Meaning Of Noun Research Articles

Using Graph Components Derived from an Associative Concept Dictionary to Predict fMRI Neural Activation Patterns that Represent the Meaning of Nouns.

In this study, we introduce an original distance definition for graphs, called the Markov-inverse-F measure (MiF). This measure enables the integration of classical graph theory indices with new knowledge pertaining to structural feature extraction from semantic networks. MiF improves the conventional Jaccard and/or Simpson indices, and reconciles both the geodesic information (random walk) and co-occurrence adjustment (degree balance and distribution). We measure the effectiveness of graph-based coefficients through the application of linguistic graph information for a neural activity recorded during conceptual processing in the human brain. Specifically, the MiF distance is computed between each of the nouns used in a previous neural experiment and each of the in-between words in a subgraph derived from the Edinburgh Word Association Thesaurus of English. From the MiF-based information matrix, a machine learning model can accurately obtain a scalar parameter that specifies the degree to which each voxel in (the MRI image of) the brain is activated by each word or each principal component of the intermediate semantic features. Furthermore, correlating the voxel information with the MiF-based principal components, a new computational neurolinguistics model with a network connectivity paradigm is created. This allows two dimensions of context space to be incorporated with both semantic and neural distributional representations.

Pedagogy of the Dispersed: A Cost-Benefit Analysis of the African Diaspora Phenomenon through the Human and Social Capital Lens

With its origin in Greek where ‘diaspora’ as a noun means ‘a dispersion’ or as a verb means to ‘scatter about’, the term is used in this paper to refer to the dispersion or scattering of Africans from their original African homeland and now live in countries other than their own. Indeed some Africans have dispersed from their own countries to other countries in Africa. For the purposes of this paper our analysis focuses on Africans who live outside Africa. This paper explores the African diaspora phenomenon starting from the commercial extraction of Africans as resources to serve as inputs into plantain development in North America and manual labourers in Europe, South America and the Caribbean, to the colonial exploitation of African peoples during the ‘Scramble for Africa’, to political exiles and economic refugees that ensued, following political independence and instabilities, and to expert skilled migrations of Africans abroad, including digital diaspora. Grounded in the educational philosophy of human and social capital theory, the paper presents a cost benefit analysis of the gains and losses that Africans and African countries have experienced as a result of the African diaspora phenomenon. The analysis leads to the philosophical conclusion that whereas the initial dispersion of Africans to overseas countries represented a significant cost to the human and social capital of Africa, African diaspora in the 21 st century have potential to improve the human and social capital not only for themselves and their former homeland, but also in the host countries.

Types, meanings and coercions in lexical semantics

This paper investigates two types of meaning shift in composition. The first examines the well-known shifts in meaning in predications, known as coercions, that involve aspectual verbs like start, begin or finish or a verb like enjoy in combination with non-event denoting direct object arguments. The second involves the modifications of meaning that result from the application of an adjective meaning to a common noun meaning, where the term coercion applies only to some of the shifts observed. Building on the framework and results of Asher (2011) and Asher and Luo (2012), my aim is to get a clearer picture of the different sorts of meaning shifts, what is responsible for meaning shifts and exactly how they affect content.

Can colors, voices, and images help learners acquire the grammatical gender of German nouns?

Knowledge of lexical items is arguably the most essential aspect of being able to communicate in a foreign language (Richards, 2000). Many studies have examined effective strategies for retaining the meaning of foreign words, but studies investigating the effectiveness of different methods for the retention of essential grammatical features of those words are unfortunately fewer. This study investigates whether memorizing the gender of German nouns concomitantly to their meaning results in a decreased ability by undergraduate native speakers of English to remember noun meaning, and whether a mnemonic approach to retaining the grammatical gender of German nouns may prove effective. In possibly the largest study of its kind ( n = 283), the effectiveness of several mnemonic devices (colors, voices, images, and a combination of these) is also investigated for the retention of noun gender in German. The sole use of images simultaneously coding for noun meaning and gender led to the best observed results, as indicated by scores on two post-tests. The use of images seems to be a promising mnemonic technique for helping learners remember the gender of German nouns, while at the same time not significantly compromising their ability to recall noun meaning. The results of the present study have possible implications for German materials development and teaching, and for computer assisted language learning (CALL) in general.

