Could a single semantic formalism be created which would allow for the representation of meaning at all levels from basic semantic units and relations to sentence-level and text-level meaning, while remaining practical and user-friendly? This book showcases a detailed, precise and clear semantic formalism such that representations of meaning can be created and understood by a wide range of users, including logicians, linguists, creative writers, and literary specialists without detailed technical knowledge.
An evil witch has turned a prince into a frog. The spell can only be broken when a young lady shows kindness to him. Follow the adventure of the frog prince as he finds such a young lady, and the real meaning of “A promise is a promise.”
How Words Mean: Lexical Concepts, Cognitive Models, and Meaning Construction
introduces a new approach to the role of words and other linguistic units in the construction of meaning. It does so by addressing the interaction between non-linguistic concepts and the meanings encoded in language.
Lumphy is a stuffed buffalo. StingRay is a stuffed stingray. And Plastic... well, Plastic isn't quite sure what she is. They all belong to the Little Girl who lives on the high bed with the fluffy pillows.
Together is best for these three best friends. Together they look things up in the dictionary, explore the basement, and argue about the meaning of life. And together they face dogs, school, television commercials, the vastness of the sea and the terrifying bigness of the washing machine.
This book is about language in STEM research and about how it is thought about: as something that somehow refers to something else not directly accessible, often meaning, mental representation, or conception. Using the analyses of real data and analyses of the way certain concepts are used in the scientifi c literature, such as "meaning," this book reframes the discussion about meaning, mental representation, and conceptions consistent with the pragmatic approaches that we have become familiar with through the works of K. Marx, L. S. Vygotsky, M. M. Bakhtin, V. N. Vološinov, L. Wittgenstein, F. Mikhailov, R. Rorty, and J. Derrida, to name but a few.
