The Semantics Of I Am

Sometimes the events of life can leave us resigned to feeling trapped within a seemingly inescapable maze of intolerable suffering. A constant struggle with challenges can be a sign of living from the ego. The good news is that there are ways to transform an attitude from ego limitation to one of infinite possibilities and abundance. In a guide to improving the whole self, Geoff Keall interweaves personal stories inspired by his family’s recovery from generational childhood sexual assault with practical wisdom to guide others through a simple formula that encourages a change in perspective to escape limiting views and constant mental chatter and move toward greater self-awareness in all areas of life. Through his insight and tips, others will learn how to: • overcome early misunderstandings to eliminate anxiety, fears, and frustration; • quiet self-defeating mind chatter; • create abundance from thoughts; and • live in a state of grace and calm. The Semantics of i AM shares personal anecdotes, tips, and revelations that reveal a different way of thinking that leads to inner peace and a better view of what it means to be alive.

The Semantics of Science proposes a radical new rethinking of science and scientific discourse. Roy Harris argues that supercategories such as science, art, religion and history are themselves verbal constructs, and thus language-dependent. Because each supercategory is constructed differently, it is necessary to pay attention to the linguistic process by which a discourse such as 'science' has developed. Through this view it is possible to observe that the function of the supercategory is to integrate what would otherwise be separate activities and enquiries, and the result of this integration is therefore a re-drawing of the intellectual world that society as a whole adopts. In the course of his study of The Semantics of Science Roy Harris looks at the history and development of scientific discourse to show through language that what is meant by science has changed since it was first theorised by the Greeks. Harris traces the semantic development of 'science' through the years of the Royal Society to the present day, moving on to an analysis of rhetoric, mathematics, common sense and finally the supercategory of semantics. This lucidly written yet radical new theory on the language of science will be fascinating reading for academics and students researching semantics, semiotics or applied linguistics.

This book elucidates the nature of the semantics / pragmatics distinction in both synchrony and diachrony and proposes a definition of semantics and pragmatics that is orthogonal to the question of truth-conditionality. A corollary aim of the study is to propose an account of how and why erstwhile pragmatically-determined elements of meaning may, in the course of time, become semanticized.

“The semantics of grammar” presents a radically semantic approach to syntax and morphology. It offers a methodology which makes it possible to demonstrate, on an empirical basis, that syntax is neither “autonomous” nor “arbitrary”, but that it follows from “semantics”. It is shown that every grammatical construction encodes a certain semantic structure, which can be revealed and rigorously stated, so that the meanings encoded in grammar can be compared in a precise and illuminating way, within one language and across language boundaries. The author develops a semantic metalanguage based on lexical universals or near-universals (and, ultimately, on a system of universal semantic primitives), and shows that the same semantic metalanguage can be used for explicating lexical, grammatical and pragmatic aspects of language and thus offers a method for an integrated linguistic description based on semantic foundations. Analyzing data from a number of different languages (including English, Russian and Japanese) the author explores the notion of ethnosyntax and, via semantics, links syntax and morphology with culture. She attemps to demonstrate that the use of a semantic metalanguage based on lexical universals makes it possible to rephrase the Humboldt-Sapir-Whorf hypothesis in such a way that it can be tested and treated as a program for empirical research.

The papers in this volume investigate the semantics of aspect from both a theoretical and a crosslinguistic point of view, in a wide range of languages from a number of different language families. The papers are all informed by the belief that a thorough exposure to the expression of aspect crosslinguistically is crucial for progress in understanding how the semantics of aspect works and what the semantic basis of aspectual distinctions is. The languages discussed include Russian, English, Dutch, Hebrew, Mandarin, Japanese and Kalaallisut. The issues discussed in this volume include the centrality of measuring and counting in an understanding of telicity; the importance of the singular/plural distinction in the study of aspect; the importance of homogeneity as a property of event types; the flexibility of lexical classes; and the interaction between expressions of aspect and the particular morphosyntactic structure of a language.

In this book, Michael Blome-Tillmann offers a critical overview of the current debate on the semantics of knowledge attributions. The book is divided into five parts. Part 1 introduces the reader to the literature on 'knowledge' attributions by outlining the historical roots of the debate andproviding an in-depth discussion of epistemic contextualism. After examining the advantages and disadvantages of the view, Part 2 offers a detailed investigation of epistemic impurism (or pragmatic encroachment views), while Part 3 is devoted to a careful examination of epistemic relativism and Part4 to two different types of strict invariantism (psychological and pragmatic). The final part of the book explores Presuppositional Epistemic Contextualism - a version of contextualism that is argued to provide a more powerful and elegant account of the semantics of 'knowledge' attributions thanmany of its competitors. A clear and precise account is provided of the main principles underlying each view and of how they aim to explain the pertinent data and resolve philosophical puzzles and challenges. The book also provides charts outlining the relations between the positions discussed andoffers suggestions for further reading.

It is well-known that derivational affixes can be highly polysemous, producing a range of different, often related, meanings. For example, English deverbal nouns with the suffix -er can denote instruments (opener), agents (writer), locations (diner), or patients (loaner). It is commonly assumed that this polysemy arises through a compositional process in which the affix interacts with the semantics of the base. Yet, despite intensive research in recent years, a workable model for this interaction is still under debate. In order to study and model the semantic contributions of the base and of the affix, a framework is needed in which meanings can be composed and decomposed. In this book, I formalize the semantic input and output of derivation by means of frames, that is, recursive attribute-value structures that serve to model mental representations of concepts. In my approach, the input frame offers an array of semantic elements from which an affix may select to construct the derivative's meaning. The relationship between base and derivative is made explicit by integrating their respective frame-semantic representations into lexical rules and inheritance hierarchies. I apply this approach to a qualitative corpus study of the productive relationship between the English nominalizing suffix -ment and a semantically delimited set of verbal bases. My data set consists of 40 neologisms with base verbs from two semantic classes, namely change-of-state verbs and verbs of psychological state. I analyze 369 attestations which were elicited from various corpora with a purposeful sampling approach, and which were hand-coded using common semantic categories such as event, state, patient and stimulus. My results show that -ment can target a systematically restricted set of elements in the frame of a given base verb. It thereby produces a range of possible readings in each derivative, which becomes ultimately interpretable only within a specific context. The derivational process is governed by an interaction of the semantic elements provided by the base on the one hand, with properties of the affix (e.g. -ment's aversion to [+animate] readings) on the other. For instance, a shift from the verb annoy to a result-state reading in annoyment is possible because the input frame of verbs of psychological state offers a RESULT-STATE attribute, which, as is fixed in the inheritance hierarchy, is compatible with -ment. Meanwhile, a shift from annoy to an experiencer reading in annoyment fails because the value range of the attribute EXPERIENER is fixed to [+animate] entities, so that -ment's animacy constraint blocks the inheritance mechanism. Furthermore, a quantitative exploration of my data set reveals a likely blocking effect for some -ment readings. Thus, while I have found most expected combinations of nominalization and reading attested, there are pronounced gaps for readings like instrument or stimulus. Such readings are likely to be produced by standardly subject-denoting suffixes such as -er or -ant, which may reduce the probability for -ment derivation. The quantitative analysis furthermore shows that, within the subset of attested combinations, ambiguity is widespread, with 43% of all combinations of nominalization and reading being only attested ambiguously. This book shows how a derivational process acts on the semantics of a given verbal base by reporting on an in-depth qualitative study of the semantic contributions of both the base and the affix. Furthermore, it demonstrates that an explicit semantic decomposition of the base is essential for the analysis of the resulting derivative's semantics.