Types And Tokens

A consideration of the distinction between the spatiotemporal furniture of the world (tokens) and the types of which they are instances, and an argument that types exist. There is a widely recognized but infrequently discussed distinction between the spatiotemporal furniture of the world (tokens) and the types of which they are instances. Words come in both types and tokens—for example, there is only one word type 'the' but there are numerous tokens of it on this page—as do symphonies, bears, chess games, and many other types of things. In this book, Linda Wetzel examines the distinction between types and tokens and argues that types exist (as abstract objects, since they lack a unique spatiotemporal location). Wetzel demonstrates the ubiquity of references to (and quantifications over) types in science and ordinary language; types have to be reckoned with, and cannot simply be swept under the rug. Wetzel argues that there are such things as types by undermining the epistemological arguments against abstract objects and offering extended original arguments demonstrating the failure of nominalistic attempts to paraphrase away such references to (and quantifications over) types. She then focuses on the relation between types and their tokens, especially for words, showing for the first time that there is nothing that all tokens of a type need have in common other than being tokens of that type. Finally, she considers an often-overlooked problem for realism having to do with types occurring in other types (such as words in a sentence) and proposes an important and original solution, extending her discussion from words and expressions to other types that structurally involve other types (flags and stars and stripes; molecules and atoms; sonatas and notes).

No detailed description available for "Sign, System and Function".

Word grammar is a theory of language structure and is based on the assumption that language, and indeed the whole of knowledge, is a network, and that virtually all of knowledge is learned. It combines the psychological insights of cognitive linguistics with the rigour of more formal theories. This textbook spans a broad range of topics from prototypes, activation and default inheritance to the details of syntactic, morphological and semantic structure. It introduces elementary ideas from cognitive science and uses them to explain the structure of language including a survey of English grammar.

Listeners are usually considered recipients in conversational interaction, whose main activity is to take in messages from other speakers. In this view, the listening activity is separate from speaking. Another view is that listeners and speakers are equal co-participants in conversations who construct the talk together. In support of this latter view, one finds a group of vocalisations which are quintessentially listener talk — little conversational objects such as uh-huh, oh, mm, yeah, right and mm-hm. These utterances do not have meanings in a conventional dictionary sense, but are nevertheless loaded with complex and subtle information about the stance listeners take to what they are hearing, information that is gleaned not only from their phonetic form, but also from their complex prosodic shape and their placement and timing within the flow of talk. This book summarises eight of these objects, and explores one, mm, in depth.

Anyone who writes an up-to-date textbook of semantics has to be au fait with an extremely wide range of contemporary academic activity. John Lyons' new book demonstrates a remarkable ability to achieve such catholicity of expertise...

Seminar paper from the year 2008 in the subject Speech Science / Linguistics, University of Münster (Englisches Seminar), course: Computational Text Analysis, language: English, abstract: In this paper I will show how it is possible to compute the type/token ratio of a text by using the programming language Perl. First of all an overview about the topic will be given, including the definition of both the terms type and token and how they are used in the context of this program. Then I will explain how the program works and give further rationale for its shortcomings. Although the program is rather simple, some knowledge of the programming language Perl will be needed for the respective parts in this paper. Then I will proceed to do a short analysis of different texts and their respective type/token ratios. These texts were taken from the British National Corpus and Project Gutenberg. The results will show the need for a different measure of lexical density. One example of such a measure is the mean type/token ratio which I will go into shortly. In the Conclusion there will be a short critique of the expressiveness of type/token ratios as well as a short overview about current research on this topic.

Mathematics appears to be concerned with abstract objects such as numbers and sets. What are these objects? Oystein Linnebo develops a distinctive approach to ontology, in which abstract objects such as numbers and sets are demystified and allowed to exist alongside more familiar physical objects.

Seminar paper from the year 2008 in the subject Speech Science / Linguistics, University of Münster (Englisches Seminar), course: Computational Text Analysis, language: English, abstract: In this paper I will show how it is possible to compute the type/token ratio of a text by using the programming language Perl. First of all an overview about the topic will be given, including the definition of both the terms type and token and how they are used in the context of this program. Then I will explain how the program works and give further rationale for its shortcomings. Although the program is rather simple, some knowledge of the programming language Perl will be needed for the respective parts in this paper. Then I will proceed to do a short analysis of different texts and their respective type/token ratios. These texts were taken from the British National Corpus and Project Gutenberg. The results will show the need for a different measure of lexical density. One example of such a measure is the mean type/token ratio which I will go into shortly. In the Conclusion there will be a short critique of the expressiveness of type/token ratios as well as a short overview about current research on this topic.