The Multiple Uses of Proper Nouns

In this essay I will defend the thesis that proper nouns are primarily used as proper names—as atomic singular referring expressions—and different possible predicative uses of proper nouns are derived from this primary use or an already derived secondary predicative use of proper nouns. There is a general linguistic phenomenon of the derivation of new meanings from already existing meanings of an expression. This phenomenon has different manifestations and different lin- guistic mechanisms can be used to establish derived meanings of different kinds of expressions. One prominent variation of these mechanisms was dubbed in Nunberg. (Linguist Philos 3:143-184, 1979, J Semant 12:109-132, 1995, The handbook of pragmatics. Blackwell, Oxford, 2004 meaning transfer.) In the essay I will distin- guish two different sub-varieties of this mechanism: occurrent and lexical meaning transfer. Nunberg conceives of meaning transfer as a mechanism that allows us to derive a new truth-conditional meaning of an expression from an already existing truth-conditional meaning of this expression. I will argue that most predicative uses of proper nouns can be captured by the mentioned two varieties of truth-conditional meaning transfer. But there are also important exceptions like the predicative use of the proper noun 'Alfred' in as sentence like 'Every Alfred that I met was a nice guy'. I will try to show that we cannot make use of truth-conditional meaning transfer to account for such uses and I will argue for a the existence of second variant of meaning transfer that I will call use-conditional meaning transfer and that allows us also to capture these derived meanings of proper nouns. Furthermore, I will try to show that the proposed explanation of multiple uses of proper nouns is superior to the view supported by defenders of a predicative view on proper names.

Peculiarities of Grammatical Properties in Nominal Word Combinations

The article examines some peculiarities if grammatical properties of nominal word combinations based on the study of German-speaking Swiss press. The accumulated experience of linguists is analyzed and certain factors influencing the choice of syntactic relations in nominal word combinations with quantitative meaning are researched. It has been established that the choice of syntactic relations in such word combinations is determined by functional style, semantics and grammatical features of nouns - first or second components in a word combination. The aforementioned factors influencing the choice of syntactic relations in quantitative nominal word combinations are studied on the material of Germanspeaking Swiss press. The research revealed a number of peculiarities. First of all, German-speaking Swiss press uses such syntactic relation as genitive subordination quite often, not only on "special occasion" and unlike its use in Germany does not produce a magniloquent, pompous impression. Secondly, it has been established that the choice of syntactic relations in word combinations of the above-mentioned type of word combinations greatly depends on the semantic meaning of the noun - the first component of the word combination - and does not always coincide with the grammatical properties in nominal combinations in Germany. Thirdly, a clear dependence of syntactic relations choice is observed. Moreover, the article highlights the importance of grammatical features of the second component. These are such features as gender, number, case accompanied by noun declension. All the afore-mentioned features help to define the type of syntactic relations, which nominal quantitative word combinations may be connected by. The results of the comparisons of grammatical properties of quantitative nominal word combinations in German and Swiss press are demonstrated in a table below.

Words and meanings: lexical semantics across domains, languages, and cultures

1. Words, Meaning, and Methodology 2. Men, Women, and Children: The semantics of basic social categories 3. Sweet, Hot, Hard, heavy, Rough, Sharp: Physical quality words in cross-linguistic perspective 4. From Colour Words to Visual Semantics: English, Russian, Warlpiri 5. Happiness and Human Values in Cross-cultural and Historical Perspective 6. Pain Is it a Human Universal? The Perspective From Cross-linguistic Semantics 7. Suggesting, Apologising, Complimenting: English speech act verbs 8. A Stitch in Time and The Way of The Rice Plant: The semantics of proverbs in English and Malay 9. The Meaning of Abstract Nouns: Locke, Bentham and Contemporary Semantics 10. Broader Perspectives: Beyond lexical semantics References Index

Частные значения несовершенного вида в семантике русского существительного

Elena Uryson: Special Meanings of the Imperfective Aspect in the Semantics of the Russian NounThe paper deals with imperfective verbs in analytic explications of meaning of Russian nouns. In most cases such a verb has gnomic meaning. The goal of this article is to show that some Russian nouns contain a semantic component denoting the moment of speech or some other fixed moment. Therefore, these nouns should be explicated with imperfective verbs in continuous meaning. Several Russian nouns of this type are described. They belong to different semantic groups. Some of them denote spatial objects; others are nomina agentis; still others denote emotions or desire. Nouns denoting something/somebody existing at the moment of speech or some other fixed moment seem to be rare in Russian. Careful analysis of Russian vocabulary is required to discover them.

