Semantic Conventions Research Articles

Change Don’t Come Easy: Nonnegotiable Meanings

ABSTRACT We often use language creatively, introducing new expressions on the fly. That we can successfully communicate with novel expressions without antecedent semantic knowledge has led many to a dynamic meaning hypothesis: namely, we can actively renegotiate extant semantic conventions to better suit our communicative, practical, and even normative concerns. We argue that this hypothesis is a mistake: meanings are non-negotiable, and so, lexical innovation cannot proceed by way of meaning-negotiation.

MAKNA PENAMAAN SAJIAN RITUAL KABASA DARI PERSPEKTIF GASTROLINGUISTIK

This article is about Munanese (an ethnic group in Southeast Sulawesi) traditional dish kabasa as a form of referential support to the gastrodiplomacy trend. Kabasa is a part of the haroa ritual that features a range of dishes with various ingredients, which is strongly connected to various aspects of the community such as social position, psychology, and environment. In this study, a combination between linguistics as language science and gastronomy which examines food within its culture is considered effective for investigating the semantics of the naming pattern of kabasa dishes in order to document this unique culinary tradition and introduce new concepts in Indonesian gastronomy, particularly that of Southeast Sulawesi. Using the qualitative descriptive method and macrolinguistic approach, this study shows that kabasa naming pattern consists of three semantic levels. Meanwhile, more comprehensive gastrolinguistic analysis on the data suggests that the meanings of the names can be found based on (1) the food ingredients, which are tied to the region’s geographical features and (2) the semantic convention of kabasa itself, which shows an associative relationship between an object, its name, and environmental aspects as contextual clues.

Textual Understanding and the Dialectics of Intent in the Works of Qur'anic Exegetes

This article explores the ways a number of exegetes deal with ideas of authorial intent and textual (mis)understanding, on the basis that the Qur’anic discourse is a set of intentions, or rather an ‘intentional discourse’ ( al-khiṭāba al-qaṣadiyya). In their view, the Qur’an is a discourse, rather than a monologic, linear text. As a speech act that uses the power of the spoken utterance, it is able to use language in a ways that allow it to convey its intended meanings fully, thereby guiding the recipient to a complete understanding of the speaker’s intention. Qur’anic Arabic is a specialised language that can be understood primarily through an appreciation of authorial intention ( mabdaʾ al-qaṣad). This is the most significant element in intentional discourses, in contrast to other genres such as literature, in which the reader’s understanding of the text is guided by both linguistic and semantic conventions and personal reader reception. In the case of the Qur’an, a failure to confine oneself to seeking to understand the speaker’s intended meaning leads to misunderstandings, and thus represents the most prominent threat to an accurate understanding of its message. Misunderstandings can arise from issues such as the recipient’s lack of linguistic and rhetorical competence, or their lack of sufficient knowledge of the characteristics and qualities of the author of the discourse, not to mention the effect of personal assumptions. Exegetes have therefore attempted to arrive at a taxonomy of the degrees of textual understanding and misunderstanding of authorial intent in the Qur’an, and the range and scope of their analysis will be addressed in this article.

Semantic conventions and referential intentions

According to intentionalism, the semantic reference of the uses of demonstratives is fixed, at least partly, by the speaker’s referential intention. In this paper, I argue against the possibility of the existence of a semantic convention of this sort. My argument is placed in the Lewisian framework of signaling games and consists of several steps that correspond to four anti-intentionalist arguments, already present in the literature, that have proven inconclusive when employed separately and without being set in the mentioned framework.

Pragmatic reasoning and semantic convention: A case study on gradable adjectives

Gradable adjectives denote properties that are relativized to contextual thresholds of application: how long an object must be in order to count as long in a context of utterance depends on what the threshold is in that context. But thresholds are variable across contexts and adjectives, and are in general uncertain. This leads to two questions about the meanings of gradable adjectives in particular contexts of utterance: what truth conditions are they understood to introduce, and what information are they taken to communicate? In this paper, we consider two kinds of answers to these questions, one from semantic theory, and one from Bayesian pragmatics, and assess them relative to human judgments about truth and communicated information. Our findings indicate that Bayesian accounts can model human judgments about what is communicated better than they can model human judgments about truth conditions, and their weakness on the latter is mainly because they fall short in accurately predicting the relevant threshold distributions. We explore the possibility that the overall performance of the Bayesian accounts can be potentially improved when they are supplemented with the threshold conventions postulated by semantic theory. EARLY ACCESS

Cultural Evolution of Precise and Agreed-Upon Semantic Conventions in a Multiplayer Gaming App.

