Semantics and Pragmatics Commons^™

Secular But Not Superficial : An Overlooked Nonreligious/Nonspiritual Identity., Daniel G. Delaney

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Since Durkheim’s characterization of the sacred and profane as “antagonistic rivals,” the strict dichotomy has been framed in such a way that “being religious” evokes images of a life filled with profound meaning and value, while “being secular” evokes images of a meaningless, self-centered, superficial life, often characterized by materialistic consumerism and the cold, heartless environment of corporate greed. Consequently, to identify as “neither religious nor spiritual” runs the risk of being stigmatized as superficial, untrustworthy, and immoral. Conflicts and confusions encountered in the process of negotiating a nonreligious/nonspiritual identity, caused by the ambiguous nature of religious language, were explored …

Towards A Computational Model Of Frame Of Reference Alignment In Swedish Dialogue, Simon Dobnik, Christine Howes, Kim Demaret, John D. Kelleher

Conference papers

In this paper we examine how people negotiate, interpret and repair the frame of reference (FoR) in online text based dialogues discussing spatial scenes in Swedish. We describe work-in-progress in which participants are given different perspectives of the same scene and asked to locate several objects that are only shown on one of their pictures. This task requires participants to coordinate on FoR in order to identify the missing objects. This study has implications for situated dialogue systems.

Virtual Meatspace: Word Formation And Deformation In Cyberpunk Discussions, Matt Garley, Benjamin Slade

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Full-On Stating, Robert Stainton

Philosophy Publications

What distinguishes full-on stating a proposition from merely communicating it? For instance, what distinguishes claiming/asserting/saying that one has never smoked crack cocaine from merely implying/conveying/hinting this? The enormous literature on ‘assertion’ provides many approaches to distinguishing stating from, say, asking and commanding: only the former aims at truth; only the former expresses one’s belief; etc. But this leaves my question unanswered, since in merely communicating a proposition one also aims at truth, expresses a belief, etc. My aim is not to criticize extant accounts of the state-vs.-merely-convey contrast, but rather to draw on clues from Dummett, functional linguistics and moral …

Respon Tutur Siswa Autis Terhadap Tutur Direktif Guru Dalam Interaksi Pembelajaran Di Kelas, Siti Robiah, Abdul Syukur Ibrahim, Ah. Rofi'uddin

Bahasa dan Seni: Jurnal Bahasa, Sastra, Seni, dan Pengajarannya

The aim of this study is to describe the form, function and response strategies from autistic studentson the teachers’ directive in the classroom. This study used a case study. The results showed that there are two categories of the students’ spoken responses: (1) speech production in the form of assertive, directive, commissive and expressive; and (2) the speech responses are based on the senses including auditory, visual and emotions. In addition, the function of the students’ responses is categorized into two: (i) the effect of speech production in terms of complaining, agreeing, asking, stating something, thanking, apologizing, asserting, reporting, mentioning …

On The Screen, In The Mind: An Erp Investigation Into The Interaction Between Visuo-Spatial Information And Spatial Language During On-Line Processing, Emily Zane

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This project used Event-Related Potentials (ERPs) to explore neurophysiological brain responses to prepositional phrases involving concrete and abstract reference nouns (e.g., "plate" and "moment", respectively) after the presentation of objects with varying spatial features. Prepositional phrases were headed by in or on and were either matching (e.g., "in the plate/moment") or mismatching (e.g., "on the plate/moment"). Conjunction phrase matches and fillers were also presented. Before half of the concrete-phrase items, a photographic depiction of the reference noun was presented. In these photographs, objects were displayed in a way that was either more appropriate for in or for on. Similarly, before …

Event Parsing In Narrative: Trials And Tribulations Of Archaic English Fairy Tales, Rebecca Lovering

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

While event extraction and automatic summarization have taken great strides in the realm of news stories, fictional narratives like fairy tales have not been so fortunate. A number of challenges arise from the literary elements present in fairy tales that are not found in more straightforward corpora of natural language, such as archaic expressions and sentence structures. To aid in summarization of fictional texts, I created an class - a template for a digital object, in this case a semantic and story event - that captures elements predicted to help classify events as important for inclusion. I wrote a processor …

Language-Mixing In Discourse In Bilingual Individuals With Non-Fluent Aphasia, Avanthi Paplikar

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Language-mixing (LM) as defined by Chengappa (2009, p. 417) is an “intra-sentential phenomenon referred to as the mixing of various linguistic units (morphemes, words, modifiers, phrases, etc.), primarily from two participating grammatical systems”. LM is influenced by grammatical, environmental, and social constraints (e.g., Milroy & Wei, 1995; Bhat & Chengappa, 2005). Researchers have suggested that LM in patients with aphasia is a communicative strategy used to achieve successful exchanges between speakers; the effectiveness of this mixing, however, had yet to be demonstrated quantitatively.