KING'S ENGLISH AND THE ARISTOCRATIC CODE OF COMMUNICATION IN MODERN BRITAIN

All inaccuracies and distortions of the language use in modern British media, revealed by Simon Heffer in his book «Strictly English», enable the author of the article to draw a distinct demarcation line between King's English, the English of the press, on the one hand, and the English of the upper classes of Great Britain, on the other. The errors in the press, such as confusion of words similar in a sound form or spelling, the use of foreign words in the wrong meanings, distortions of names, etc. testify to the deterioration of education at some universities of Great Britain. They also point to the lack of a classical education based on the study of foreign languages, Greek and Latin, in the first place, which facilitates learning foreign words and mastering complicated grammar structures and subtleties of modality in the English language. The language of the press is clearly opposed to the language of the upper classes by methods of communication. If the former is characterized by direct and straightforward ways of communication, the latter manifests indirect and hidden ways of interaction. Cultivated by the upper classes and the aristocracy, this code is based on the categories of words which originate ambiguity in speech or texts and raise the eternal question «What is meant by this or that? ». In journalism these categories of words are labeled as «killers» of meaning. They include foreign words which considerably obscure understanding, abstract nouns that serve to create distance and insincerity in communication, adjectives which very often veil the real state of things, serve as a means of linguistic manipulation, especially when used to describe emotions, opinions and feelings. Here, also, belong euphemism and metaphorical meanings of nouns and verbs. The author concludes that, despite stringent prohibition for journalists to use these categories of words in the media, journalists and professional writers would only benefit if they were aware of them as well as of social connotations of words marked as U - non-U words in the book «Noblesse Oblige» by Alan Ross, Evelyn Waugh and Nancy Mitford. Heffer's book allows to clearly see the demarcation line between the English of the media and the English of the upper classes of Great Britain based on play upon words and various implications to express individuality and sense of humour, intellect and social exclusiveness.

Interpretation as Optimization: Constitutive material adjectives

Constitutive material adjectives, a subset of the privative adjectives, include adjectives like stone, wooden, plastic, foam, velveteen, etc. Constitutive material adjectives exhibit two important features: (1) they appear to violate the Head-Primacy Principle (Kamp and Partee, 1995), (2) their behavior, and thus classification, depends on the constituent with which they combine. Partee (2010) has suggested that these adjectives are not, in fact, privative, but rather are subsective adjectives that have undergone coercion. This is a compelling analysis, but unfortunately the mechanisms that underlie the coercion operation have not been fully explored. Here, I argue that coercion, as formulated by Partee, can be understood as the result of optimization over conflicting constraints on interpretation. I propose an analysis that conceives of the meaning of adjectives and nouns as collections of constraints on interpretation. Conceived as such, we can derive the effects of coercion using Optimality Theory (Prince and Smolensky, 2004; Smolensky and Legendre, 2006).

Infants use known verbs to learn novel nouns: Evidence from 15- and 19-month-olds

Fluent speakers’ representations of verbs include semantic knowledge about the nouns that can serve as their arguments. These “selectional restrictions” of a verb can in principle be recruited to learn the meaning of a novel noun. For example, the sentence He ate the carambola licenses the inference that carambola refers to something edible. We ask whether 15- and 19-month-old infants can recruit their nascent verb lexicon to identify the referents of novel nouns that appear as the verbs’ subjects. We compared infants’ interpretation of a novel noun (e.g., the dax) in two conditions: one in which dax is presented as the subject of animate-selecting construction (e.g., The dax is crying), and the other in which dax is the subject of an animacy-neutral construction (e.g., The dax is right here). Results indicate that by 19months, infants use their representations of known verbs to inform the meaning of a novel noun that appears as its argument.

