Semantics, Culture, and Cognition: Universal Human Concepts in Culture-Specific Configurations
Not everything that can be said in one language can be said in another. The lexicons of different languages seem to suggest different conceptual universes. Investigating cultures from a universal, language-independent perspective, this book rejects analytical tools derived from the English language and Anglo culture and proposes instead a "natural semantic metalanguage" formulated in English words but based on lexical universals.
Cedric Boeckx provides a wonderful, modern review of the necessity of mentalism, of innate structure for all of the mind, and the role of mathematics in articulating different principles of representation for different modules of mind---a summary of the Chomskyan revolution over the last half century. He brings perspective to the project by connecting the history of philosophy with modern experimentation showing that the “generative” approach to both language and mind has received stunning support in acquisition, processing, and aphasia.
Not everything that can be said in one language can be said in another. The lexicons of different languages seem to suggest different conceptual universes. Investigating cultures from a universal, language-independent perspective, this book rejects analytical tools derived from the English language and Anglo culture and proposes instead a "natural semantic metalanguage" formulated in English words but based on lexical universals.
Current Trends in Diachronic Semantics and Pragmatics
The focus of this volume is on semantic and pragmatic change, its causes and mechanisms. The papers gathered here offer both theoretical proposals of more general scope and in-depth studies of language-specific cases of meaning change in particular notional domains. The analyses include data from English, several Romance languages, German, Scandinavian languages, and Oceanic languages.
Although during the last sixty years philology has attained a high degree of development, looking at the literature available, Etymology appears only to have reached the level of philology at the turn of the century. This dictionary is the first major work of its kind in the 20th century, and as such, embodies the findings of modern philological scholarship. For example, full reference is made to Tocharian, the extinct language rediscovered at the end of the Nineteenth Century which often provides the key to the important transition form between the Old-Indian and the Indo-European group of languages
