of the benefits of a humorous attitude and of the work of rebellious groups who use humor, but his insistence that the play mode of humor precludes emotional attachment and practical concern, renders his philosophical analysis of humor far less comprehensive than his title suggests. I will make the case, contra Morreall, and he is the most prominent of many humor theorists who make similar points, that some humor in play mode is non-existentially, non-gravely serious, and intends to do more than simply "delight" audiences; the subversive humorist, in particular, is attempting to disclose and transmit information in such a way as to create change in both attitudes and practical social interactions. (shrink)

Wortschatzlernen fällt Lateinschülern meist recht schwer: Dies liegt nicht zuletzt an der Komplexität des Lernprozesses und der semantischen Unschärfe von Lexemen. Im praktischen Lateinunterricht sollten daher mehr motivierende Wortschatzübungen integriert werden, die zu einer vertieften Semantisierung neuer und alter Vokabeln führen. Auf den Prüfstand gehört das aktuell verbreitete Quantum des lateinischen Lernwortschatzes.

The paper addresses the situation of a dispute in which one speaker says ϕ and a second speaker says not-ϕ. Proceeding on an idealising distinction between "basic" and "interesting" claims that may be formulated in a given idiolectal language, I investigate how it might be sorted out whether the dispute reflects a genuine disagreement, or whether the speakers are only having a merely verbal dispute, due to their using different interesting concepts. I show that four individually plausible principles for the (...) determination of the nature of a dispute are incompatible. As an example, I discuss the question whether Sarai lied in the story told in Genesis 12. (shrink)

The focus of the article is the role of the Russian language in the world system of languages, the current status of the Russian language and the language policy measures that should be taken to preserve the Russian language and for the strengthening of its positions. The law ‘On the state language of the Russian Federation‘ adopted in 2005 should be supplemented by the list of grammar books and dictionaries of various types as listed in the appendixes to the article. (...) The main actions aimed at ensuring the effective functioning of the law ‘On the state language of the Russian Federation‘ are also enlisted in the article. (shrink)

The modern world is multicultural and multilingual, it creates difficulties for the mutual contacts of the nations with different languages. The problem of overcoming the language barrier in a multilingual world is urgent. One of the best ways to solve this problem is bilingualism: possession of two languages, a native and a second one, generally intermediate language. The choice of the intermediate language is determined by socio-political and socio-economic conditions of contacting people. In a multinational state official language of the (...) country serves as an intermediate language. In the multi-ethnic Russian Federation, Russian language chosen as the intermediate language, by which representatives of different nationalities come into contact with each other. National-Russian bilingualism in the Russian Federation has become a mass phenomenon: all non-Russian population in varying degrees is fluent in Russian language. Further improvement of bilingualism at the present stage is solved in the new format - as an active bilingualism. In an active and harmonious bilingualism, languages distribute responsibilities among themselves: native language and intermediate language perform different public functions and the number of functions is usually not equal, one language performs more functions than the other does. It depends on the status of the language: the higher the status of the language, the more reason a speaker has for its extensive use in different areas of communication. Harmonious bilingualism helps to keep the national identity of each language and makes it possible to operate each of them on an equal footing in a multicultural space. Among the many politically and legally equal languages of the Russian Federation, a special place belongs to the Russian language: it performs a consolidating function, combines the languages of the nations of Great Russia into one united family. Multilingual Russia can be compared with a starry firmament. The more bright stars we can see, the more beautiful the starry sky is. The star of the Russian language in the sky shines especially bright. (shrink)

This paper presents a simple model to estimate the number of languages that existed throughout history, and considers philosophical and linguistic implications of the findings. The estimated number is 150,000 plus or minus 50,000. Because only few of those remain, and there is no reason to believe that that remainder is a statistically representative sample, we should be very cautious about universalistic claims based on existing linguistic variation.

