Motivation in Grammar and the Lexicon


Book Description

Language structure and use are largely shaped by cognitive processes such as categorizing, framing, inferencing, associative (metonymic), and analogical (metaphorical) thinking, and mediated through cognition by bodily experience, emotion, perception, action, social/communicative interaction, culture, and the internal ecology of the linguistic system itself. The contributors to the present volume demonstrate how these language-independent factors motivate grammar and the lexicon in a variety of languages such as English, German, French, Italian, Hungarian, Russian, Croatian, Japanese, and Korean. The volume will be of great interest to students and scholars in cognitive and functional linguistics."




Motivation in Grammar and the Lexicon


Book Description

Language structure and use are largely shaped by cognitive processes such as categorizing, framing, inferencing, associative (metonymic), and analogical (metaphorical) thinking, and – mediated through cognition – by bodily experience, emotion, perception, action, social/communicative interaction, culture, and the internal ecology of the linguistic system itself. The contributors to the present volume demonstrate how these language-independent factors motivate grammar and the lexicon in a variety of languages such as English, German, French, Italian, Hungarian, Russian, Croatian, Japanese, and Korean. The volume will be of great interest to students and scholars in cognitive and functional linguistics.




Studies in Linguistic Motivation


Book Description

How much of language is motivated? Recently, cognitive and functional linguists have proposed new solutions to this intriguing question. The thirteen articles collected in this volume cover various aspects of motivation in grammar and in the lexicon. The phenomena discussed in the contributions can be grouped into four types of motivation, which, along with other types, are explicated in the introductory chapter: ecological motivation, i.e. motivation of a linguistic unit due to its place, or "ecological niche," within a system; genetic motivation, i.e. motivation of present-day linguistic behavior or structure due to historical factors; experiential motivation, i.e. motivation that is based on embodied experience; and cognitive motivation, i.e. motivation that is based on human knowledge and cognitive operations such as metonymy and metaphor. The languages studied in some detail include Afrikaans, Croatian, Dutch, English, French, German, Hausa, and Hungarian. This volume makes a strong case for the pervasiveness of motivation in natural language. It will be of interest to teachers, researchers and students of linguistics, especially of functional and cognitive linguistics.




Expanding the Lexicon


Book Description

The creation of new lexical units and patterns has been studied in different research frameworks, focusing on either system-internal or system-external aspects, from which no comprehensive view has emerged. The volume aims to fill this gap by studying dynamic processes in the lexicon – understood in a wide sense as not being necessarily limited to the word level – by bringing together approaches directed to morphological productivity as well as approaches analyzing general types of lexical innovation and the role of discourse-related factors. The papers deal with ongoing changes as well as with historical processes of change in different languages and reflect on patterns and specific subtypes of lexical innovation as well as on their external conditions and the speakers’ motivations for innovating. Moreover, the diffusion and conventionalization of innovations will be addressed. In this way, the volume contributes to understanding the complex interplay of structural, cognitive and functional factors in the lexicon as a highly dynamic domain.




Rhyme over Reason


Book Description

Machine generated contents note: 1. Introduction; 2. Phonological motivation in language evolution and development; 3. Phonetic symbolism; 4. Onomatopoeia; 5. Rhyme and alliteration in blends and compounds; 6. Words, words, words: rhyme and repetition in multi-word expressions; 7. Conclusions: the piggy in the middle.




The Cambridge Handbook of Phonology


Book Description

Phonology - the study of how the sounds of speech are represented in our minds - is one of the core areas of linguistic theory, and is central to the study of human language. This handbook brings together the world's leading experts in phonology to present the most comprehensive and detailed overview of the field. Focusing on research and the most influential theories, the authors discuss each of the central issues in phonological theory, explore a variety of empirical phenomena, and show how phonology interacts with other aspects of language such as syntax, morphology, phonetics, and language acquisition. Providing a one-stop guide to every aspect of this important field, The Cambridge Handbook of Phonology will serve as an invaluable source of readings for advanced undergraduate and graduate students, an informative overview for linguists and a useful starting point for anyone beginning phonological research.




Between Grammar and Lexicon


Book Description

The essays in this volume explore the relationship between lexical and grammatical categories, calling into question the strict dichotomy between the two that is sometimes assumed.




A Case Frame Grammar and Lexicon for the Book of Revelation


Book Description

Paul Danove presents a case frame grammar and lexicon for the Book of Revelation, with three major goals. He first provides a step-by-step introduction to case frame analysis, incorporating various adaptations and extensions to address the needs of the study of the Greek of the New Testament. He then supplies a comprehensive case frame grammar and description of the syntactic, semantic, and lexical requirements that each predicator imposes on its complements. He finally generates a case frame lexicon that guides the interpretation and translation of each predicator occurrence in its grammatical contexts. Danove begins with the method of analysis and description, with an overview of case frame grammar, an analysis of the events grammaticalized by the predicators in the Book of Revelation, descriptions of the usages of these events, and further specification of these descriptions. He then provides illustrative examples of the predicators with each usage, discusses the distinctive grammatical characteristics of Revelation, sets forth the protocols for generating lexicon entries, and concludes with the case frame lexicon for predicators in the text of Revelation.




