Stylistics is the study of the ways in which meaning is created through language in literature as well as in other types of text. To this end, stylisticians use linguistic models, theories and frameworks as their analytical tools in order to describe and explain how and why a text works as it does, and how we come from the words on the page to its meaning. The analysis typically focuses qualitatively or quantitatively on the phonological,
lexical, grammatical, semantic, pragmatic or discoursal features of texts, on the cognitive aspects involved in the processing of those features by the reader as well as on various combinations of these.
Presenting a radically semantic approach to syntax and morphology, this book offers a methodology which makes it possible to demonstrate, on an empirical basis, that syntax is neither "autonomous" nor "arbitrary", but that it "follows from semantics". It is shown that every grammatical construction encodes a certain semantic structure, which can be revealed and rigorously stated, so that the meanings encoded in grammar can be compared in a precise and illuminating way, within one language and across language boundaries.
The Human Semantic Potential: Spatial Language and Constrained Connectionism Drawing on ideas from cognitive linguistics, connectionism, and perception, The Human Semantic Potential describes a connectionist model that learns perceptually grounded semantics for natural language in spatial terms. Languages differ in the ways in which they structure space, and Regier's aim is to have the model perform its learning task for terms from any natural language. The system has so far succeeded in learning spatial terms from English, German, Russian, Japanese, and Mixtec.
The Meaning of Focus Particles - A Comparative Perspective
Focus particles--even, only, also, merely--play an important role in English in various syntactic and semantic domains such as coordination, focusing, emphatic reflexives, concessive constructions, and quantification. The syntactic properties of these expressions pose numerous problems for current syntactic frameworks and the highly context-dependent and subjective nature of their meaning presents a challenge for semantic theories.
Case, Semantic Roles, and Grammatical Relations - A Comprehensive Bibliography
This is the first of a series of six books dealing with case phenomena in different languages, both Indo- and non-Indo-European. The This bibliography presents the many dimensions involved in reserch into case and case-related phenomena. This includes morphological case markers and cross-constituent (semantic and grammatical) relations expressed by morphological case or by its various conterparts; morpho-syntactic processes such as transitivity and passivization; and pragmatic and textual considerations.