The amount of information conveyed by linguistic conventions depends on their precision, yet the codes that humans and other animals use to communicate are quite ambiguous: they may map several vague meanings to the same symbol. How does semantic precision evolve, and what are the constraints that limit it? We address this question using a multiplayer gaming app, where individuals communicate with one another in a scaled-up referential game. Here, the goal is for a sender to use black and white symbols to communicate colors. We expected that the players' mappings between symbols and colors would grow more specific over time, through a selection process whereby precise mappings are preferentially copied. We found that players become increasingly more precise in their use of symbols over the course of their interactions. This trend did not, however, result from selective copying of precise mappings. We explore the implications of this result for the study of lexical ambiguity, Zipf's Law of Meaning, and disagreements over semantic conventions.

Not What I Agreed To: Content and Consent

Deception sometimes results in nonconsensual sex. A recent body of literature diagnoses such violations as invalidating consent: the agreement is not morally transformative, which is why the sexual contact is a rights violation. We pursue a different explanation for the wrongs in question: there is valid consent, but it is not consent to the sex act that happened. Semantic conventions play a key role in distinguishing deceptions that result in nonconsensual sex (like stealth condom removal) from those that don’t (like white lies). Our framework is also applicable to more controversial cases, like those implicated in so-called “gender fraud” complaints.

Deriving politeness from an extended Lewisian model: The case of rising declaratives

This paper examines one systematic way in which inferences about politeness are derived from linguistic expressions. Focusing on the complex connection between English rising declaratives (RDs) and politeness, it proposes an analysis that combines aspects of the Lewisian/Stalnakerian context-update framework with pragmatic theories of politeness. The analysis generates certain context-sensitive predictions, which are tested and confirmed experimentally. The resulting account is able to capture why assertive uses of RDs often sound like more polite assertions, why inquisitive uses of RDs often sound like less polite questions, why assertive RDs can sometimes convey particular presumptions about the common ground, and why all of these inferences are ultimately heavily context-dependent. The emerging proposal is shown to have broader implications for analyzing the role of semantic convention in deriving politeness and associated inferences, and for determining the division of labor between semantics, context, and general pragmatic reasoning.

Adam Smith and Propriety in Moral and Political Discourse

My university – George Mason University – has announced a Task Force on Anti-Racism and Inclusive Excellence. I gave a lecture about the discourse of those advocating such agendas. The lecture draws on Adam Smith and suggests that improprieties riddle such discourse. I treat improprieties of the discourse, not improprieties of the agenda measures themselves – that would be something else again. Drawing on Adam Smith, I offer a distinction between calling loudly and proffering coolly. I realize that these two expressions use different metaphors – “loudly” is about sound and “coolly” is about temperature – but such terminology follows Smith’s talk of calling loudly and reflecting coolly. The impropriety of calling loudly lies in the great distance and tenuous, complex, and highly contested interpretive connections between lower things and higher things in the moral worlds of human beings and in the meanings they make in life. Related to calling loudly are the improprieties of controversial and even outlandish presuppositions and, most of all, abuse of language. The discourse treated often violates semantic conventions and often leaves its key words ill-defined or undefined. I remark on the words diversity, inclusiveness, bias (as used for example in “unconscious bias” and “implicit bias”), anti-racism, and social justice. I present Adam Smith’s tri-layered justice and discuss the unjustness of the discourse treated. I suggest that behind the agenda is an impetus to reduce dissent from leftism. That impetus could well be subconscious.

Little cutie one piece

AbstractThis study investigates emerging usages in Chinese cyberspace of the numeral classifierméithat violate syntactic and semantic conventions of canonical grammar of modern Chinese. We treat these usages as constructional variants of the canonical classifier construction and show how they afford users of Weibo a device of social indexicality in the sense of Silverstein (1976,1985,2003) and Eckert (2000,2003,2008). We argue that the constructional variants facilitate the creation of a cute, chic, playful, humorous, and youthful online style and that its popularity draws on multiple indexical resources including contrast to canonical grammar, contemporary language contact with Japanese, influence of the cuteness culture and its commodification, and consumerism in the digital economy. This study contributes to research on the linguistic construction of identity and style, linguistic creativity in the new media and digital culture, and usage-based constructionist approaches to language.

