The Conceptual Basis Of Language

In this volume, the author deals explicitly and literally with the speech-thought relationship. Departing boldly from contemporary linguistic and psycholinguistic thinking, the author offers us one of the truly serious efforts since Vygotsky to deal with this question. A unifying theme is the organization of action, and speech is seen as growing out of sensory-motor representations that are simultaneously part of meaning and part of action.

This book discusses the development of a theory of info-statics as a sub-theory of the general theory of information. It describes the factors required to establish a definition of the concept of information that fixes the applicable boundaries of the phenomenon of information, its linguistic structure and scientific applications. The book establishes the definitional foundations of information and how the concepts of uncertainty, data, fact, evidence and evidential things are sequential derivatives of information as the primary category, which is a property of matter and energy. The sub-definitions are extended to include the concepts of possibility, probability, expectation, anticipation, surprise, discounting, forecasting, prediction and the nature of past-present-future information structures. It shows that the factors required to define the concept of information are those that allow differences and similarities to be established among universal objects over the ontological and epistemological spaces in terms of varieties and identities. These factors are characteristic and signal dispositions on the basis of which general definitional foundations are developed to construct the general information definition (GID). The book then demonstrates that this definition is applicable to all types of information over the ontological and epistemological spaces. It also defines the concepts of uncertainty, data, fact, evidence and knowledge based on the GID. Lastly, it uses set-theoretic analytics to enhance the definitional foundations, and shows the value of the theory of info-statics to establish varieties and categorial varieties at every point of time and thus initializes the construct of the theory of info-dynamics.

One of the common frustrations for students trying to make sense of the various debates and concepts that inform contemporary educational and social science research methods such as structuralism, postpositivism, hermeneutics, and postmodernism is that most books introducing these topics are written at a level that assumes the reader comes to this material with a basic grasp of the underlying ideas. Too often, fundamental concepts and theories are presented without adequate preparation and without providing practical examples to illustrate key elements. When the first edition of "Conceptual Foundations of Social Research Methods" was published, it represented a sharp contrast with these other approaches and received much praise. In this revised and expanded second edition, David Baronov further develops his critically acclaimed treatment of the core conceptual tools of social research informing education and the social sciences, updating his discussion of the current literature, and adding a new chapter that explores the role of pragmatism. Features of the Second Edition"

For many tasks involving communication between humans and computers it is necessary for the machine to produce as well as understand natural language. We describe an implemented system which generates English sentences from Conceptual Dependency networks, which are unambiguous, language-free representations of meaning. The system is designed to be task independent, and thus capable of providing the language generation mechanism for such diverse problem areas as question answering, machine translation, and interviewing.

This volume owes its existance to many different sources and influ ences. It is based on a meeting that took place from April 30 to May 2, 1982 at the University of Technology in Darmstadt. The idea for that meeting came while we were elaborating a research program on concept development and the development of word meaning; we were inspired by Werner Deutsch of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen (The Netherlands) and by the Volkswagen Foundation in Hannover (Federal Republic of Germany) to organize an international conference on the same topic. We set out to invite a long list of colleagues, and we only regret that not all of them were able to attend. This volume should not be viewed as the proceedings of that conference. On the one hand, it does not include all of the papers presented there, and on the other hand, some of our colleagues who were unable to attend were nevertheless willing to write contributions. Furthermore, some who did pre sent papers at the conference revised and reformulated them or even submitted completely new ones for this book. We feel, however, that in the end we have arranged a valuable collection of work in the theory and research of a field that has occupied not only psychologists and linguists, but also philosophers, anthropologists, and many others for a long time.

This book probes the complex methodological choices facing social researchers and students who are applying or learning the methods of social research. The author shows how an understanding of social research requires close consideration of the underlying conceptual frameworks - from neopositivism to structuralism, hermeneutics and anti-foundationalism - that shape how one studies society. Baranov introduces each philosophical tradition and shows how decisions about research design and methodology are affected by them. He also explains the practical and ethical consequences that follow from methodological choices. The book's approach is non-doctrinaire and the prose style is accessible, concrete, and jargon-free.

This volume focuses on innovative approaches to teaching foreign language courses offered to non-language degree students. It includes essays related to the innovative use of ICTs, new developments in methodology, approaches to course and materials design, and the contribution of language theory to foreign language teaching. As the book brings together researchers and practitioners working in a variety of contexts, it provides detailed insight into ways the same challenges are dealt with in different educational environments. The ideas and experiences analysed in this collection of essays will appeal to anyone interested in the current trends in foreign language teaching and learning, particularly educationalists. The best practices in FLT that the book offers will be a source of inspiration for in-service teachers and course designers, while the theoretical backgrounds provided in each chapter will be valuable to pre-service teachers and stimulating to researchers.