Two different conceptions of language dominate philosophical reflection on the nature of human language and of human linguistic powers. The first is the conception of language as a calculus of meaning, and of understanding as computational interpretation. This conception is rooted in the exigencies of function-theoretic logic. The notions pivotal to this conception are truth, truth-condition, sense and force, naming and describing (representation), and theory of meaning for natural languages. The alternative conception is an anthropological one, which conceives of language (...) above all as a form of human communicative behaviour, constituted by human practices and manifest in human action. The notions pivotal to this conception are practice, language-game, use and rule of use as given by explanations of meaning, understanding and criteria of understanding. The fundamental principles that inform each of these conceptions are explained. The radical flaws of calculus conceptions of language are laid bare. (shrink)

This paper will discuss the nature of language. I find the present state of the subject, the Philosophy of Language, and the present state of Lin- guistics to be both, for different reasons, unsatisfactory. The problem with the Philosophy of Language is that its practitioners tend to lose sight of the psy- chological reality of language, i.e. of speaking and writing. Historically this is because the Philosophy of Language began with Frege’s logic and has continued to the present day to (...) be heavily influenced by considerations of formal logic. Logicians need not be interested in the psychological reality of logical systems. Frege’s logical system is much more powerful than Aristotle’s, but for all I know Aristotle may be closer to the way people actually think. It does not matter to logicians. (shrink)

Formal semantic analyses often take words to be minimal building blocks for the purposes of compositionality. But various recent theories of morphology and syntax have converged on the view that there is no demarcation line corresponding to the word level. The same conclusion has emerged from the compositional semantics of superlatives. In the spirit of extending compositionality below the word level, this paper explores how a small set of particles (Japanese KA and MO, Chinese DOU, and Hungarian VALA/VAGY, MIND, and (...) IS) form quantifier words and serve as connectives, additive and scalar particles, question markers, and existential verbs. The main question is whether the meanings of these particles across the varied environments are highly regular, or they are lexicalized with a variety of different meanings that bear a family resemblance. This paper does not reach definitive conclusions, but it raises analytical possibilities using Boolean semantics and the semantics of alternatives. It also draws attention to systematic similarities and some differences between MO and DOU that have not been studied in the literature. (shrink)

Philosophical Perspectives: Philosophy of Language brings together state of the art essays to address the key issues at the heart of the philosophy of language, written by some of the top minds in the field.

Taken at face value, a programming language is defined by a formal grammar. But, clearly, there is more to it. By themselves, the naked strings of the language do not determine when a program is correct relative to some specification. For this, the constructs of the language must be given some semantic content. Moreover, to be employed to generate physical computations, a programming language must have a physical implementation. How are we to conceptualize this complex package? Ontologically, what kind of (...) thing is it? In this paper, we shall argue that an appropriate conceptualization is furnished by the notion of a technical artifact. (shrink)

A paradox at the heart of language acquisition research is that, to achieve adult-like competence, children must acquire the ability to generalize verbs into non-attested structures, while avoiding utterances that are deemed ungrammatical by native speakers. For example, children must learn that, to denote the reversal of an action, un- can be added to many verbs, but not all (e.g., roll/unroll; close/*unclose). This study compared theoretical accounts of how this is done. Children aged 5–6 (N = 18), 9–10 (N = (...) 18), and adults (N = 18) rated the acceptability of un- prefixed forms of 48 verbs (and, as a control, bare forms). Across verbs, a negative correlation was observed between the acceptability of ungrammatical un- prefixed forms (e.g., *unclose) and the frequency of (a) the bare form and (b) alternative forms (e.g., open), supporting the entrenchment and pre-emption hypotheses, respectively. Independent ratings of the extent to which verbs instantiate the semantic properties characteristic of a hypothesized semantic cryptotype for un- prefixation were a significant positive predictor of acceptability, for all age groups. The relative importance of each factor differed for attested and unattested un- forms and also varied with age. The findings are interpreted in the context of a new hybrid account designed to incorporate the three factors of entrenchment, pre-emption, and verb semantics. (shrink)

Information Communication Technologies (ICTs) have transformed education by making information available to learners like never before. However, ICT’s are less successful in making information accessible, and even less so in making it usable. This paper argues that, while availability and accessibility are issues on the side of the providers, the usability and comprehension of accessible information are, in the final analysis, issues that involve the education of ICT users. For this reason, the paper concludes that the demand for e-ducators will (...) become ever more critical. -/- . (shrink)