Perspektivität und Polysemie im Lexikon und Wörterbuch

Perspectivization constitutes an important part of semantic meaning. In this paper the “inner” perspectivization of nouns is analyzed. Inner perspectivization is defined as a kind of foregrounding of a certain part of word meanings of nouns. In this context polysemy is seen as a result of perspectivization of word meanings, whereas homonymy besides of being a result of phonetic change may also be caused by a disruption of the chains of meaning in the semantics of polysemic words. It is argued that the concept of inner perspectivization is not only theoretically interesting but also of importance for lexicography. A number of dictionary descriptions of word meanings are analysed.

Rethinking case marking and case alternation in Estonian

In this paper, we argue for a view of case marking that does not treat case as the passive realisation of other morpho-syntactic properties of a construction but as independently bringing information to a clause. This different view of case entails that precise functions of case-marked expressions may be determined by the interaction of the case marking, the meaning of the host noun, the semantics of any predicate of which it is an argument and other contextually given factors. With respect to Estonian, it is argued that there is only one ‘structural’ case, the genitive, and this case marks non-subject, or oblique, dependency on some head. The partitive case, we argue, is semantically partitive in all its uses, except that the partitive meaning can be obscured or even eliminated depending on contextual factors. The nominative is merely the absence of case, associated with no specific positions or semantic effects.

Recognizing the emotional valence of names: An ERP study

Unlike common nouns, person names refer to unique entities and generally have a referring function. We used event-related potentials to investigate the time course of identifying the emotional meaning of nouns and names. The emotional valence of names and nouns were manipulated separately. The results show early N1 effects in response to emotional valence only for nouns. This might reflect automatic attention directed towards emotional stimuli. The absence of such an effect for names supports the notion that the emotional meaning carried by names is accessed after word recognition and person identification. In addition, both names with negative valence and emotional nouns elicited late positive effects, which have been associated with evaluation of emotional significance. This positive effect started earlier for nouns than for names, but with similar durations. Our results suggest that distinct neural systems are involved in the retrieval of names’ and nouns’ emotional meaning.

Salience and construal in the use of synonymy: A study of two sets of near-synonymous nouns

AbstractVia a corpus-based collocation analysis and a forced-choice questionnaire examination, this study investigates the use of two sets of near-synonymous nouns: authority/power/right and duty/obligation/responsibility. The corpus analysis reveals the prototypical meanings of the nouns in each set and the semantic and usage pattern differences among the synonymous nouns. Also, the corpus analysis and the results of the forced-choice study jointly show that the level of lexical salience and the language users' construal are two key factors in the use of synonymous nouns. Due to entrenchment effects, speakers/writers typically use a synonymous noun with the highest salience in a given semantic context unless the speaker/writer's construal operations result in a decision to use a different noun whose prototypical meaning fits the context better. It is also found that the selection of a non-salient noun in a given context typically signifies a difference in meaning. Furthermore, the meanings of synonymous nouns and the internal semantic structure of a synonymous-noun set seem to show a certain degree of fluidity, influenced by the competition of lexical salience and language users' construal. The study has also demonstrated the effectiveness of combining corpus-based analysis and elicited data examination in the study of synonyms.

Tracking neural coding of perceptual and semantic features of concrete nouns

We present a methodological approach employing magnetoencephalography (MEG) and machine learning techniques to investigate the flow of perceptual and semantic information decodable from neural activity in the half second during which the brain comprehends the meaning of a concrete noun. Important information about the cortical location of neural activity related to the representation of nouns in the human brain has been revealed by past studies using fMRI. However, the temporal sequence of processing from sensory input to concept comprehension remains unclear, in part because of the poor time resolution provided by fMRI. In this study, subjects answered 20 questions (e.g. is it alive?) about the properties of 60 different nouns prompted by simultaneous presentation of a pictured item and its written name. Our results show that the neural activity observed with MEG encodes a variety of perceptual and semantic features of stimuli at different times relative to stimulus onset, and in different cortical locations. By decoding these features, our MEG-based classifier was able to reliably distinguish between two different concrete nouns that it had never seen before. The results demonstrate that there are clear differences between the time course of the magnitude of MEG activity and that of decodable semantic information. Perceptual features were decoded from MEG activity earlier in time than semantic features, and features related to animacy, size, and manipulability were decoded consistently across subjects. We also observed that regions commonly associated with semantic processing in the fMRI literature may not show high decoding results in MEG. We believe that this type of approach and the accompanying machine learning methods can form the basis for further modeling of the flow of neural information during language processing and a variety of other cognitive processes.