Advances in Generative Lexicon Theory


Book Description

This collection of papers takes linguists to the leading edge of techniques in generative lexicon theory, the linguistic composition methodology that arose from the imperative to provide a compositional semantics for the contextual modifications in meaning that emerge in real linguistic usage. Today’s growing shift towards distributed compositional analyses evinces the applicability of GL theory, and the contributions to this volume, presented at three international workshops (GL-2003, GL-2005 and GL-2007) address the relationship between compositionality in language and the mechanisms of selection in grammar that are necessary to maintain this property. The core unresolved issues in compositionality, relating to the interpretation of context and the mechanisms of selection, are treated from varying perspectives within GL theory, including its basic theoretical mechanisms and its analytical viewpoint on linguistic phenomena.




LMF Lexical Markup Framework


Book Description

The community responsible for developing lexicons for Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Machine Readable Dictionaries (MRDs) started their ISO standardization activities in 2003. These activities resulted in the ISO standard – Lexical Markup Framework (LMF). After selecting and defining a common terminology, the LMF team had to identify the common notions shared by all lexicons in order to specify a common skeleton (called the core model) and understand the various requirements coming from different groups of users. The goals of LMF are to provide a common model for the creation and use of lexical resources, to manage the exchange of data between and among these resources, and to enable the merging of a large number of individual electronic resources to form extensive global electronic resources. The various types of individual instantiations of LMF can include monolingual, bilingual or multilingual lexical resources. The same specifications can be used for small and large lexicons, both simple and complex, as well as for both written and spoken lexical representations. The descriptions range from morphology, syntax and computational semantics to computer-assisted translation. The languages covered are not restricted to European languages, but apply to all natural languages. The LMF specification is now a success and numerous lexicon managers currently use LMF in different languages and contexts. This book starts with the historical context of LMF, before providing an overview of the LMF model and the Data Category Registry, which provides a flexible means for applying constants like /grammatical gender/ in a variety of different settings. It then presents concrete applications and experiments on real data, which are important for developers who want to learn about the use of LMF. Contents 1. LMF – Historical Context and Perspectives, Nicoletta Calzolari, Monica Monachini and Claudia Soria. 2. Model Description, Gil Francopoulo and Monte George. 3. LMF and the Data Category Registry: Principles and Application, Menzo Windhouwer and Sue Ellen Wright. 4. Wordnet-LMF: A Standard Representation for Multilingual Wordnets, Piek Vossen, Claudia Soria and Monica Monachini. 5. Prolmf: A Multilingual Dictionary of Proper Names and their Relations, Denis Maurel, Béatrice Bouchou-Markhoff. 6. LMF for Arabic, Aida Khemakhem, Bilel Gargouri, Kais Haddar and Abdelmajid Ben Hamadou. 7. LMF for a Selection of African Languages, Chantal Enguehard and Mathieu Mangeot. 8. LMF and its Implementation in Some Asian Languages, Takenobu Tokunaga, Sophia Y.M. Lee, Virach Sornlertlamvanich, Kiyoaki Shirai, Shu-Kai Hsieh and Chu-Ren Huang. 9. DUELME: Dutch Electronic Lexicon of Multiword Expressions, Jan Odijk. 10. UBY-LMF – Exploring the Boundaries of Language-Independent Lexicon Models, Judith Eckle-Kohler, Iryna Gurevych, Silvana Hartmann, Michael Matuschek and Christian M. Meyer. 11. Conversion of Lexicon-Grammar Tables to LMF: Application to French, Éric Laporte, Elsa Tolone and Matthieu Constant. 12. Collaborative Tools: From Wiktionary to LMF, for Synchronic and Diachronic Language Data, Thierry Declerck, Pirsoka Lendvai and Karlheinz Mörth. 13. LMF Experiments on Format Conversions for Resource Merging: Converters and Problems, Marta Villegas, Muntsa Padró and Núria Bel. 14. LMF as a Foundation for Servicized Lexical Resources, Yoshihiko Hayashi, Monica Monachini, Bora Savas, Claudia Soria and Nicoletta Calzolari. 15. Creating a Serialization of LMF: The Experience of the RELISH Project, Menzo Windhouwer, Justin Petro, Irina Nevskaya, Sebastian Drude, Helen Aristar-Dry and Jost Gippert. 16. Global Atlas: Proper Nouns, From Wikipedia to LMF, Gil Francopoulo, Frédéric Marcoul, David Causse and Grégory Piparo. 17. LMF in U.S. Government Language Resource Management, Monte George. About the Authors Gil Francopoulo works for Tagmatica (www.tagmatica.com), a company specializing in software development in the field of linguistics and documentation in the semantic web, in Paris, France, as well as for Spotter (www.spotter.com), a company specializing in media and social media analytics.