Preschoolers' crossmodal mappings of timbre.

Crossmodal correspondences have been of interest to researchers for nearly a century, although it is only more recently that interactions related to timbre have been examined systematically. Timbre is often described using crossmodal adjectives (e.g., bright, smooth). However, it is not clear whether these semantic conventions are primarily the result of low-level multisensory interactions or are more a product of associative learning and musical training. Do young children exhibit crossmodal correspondences involving timbre? The aim of this study was to investigate the effects of timbre, age, and sensory modality (visual and tactile) on the consistency and congruency of young children's patterns of crossmodal mappings. Preschool children (N = 69, M age = 4.51) completed a novel audio-visual and audio-tactile association task. Results indicate that children are moderately consistent in their associations; mappings are largely congruent with adult associations; and results suggest a possible developmental time course for the establishment of crossmodal correspondences between approximately ages 3 and 6. However, congruency is dependent on modality, with robust agreement in the tactile-auditory domain but a good deal more variance and a stronger developmental influence on visual-auditory associations. These results are the first to demonstrate that crossmodal correspondences are a feature of timbre perception early in development.

From shrieks to “Stupid poo”: emotive language in a developmental perspective

AbstractThe aim of this paper is to highlight and describe the forms of verbal emotive utterances that appeared in a longitudinal corpus of 11 Swedish children interacting with parents, siblings and friends. The children were in the ages 0;9 to 5;10 and were recorded four to six times during a two-year period. The verbal emotive expressions of the material are divided into the categories Descriptive versus Accompanying utterances. Descriptive utterances are emotive mainly from semantic conventions, whereas Accompanying utterances are emotive due to prosodic and contextual traits. The categories are illustrated and related to conventions, language development and cognitive growth. By classifying and labeling verbal expressions as emotive in different ways, it is argued that we can gain a better understanding of how language is used when intertwined with emotions, but also that we access a way to compare and investigate emotive language in a more thorough manner.

The change of signaling conventions in social networks

To depict the mechanisms that have enabled the emergence of semantic conventions, philosophers and researchers particularly access a game-theoretic model: the signaling game. In this article I argue that this model is also quite appropriate to analyze not only the emergence of a semantic convention, but also its change. I delineate how the application of signaling games helps to reproduce and depict mechanisms of semantic change. For that purpose I present a model that combines a signaling game with innovative reinforcement learning; in simulation runs I conduct this game repeatedly within a multi-agent setup, where agents are arranged in social network structures. The results of these runs are contrasted with an attested theory from sociolinguistics: the ‘weak tie’ theory. Analyses of the produced data target a deeper understanding of the role of environmental variables for the promotion of (1) semantic change or (2) solidity of semantic conventions.

"Quivered Out of Decimals": Simulating Somatime in Emily Dickinson's Entropic Text

ABSTRACTIn desiring to constitute herself independently of any unitary subject, Emily Dickinson apostrophises—and simulates—the aberrant complexities of mortality. Her texts— closed systems within which grammatical and semantic conventions are atomised by ellipsis and parataxis—calibrate measures of disorder which signal irreversible changes in consciousness, perception, and experience. By bringing Emily Dickinson's intellectual and sensuous cognition of mortality into prominence as an exemplary instance of somatime in the entropic text, the article explores some of the ways in which the representation of mitotic time and pineal embodiment is adapted and transformed through the figural potentiality of poetic language.

The argument from convention revisited

The argument from convention contends that the regular use of definite descriptions as referential devices strongly implies that a referential semantic convention underlies such usage. On the presumption that definite descriptions also participate in a quantificational semantic convention, the argument from convention has served as an argument for the thesis that the English definite article is ambiguous. Here, I revisit this relatively new argument. First, I address two recurring criticisms of the argument from convention: (1) its alleged tendency to overgenerate and (2) its apparent evidential inadequacy. These criticisms are found wanting. Second, following Zacharska (Univ Coll Lond Work Pap Linguist 22:56–63, 2010), I argue that while the argument from convention does alter the landscape of logical possibilities insofar as it provides good grounds for treating Donnellan’s (Philos Rev 75:281–304, 1966) referential–attributive distinction as having truth-conditional consequences, the argument from convention nonetheless fails to demonstrate that ‘the’ requires two lexical entries.

Three new species of entimine weevils in Early Miocene amber from the Dominican Republic (Coleoptera: Curculionidae).

