In our multimedia age, text description presents many conceptual problems: texts, as cultural objects, cannot be interpreted without descriptions of genre, communicative conditions, and language, which positivist approaches have proved unable to provide. Semantics for Descriptions addresses itself as much to linguists as to computer scientists, arguing that rational hermeneutics can offer better descriptive methods by allowing the theoretical and practical conditions of text interpretation to be defined.
The study of compounds is currently at the center of attention in many areas of both theoretical and applied linguistics. This volume brings together contributions by experts involved in a wide range of such areas, based on a large number of diverse languages – spoken and signed. The fact that compound constructions are at the interface of the various components of language – morphology, syntax, phonology, and semantics – makes them ideal testing grounds for models of grammatical architecture, as seen in a number of these chapters.
This is the second volume of a two-volume work that introduces a new and fundamentally different conception of language structure and linguistic investigation. The central claim of cognitive grammar is that grammar forms a continuum with lexicon and is fully describable in terms of symbolic units (i.e. form-meaning pairings). In contrast to current orthodoxy, the author argues that grammar is not autonomous with respect to semantics, but rather reduces to patterns for the structuring and symbolization of conceptual content.
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.