_Dark Tongues _constitutes a sustained exploration of a perplexing fact that has never received the attention it deserves. Wherever human beings share a language, they also strive to make from it something new: a cryptic idiom, built from the grammar that they know, which will allow them to communicate in secrecy. Such hidden languages come in many shapes. They may be playful or serious, children's games or adults' work. They may be as impenetrable as foreign tongues, or slightly different from (...) the idioms from which they spring, or barely perceptible, their existence being the subject of uncertain, even unlikely, suppositions. The first recorded jargons date to the time of the Renaissance, when writers across Europe noted that obscure languages had suddenly come into use. A varied cast of characters -- lawyers, grammarians, and theologians -- denounced these new forms of speech, arguing that they were tools of crime, plotted in tongues that honest people could not understand. Before the emergence of these modern jargons, however, the artificial twisting of languages served a different purpose. In epochs and regions as diverse as archaic Greece and Rome and medieval Provence and Scandinavia, singers and scribes also invented opaque varieties of speech. They did so not to defraud, but to reveal and record a divine thing: the language of the gods, which poets and priests alone were said to master. _Dark Tongues _moves among these various artificial and hermetic tongues. From criminal jargons to sacred idioms, from Saussure's work on anagrams to Jakobson's theory of subliminal patterns in poetry, from the arcane arts of the Druids and Biblical copyists to the secret procedure that Tristan Tzara, founder of Dada, believed he had uncovered in Villon's songs and ballads, Dark Tongues explores the common crafts of rogues and riddlers, which play sound and sense against each other. (shrink)

The essays collected in this volume take a new look at the role of language in the thought of Martin Heidegger to reassess its significance for contemporary philosophy. They consider such topics as Heidegger’s engagement with the Greeks, expression in language, poetry, the language of art and politics, and the question of truth. Heidegger left his unique stamp on language, giving it its own force and shape, especially with reference to concepts such as Dasein, understanding, and attunement, which have a (...) distinctive place in his philosophy. (shrink)

Context: Non-dualism suggests a new way of utilizing language without the assumption of categorically extralinguistic objects denoted by language. Problem: What is the innovative potential, what is the special value of non-dualism for science? Is non-dualism a fruitful conceptual revision or just a philosophical thought experiment with no or little significance for science? Method: We provide a concise introduction to non-dualism’s central new proposals and an overview of the papers. Results: Fourteen contributors show how this way of thinking and speaking (...) can be operationalized creatively, but also address some of its boundaries. Implications: Since not all of the aspects and problems highlighted for discussion in the original Call for Papers were answered satisfactorily, further research is necessary. For example, research is needed on the relationship between dualism’s distinction between object language and metalanguage on the one hand and non-dualism’s distinction between descriptions so far and descriptions from now on on the other; or on the infinite regress allegations by non-dualism against dualism. Constructivist content: Some authors show that non-dualist thinking is anti-essentialist, in a similar way as constructivist thinking. Some also show that comparable questions arise; for example, the question of whether non-dualism denies the material world (containing extralinguistic objects). (shrink)

Natural languages contain many layers of sequential structure, from the distribution of phonemes within words to the distribution of phrases within utterances. However, most research modeling language acquisition using artificial languages has focused on only one type of distributional structure at a time. In two experiments, we investigated adult learning of an artificial language that contains dependencies between both adjacent and non-adjacent words. We found that learners rapidly acquired both types of regularities and that the strength of the adjacent statistics (...) influenced learning of both adjacent and non-adjacent dependencies. Additionally, though accuracy was similar for both types of structure, participants’ knowledge of the deterministic non-adjacent dependencies was more explicit than their knowledge of the probabilistic adjacent dependencies. The results are discussed in the context of current theories of statistical learning and language acquisition. (shrink)

Introduction -- 1. The settling of a language -- 2. The Whorf hypothesis -- 3. Relativism or a universal theory? -- 4. What does language have to do with logic and mathematics? -- 5. A test bed for grammatical theories -- 6. The Chomsky hierarchy in perpsective -- 7. Reflexivity and identity in language and cognition -- 8. The generalized logic hierarchy and its cognitive implications -- 9. The intensionalization of extensions.

This paper develops a semantic analysis of data like It is getting colder and colder. Their meaning is argued to arise from a combination of a comparative with pluractionality. The analysis is embedded in a general theory of plural predication and pluractionality. It supports a semantic theory involving a family of syntactic plural operators.