BackgroundUsing syntactic and semantic conventions of the taxonomic concept approach (Franz et al. 2015), we describe three newly recognized fossil broad-nosed weevils (Coleoptera: Curculionidae: Entiminae) preserved in Early Miocene amber (ca. 20.4-16.0 mya) from the Dominican Republic: Scelianoma compacta sp. n. sec. Franz & Zhang (2017) (henceforth abbreviated as [FZ2017]), Tropirhinus palpebratus sp. n. [FZ2017], and Diaprepes anticus sp. n. [FZ2017]. The taxonomic assignment of the amber inclusions is grounded in a preceding phylogenetic analysis by Franz (2012). As many as 88 of the 143 therein identified characters were coded for the fossils, whose traits are largely congruent with those present in extant congeners while also differing in ways that justify their new nomenclatural and taxonomic status.New informationWe present detailed images, descriptions, and phylogenetically informed diagnoses for the three new species-level entities, along with logically consistent Region Connection Calculus (RCC-5) alignments of the amended genus-level classifications for Scelianoma Franz and Girón 2009 [FZ2017], Tropirhinus Schoenherr 1823 [FZ2017], and Diaprepes Schoenherr 1823 [FZ2017] - in relation to 2-4 preceding classifications published in 1982-2012. The description of Scelianoma compacta [FZ2017] from Hispaniola is indicative of a more widespread historical range of Scelianoma [FZ2017] than reflected in the extant, southwestern Puerto Rican Scelianoma elydimorpha Franz and Girón 2009 sec. Franz and Girón (2009). The presence of Diaprepes anticus [FZ2017] in Hispaniola during the Early Miocene suggests an eastward directed process of island colonization and likely speciation of members of Diaprepes [FZ2017], given that most extant relatives occur throughout the Lesser Antilles. The herein presented data will facilitate more reliable reconstructions of historical biographic processes thought to have played a prominent role in the diversification of the West Indian and Neotropical mainland broad-nosed weevil lineages.

The Intensionality behind Legal Concepts and Their Extensional Boundaries: Between Conventionalism and Interpretivism

AbstractThis article constitutes an attempt to reexamine a crucial issue of legal theory from the perspective of philosophy of language and of social ontology: by analyzing a jurisprudential case recently decided by the U.S. Supreme Court, we explain how Searle's account on rules in The Construction of Social Reality constitutes an important starting point for the clarification of the old jurisprudential debate between conventionalism and interpretivism. In a nutshell, we show that Searle's framework, while strictly conventionalist, makes it possible to conceive of the distinction between the semantic content of rules (their intended purpose) and their extension, by drawing a parallel with the idea of “deep conventions” (and “essential rules”) as well as with the semantic conventions in natural language. The paper thus touches on the broader problem of the relations between legal concepts and nonlegal values (law and morality).

Controlling the taxonomic variable: Taxonomic concept resolution for a southeastern United States herbarium portal