Seme Stocks of Lexico-Semantic Fields - A Contrastive Study

The approach to the contrastive study of lexico-semantic fields and their stocks by the method of a matrix analysis is entirely new in lexical semantics. In our research paper we present the results of a comparative analysis carried out on the seme stocks of lexico-semantic fields of the nouns denoting happiness both in English and Slovak. It was preceded by dictionary analyses for the purpose to find and collect all the specified nouns. Their forms and meanings were consequently quantitatively and qualitatively analysed. The objectives of the present lexicosemantic comparison are: a character of the seme stock, individual and common meanings of English and Slovak nouns of happiness and their semantic reference to three domains of human personality.

At 6–9 months, human infants know the meanings of many common nouns

It is widely accepted that infants begin learning their native language not by learning words, but by discovering features of the speech signal: consonants, vowels, and combinations of these sounds. Learning to understand words, as opposed to just perceiving their sounds, is said to come later, between 9 and 15 mo of age, when infants develop a capacity for interpreting others' goals and intentions. Here, we demonstrate that this consensus about the developmental sequence of human language learning is flawed: in fact, infants already know the meanings of several common words from the age of 6 mo onward. We presented 6- to 9-mo-old infants with sets of pictures to view while their parent named a picture in each set. Over this entire age range, infants directed their gaze to the named pictures, indicating their understanding of spoken words. Because the words were not trained in the laboratory, the results show that even young infants learn ordinary words through daily experience with language. This surprising accomplishment indicates that, contrary to prevailing beliefs, either infants can already grasp the referential intentions of adults at 6 mo or infants can learn words before this ability emerges. The precocious discovery of word meanings suggests a perspective in which learning vocabulary and learning the sound structure of spoken language go hand in hand as language acquisition begins.

On Travis cases

Charles Travis has been forcefully arguing that meaning does not determine truth-conditions for more than two decades now. To this end, he has devised ingenious examples whereby different utterances of the same prima facie non-ambiguous and non-indexical expression type have different truth-conditions depending on the occasion on which they are delivered. However, Travis does not argue that meaning varies with circumstances; only that truth-conditions do. He assumes that meaning is a stable feature of both words and sentences. After surveying some of the explanations that semanticists and pragmaticians have produced in order to account for Travis cases, I propose a view which differs substantially from all of them. I argue that the variability in the truth-conditions that an utterance type can have is due to meaning facts alone. To support my argument, I suggest that we think about the meanings of words (in particular, the meanings of nouns) as rich conceptual structures; so rich that the way in which a property concept applies to an object concept is not determined.

Modeling the meaning of words: neural correlates of abstract and concrete noun processing.

We present a model relating analysis of abstract and concrete word meaning in terms of semantic features and contextual frames within a general framework of neurocognitive information processing. The approach taken here assumes concrete noun meanings to be intimately related to sensory feature constellations. These features are processed by posterior sensory regions of the brain, e.g. the occipital lobe, which handles visual information. The interpretation of abstract nouns, however, is likely to be more dependent on semantic frames and linguistic context. A greater involvement of more anteriorly located, perisylvian brain areas has previously been found for the processing of abstract words. In the present study, a word association test was carried out in order to compare semantic processing in healthy subjects (n=12) with subjects with aphasia due to perisylvian lesions (n=3) and occipital lesions (n=1). The word associations were coded into different categories depending on their semantic content. A double dissociation was found, where, compared to the controls, the perisylvian aphasic subjects had problems associating to abstract nouns and produced fewer semantic framebased associations, whereas the occipital aphasic subject showed disturbances in concrete noun processing and made fewer semantic feature based associations.