In the current study we investigated whether LM is present in bilingual speakers with aphasia, and if …

On The Syntax/Semantics Of Korean Nominal Particles, Han-Byul Chung

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this dissertation, I investigate the structural positions of i/ka-marked DPs and un/nun-marked DPs in the light of Kratzer (1988; 1995) and Diesing (1990; 1992). In Korean, unlike German (and English in part), vP-external subjects and vP-internal subjects are not distinguishable at the surface. However, by adopting Kratzer (1988; 1995) and Diesing (1990; 1992), we are able to distinguish between vP-external DPs and vP-internal DPs in Korean.

According to Kratzer and Diesing, syntactic position of a DP has affect in the interpretation of the DP itself, as well as the interpretation of the sentence …

Animacy And Alienability: A Reconsideration Of English Possession, Jaimee Jones

Senior Honors Theses

Current scholarship on English possessive constructions, the s-genitive and the of-construction, largely ignores the possessive relationships inherent in certain English compound nouns. Scholars agree that, in general, an animate possessor predicts the s-genitive while an inanimate possessor predicts the of-construction. However, the current literature rarely discusses noun compounds, such as the table leg, which also express possessive relationships. However, pragmatically and syntactically, a compound cannot be considered as a true possessive construction. Thus, this paper will examine why some compounds still display possessive semantics epiphenomenally. The noun compounds that imply possession seem to exhibit relationships prototypical of inalienable …

Chinese Slang, Robert L. Moore

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Hpcnmf: A High-Performance Toolbox For Non-Negative Matrix Factorization, Karthik Devarajan, Guoli Wang

COBRA Preprint Series

Non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) is a widely used machine learning algorithm for dimension reduction of large-scale data. It has found successful applications in a variety of fields such as computational biology, neuroscience, natural language processing, information retrieval, image processing and speech recognition. In bioinformatics, for example, it has been used to extract patterns and profiles from genomic and text-mining data as well as in protein sequence and structure analysis. While the scientific performance of NMF is very promising in dealing with high dimensional data sets and complex data structures, its computational cost is high and sometimes could be critical for …

Verbing And Nouning, Grace Gomashie, Robert Stainton

Philosophy Publications

This brief encyclopedia entry addresses three questions: What are verbing and nouning? Why are they important for language evolution? And are prescriptive grammarians right to be so unreceptive?

Cuasi Factivos, Axel Barcelo Aspeitia, Robert Stainton

Philosophy Publications

We introduce a construction which we label 'quasi-factive'. They are heard like factives, in that we immediately take the complement to be true. Yet they aren't really factive at all. Examples include: 'It's not widely known that Marta was born in Canada' (because she was born in Uruguay); 'Don't tell anyone that Carlos will run as a candidate' (because he won't); 'Did it bother Jane that Miguel came?' (no, because Miguel didn't come). We identify sub-categories of our quasi-factives, and then tentatively explore a pragmatic explanation of how they work their magic.

Re-Analyzing The Function Of Demonstrative Reference In Tajik, Kelly E. Bowman

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

This thesis presents a re-analysis of Tajik demonstratives based on an alternative to the widely accepted framework for understanding demonstrative reference. In this framework, demonstrative reference is categorized according to two criteria: the anchor relative to which reference is made, and the number of spatial distinctions the system has for encoding distance from the anchor (Levinson 2004, O’Grady 2010). According to previous literature (Rastorgueva 1963, Perry 2005, Windfuhr & Perry 2009), Tajik has a speaker-anchored, two-way reference system. However, these criteria alone do not account for the data presented in this thesis. I therefore propose the following change to this …