Overview. Taxonomic names are imperfect identifiers of specific and sometimes conflicting taxonomic perspectives in aggregated biodiversity data environments. The inherent ambiguities of names can be mitigated using syntactic and semantic conventions developed under the taxonomic concept approach. These include: (1) representation of taxonomic concept labels (TCLs: name sec. source) to precisely identify name usages and meanings, (2) use of parent/child relationships to assemble separate taxonomic perspectives, and (3) expert provision of Region Connection Calculus articulations (RCC–5: congruence, [inverse] inclusion, overlap, exclusion) that specify how data identified to different-sourced TCLs can be integrated. Application of these conventions greatly increases trust in biodiversity data networks, most of which promote unitary taxonomic 'syntheses' that obscure the actual diversity of expert-held views. Better design solutions allow users to control the taxonomic variable and thereby assess the robustness of their biological inferences under different perspectives. A unique constellation of prior efforts – including the powerful Symbiota collections software platform, the Euler/X multi-taxonomy alignment toolkit, and the "Weakley Flora" which entails 7,000 concepts and more than 75,000 RCC–5 articulations – provides the opportunity to build a first full-scale concept resolution service for SERNEC, the SouthEast Regional Network of Expertise and Collections, currently with 60 member herbaria and 2 million occurrence records. Intellectual merit. We have developed a multi-dimensional, step-wise plan to transition SERNEC's data culture from name- to concept-based practices. (1) We will engage SERNEC experts through annual, regional workshops and follow-up interactions that will foster buy-in and ultimately the completion of 12 community-identified use cases. (2). We will leverage RCC–5 data from the Weakley Flora and further development of the Euler/X logic reasoning toolkit to provide comprehensive genus- to variety-level concept alignments for at least 10 major flora treatments with highest relevance to SERNEC. The visualizations and estimated > 1 billion inferred concept-to-concept relations will effectively drive specimen data integration in the transformed portal. (3) We will expand Symbiota's taxonomy and occurrence schemas and related user interfaces to support the new concept data, including novel batch and map-based specimen determination modules, with easy output options in Darwin Core Archive format. (4) Through combinations of the new technology, enlisted taxonomic expertise, and SERNEC's large image resources, we will upgrade minimally 80% of all SERNEC specimen identifications from names to the narrowest suitable TCLs, or add "uncertainty" flags to specimens needing further study. (5) We will utilize the novel tools and data to demonstrate how controlling for the taxonomic variable in 12 use cases variously drives the outcomes of evolutionary, ecological, and conservation-based research hypotheses. Broader impacts. Our project is focused on just one herbarium network, but the potential impact is as wide as Darwin Core or even comparative biology. We believe that trust in networked biodiversity data depends on open and dynamic system designs, allowing expert access and resolution of multiple conflicting views that reflect the complex realities of ongoing taxonomic research. Taking well over 1 million SERNEC records from name- to TCL-resolution will show that "big" specimen data can pass the credibility threshold needed to validate the substantive data mobilization investment. We will mentor one postdoctoral researcher (UNC), two Ph.D. students (ASU, UIUC), and at least 15 undergraduate students (ASU). Each of our workshops will capacitate 10-15 SERNEC experts, who in turn can recruit colleagues and students at their home collections. We will incorporate the project theme and use cases into undergraduate courses taught at six institutions and reaching an estimated 300-500 students annually (10-40% minority students). At each institution, project members will make a systematic effort to recruit new students from underrepresented groups. Our group's leadership of Symbiota (with close ties to iDigBio), SERNEC, and local biodiversity projects and centers will further promote the new data culture. We will create a feature story "Where do plant species occur?" for ASU's popular "Ask A Biologist" website, and a series of undergraduate student-led "How-To" videos that illustrate the use case workflows, including the creation of multi-taxonomy alignments.

Artificial conversations for customer service chatter bots: Architecture, algorithms, and evaluation metrics

Chatter bots are software programs that engage in artificial conversations through a text-based input medium. They are extensively deployed in customer service applications. Existing approaches to artificial conversation generation emphasize grammatical and linguistic modeling techniques. They focus on generation of discrete sentence-level utterances. These approaches perform poorly in conversational situations requiring contextual continuity over a series of utterances. We present an approach that combines pragmatics with content semantics to generate artificial conversations in the customer service domain. A conversation is a process that adheres to well-defined semantic conventions and is contextually grounded in domain-specific knowledge. We model this using stochastic finite state machines, where the parameters of the model are learned from a corpus of human conversations. We present a specific set of criteria which we then use to evaluate the quality of artificial conversations in the customer service domain. We also compare chatter bot generated artificial conversations with human generated natural conversations in this domain.

Whole-for-part metonymy, classification, and grounding

Since the early 1980s, metonymy has progressively gained central stage in linguistic investigations. The advent of cognitive linguistics marked a new turn in the study of this trope conceived, not as a deviation from semantic conventions (contra classical rhetorical theories), but as a phenomenon rooted in non-language-specific mechanisms of conceptualization of the world. Acknowledging that metonymy is ultimately cognitive in nature, this paper proposes to consider metonymy from its multiple levels of manifestation, integrating cognitive, pragmatic, semantic, but also ontological angles of approach. Taking whole-for-part (WP) metonymies as a case study, I aim to show how recent developments within these respective disciplines can enrich our understanding of such metonymic mechanisms, sometimes without even identifying them as such. This paper proposes to establish a dialog between these disciplines on the topic of WP-metonymy. So, after a presentation of the most standard cognitive and pragmatic approaches to WP-metonymy, I will argue for the relevance of recent semantic investigations on quantity gradability, and for the theoretical importance of keeping these two kinds of part-reference clearly apart. I will show that the literature on gradability provides strong semantic arguments for doing so. Finally, connecting the debate on WP-metonymy with the ontological debate on property inherence will open the way for a formal treatment of WP-metonymy within ground logic.