Semantic Metalanguage Research Articles

Paradoxes of truth-in-context-X

We may suppose that the truth predicate that we utilize in our semantic metalanguage is a two-place predicate relating sentences to contexts, the truth-in-context-X predicate. Seeming paradoxes pertaining to the truth-in-context-X predicate can be blocked by placing restrictions on the structure of contexts. While contexts must specify a domain of contexts, and what a context constant denotes relative to a context must be a context in the context domain of that context, no context may belong to its own context domain. A generalization of that restriction appears to block all of the paradoxes of truth-in-context-X. This restriction entails that, in a certain sense, we cannot talk about the context we are in. This result will be defended, up to a point, on broadly ontological grounds. It will also be conjectured that our semantic metalanguage can be regarded as semantically closed.

Generalized description and referential meaning of typical childlike situations comparable to sacrifice

The article discusses the issues regarding the essence of what the reality referring to typical childlike situations similar to sacrifice, and the ways the names and descriptions of behavior types differ from these types as per se. The description of lexical meanings via the semantic metalanguage and the description of typical linguistic and other cultural forms based on prototypes do not contradict each other, since they solve different problems. Consequently, generic descriptions of typical childlike situations comparable to sacrifice are lexical meanings of the short names of typical situations, constructed in metalanguage on the basis of an intuitive understanding of their similarity, existing as artefacts of text analysis, while the typical situations and forms of childlike behavior comparable to sacrifice are real-life objective forms of behavioral situations and biological, cultural and social predispositions to certain typical forms of behavior.

Investigating a Japanese Authenticity-Blurring Mechanism in Discourse: “It’s the Mood which has the Last Say in Our Discussion.”

Every culture has its own repertoire of characteristic discourse patterns. In a discourse, authenticity, which is related to socio-pragmatic strategies, is also culturally influenced. As is often noted, Japanese discourse patterns deviate from the Western norm in that the source of the influential view is intentionally blurred so that it is not easily traceable to its asserters. When the decision process is criticized, people concerned can say, “the mood had the last say in our discussion.” This discourse pattern is referred to as atmospheric dominance. The purpose of this research is to identify sources of the phenomenon through philological research, citing data from the Seventeen-Article Constitution (compiled in 604), Manyousyu (the 8th century anthology of poetry), Kojiki (the oldest chronicle, compiled around the 8th century), and Nihon Shoki (the second oldest chronicle, completed approximately 8th century). Our main point is that the concepts of Wa (harmony) and kotodama (language spirits) pertain to and constitute atmospheric dominance, which are defined with semantic metalanguage. This research clarifies how these two concepts are intertwined and work behind atmospheric dominance by citing documentaries, monologues, and newspaper articles, including the delay of publication of the meltdown incident in 2011.

Do pragmatic signals affect conventional metaphor understanding? A failed test of deliberate metaphor theory

Different signals, or tuning devices, in language, including certain discourse markers, comparatives, intensifiers and semantic meta-language, sometimes accompany verbal metaphors. Some scholars have claimed that these signals give evidence of “deliberate metaphor” use on the part of speakers and writers. So, understanding these particular uses of metaphor requires people to infer deliberation, which leads them to pay greater notice to these figures and enhances their understanding of the cross-domain mappings motivating metaphorical utterances. Many linguistic analyses argue that deliberate metaphor is a critical part of metaphor use, yet no empirical study has explored whether people really infer greater deliberation and cross-domain mappings when encountering so-called pragmatic signals of metaphor. The present study tested this idea and did not find evidence in support of the deliberate metaphor proposal. This conclusion raises serious doubts about the psychological validity of the idea that some metaphors are produced and understood as being deliberate.

Modularity in Meta-Languages

A meta-language for semantics has a high degree of modularity<br />when descriptions of individual language constructs can be formulated independently using it, and do not require reformulation when new constructs are added to the described language. The quest for modularity in semantic meta-languages has been going on for more than two decades. Here, most of the main meta-languages for operational, denotational, and hybrid styles of semantics are compared regarding their modularity. A simple bench-mark is used: describing the semantics of a pure functional language, then extending the described language with references, exceptions, and concurrency constructs. For each style of semantics, at least one of the considered meta-languages appears to provide a high degree of modularity.

Wh-questions in underspecified minimal recursion semantics

In this paper, I present Underspecified Minimal Recursion Semantics (UMRS), a representation language that represents structural ambiguities in terms of underspecification. It is argued that this kind of approach allows for transparent semantic representations and a straightforward syntax-semantics interface. UMRS is a semantic metalanguage, whose expressions describe expressions of an object language and (possibly underspecified) dependences between them. The potential of UMRS will be illustrated by employing it as the semantic component of an HPSG description of wh-questions

Human Emotions: Universal or Culture‐Specific?

The search for “fundamental human emotions” has been seriously impeded by the absence of a culture‐independent semantic metalanguage. The author proposes a metalanguage based on a postulated set of universal semantic primitives, and shows how language‐specific meanings of emotion terms can be captured and how rigorous cross‐cultural comparisons of emotion terms can be achieved.

Is the get‐passive adversative?

Abstract A new analysis of the get‐passive is advocated in the following paper. It is based on the belief that the study of semantics is fundamental and prior to the study of syntax. This initial assumption leads to the postulation of a discrete number of intuitively‐verifiable interpretations of the get‐passive construction in the main section of the article. Natural language is used as the semantic metalanguage in the analysis of the passive. Bach interpretation is subsequently reduced into less complex but more readily comprehensible units. The article begins with an outline of earlier attitudes towards the use of get, followed by a brief description of several different kinds of passive constructions in other languages. An appraisal of two comparatively recent articles that specifically deal with the get‐passive precedes the presentation of the semantic analysis.