Search

This paper discusses the contemporary use of the Portuguese simple and two compound pluperfect forms (with the auxiliary verbs ter, and haver) of the indicative mood in written texts. Four topics are addressed. First, the claim that the simple pluperfect is currently a defective paradigm lacking the third person plural; this claim is confirmed and substantiated by looking at specific distinguishing contexts in corpora. Secondly, the competition between the three pluperfect forms, in written contemporary European and Brazilian Portuguese; it is shown that – contrary to some frequent comments in the literature – all three forms still have widespread usage, and occur in a relatively balanced way, in the type of registers considered (newspaper writing, modern literary texts, modern literary translations), in both varieties of the language. Thirdly, as regards semantic polyvalence, the possible existence of a deictic rather than anaphoric (temporal) pluperfect; it is argued that this type of pluperfect does indeed exist, and deserves separate grammatical recognition. Fourthly, the well-known cases of ambiguity in structures with pluperfect and temporal locating adjuncts, where the latter can act either as markers of the past perspective point required by the pluperfect, or as markers of the location time of the described eventualities; facts in English and Portuguese are compared, with some differences highlighted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes memes posted by @Ukraine to X, formerly known as Twitter, from the account’s inception in 2016 through September 2023 to examine the function and utility of memes as tools of propaganda in global conflict.

Nietzsche’s Eternal Return (ER) is interpreted in many ways, including by him. I present it as a hermeneutic device, a way of reading texts, especially those whose influence threatens one’s authorial autonomy and/or are later difficult to take ownership of due to philosophical growth. It returns past texts with new interpretations, similar to the way ER leads one to embrace one’s past without changing anything, which radically changes everything from a resented painful burden into a celebrated enhancement of freedom and power. I show how he could have derived the idea from Schopenhauer, his own embarrassing past, by performing the technique on Schopenhauer. The same attitude toward past texts of recreating them according to one’s present interests and concerns simultaneously releases one’s present texts for future readers to impose their readings onto them, just as Zarathustra tells his followers not to follow him. Heidegger takes the idea up in a far more nuanced account than he is usually given credit for and applies it, among other places, to the history of philosophy. All philosophers say the same as it keeps returning. Derrida then recreates this as iterability, the deconstruction of the no/change dichotomy that Nietzsche began.

The Polish genitive case is explored from the point of view of its proposed polysemy. We adopt the view that the genitive represents an instance of structured polysemy (Nikiforidou 1991). Like Nikiforidou, we reject the opinion that the genitive instantiates accidental homonymy or shows general single meaning. Our analysis demonstrates that several meanings we identified are intricately tied to each other. There are two prototypical meanings with their several semantic extensions, the latter departing from the former. Contrary to Nikiforidou's proposal of the genitive as a "radial category" (Lakoff 1987), we support an alternative model. In our view, structured polysemy found in the genitive is better handled by a model referred to as the "meaning chain" (Taylor 1988). Some of the meanings identified are motivated by other meanings in the chain, without directly relying on some semantic centre. Our description of the Polish genitive sheds new light on the holistic semantics of this category with allegedly only grammatical meaning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is a contribution to the semantic map of imperatives, prompted by an implicational map proposed earlier in the literature. The tentative semantic map proposed here abstracts away from differences in use that can be attributed to pragmatics, like distinctions between commands, requests, suggestions etc. The functional differentiation resulting from person and number value, which determines a different character of the directive speech act, is adopted as the basis for the characterization of polysemy in imperatives, and taken as the nucleus of the semantic map, which is then expanded by taking into account non-directive meanings, which are also differentiated with regard to the person value from which they develop. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent debates about aesthetics are characterized by a partly intentional, but also partly involuntary, vagueness. Whether it be aestheticisation or anesthetisation, articisation or desartification: what is upheld or deplored under one and the same label in fact designates rather different things. The paper makes a suggestion as to how the field could be reorganized. Taking heed of what political theory discusses as the "political difference" between "politics" and "the political", the aim is to examine what would be gained by working with an "aesthetic difference" that does not straightforwardly equate "the aesthetic" with "art", and "the aesthetic" with the totality of sensuous-aisthetic processes. An aesthetic thinking would then amount to a thinking that does justice to these inner polarities and remains faithful to the ambiguity of its objects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Late Latin, dolus 'deceit' expanded its semantic scope and took on the meanings of dolor 'pain, suffering, grief, anguish'. This article lays out the literary and epigraphic attestations for dolus 'suffering' in full and discusses the difficulties in determining whether a change in semantics has occurred. Using digital resources such as Perseus Digital Library and the linguistic corpus LatinISE as the basis for quantitative analysis, suggested routes by which dolus took on the meanings of dolor are evaluated. The article proposes that analogy played an important role and suggests several instances of four-part analogy based around s-stem nouns and adjectives formed from them by the suffix -oso-. It also considers the way in which the prescriptivist rhetoric of ancient authors still shape modern scholarship on Latin. Late Latin features are not evidence of decay or the result of speakers being ill-educated or incompetent, and should not be discussed as mistakes. The article also considers how social hegemonies influence semantics and the study whereof, and how the dominance of certain voices in Latin may skew our understanding of the meaning of words. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the rendition of the key words of the Christian ethical vocabulary σώφρων and σωφροσύνη in Ukrainian translations of the New Testament in comparison with other East Slavic translations in synchronic and diachronic dimensions. The σώφρων word group covers a range of "intellectual" and "moral" meanings in Ancient Greek, which continue to evolve in Hellenistic Greek to denote 'soundness of mind', 'prudence', 'discretion', 'good sense', on the one hand, and 'moderation', 'self-control', 'temperance', 'restraint', 'decency', 'modesty', on the other. Retaining such polysemy in the New Testament, the σώφρων word group also displays various connotations depending on gender, age and social status. The Old Slavonic and Church Slavonic calques of the σώφρων word group mostly accentuate its "moral" meanings, especially the meanings of 'chastity' and 'purity', which evolve in Christian ascetic literature after the New Testament, although in some cases they retain their primary "intellectual" meanings. The article also explores the use of semantic equivalents of the σώφρων word group in Old Ukrainian, Old Russian and Old Belarusian based on corpora data and historical written monuments. We came to the conclusion that Ukrainian biblical translations of the 19th to early 21st century, as well as some Russian and Belarusian translations, generally take into consideration the polysemy of the σώφρων word group in the New Testament, though a great extent of variability of equivalents and a lack of consistent reproduction of gender and age connotations are observed. We argue that the use of certain moral equivalents of the σώφρων word group in modern East Slavic translations (in particular, Ukrainian цнотливий, цнотливість, цнота, Russian целомудренный and Belarusian цнатлівий) is inappropriate due to the resulting narrowing of their meanings to 'innocence', 'virginity' and 'sexual purity'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In their target paper, Roelofsen & Dotlacil develops a type-theoretic dynamic inquisitive semantics framework ( HT ht , for short). This is because the atomicity condition in HT ht does not prevent a discourse referent from being plural at the discourse level. HT ht combines Inquisitive Semantics ([5]), which is a framework for studying questions, and Plural Compositional DRT (PCDRT, for short, [2], [3]), which is a dynamic framework for studying plural anaphora. How many points did get?. [Extracted from the article]

In this paper we bring evidence from English and Italian deverbal zero nominals (to climb > the climb-ØN) that zero is a possible spell-out of a nominalizer otherwise overtly instantiated in suffixed nominals (examin-ation). We argue in favor of a Distributed Morphology approach, a separationist theory that recognizes and easily implements zero morphology with underlying syntax-semantics. Abstracting away from other theoretical trends and their foundational reasons to refrain from using zero suffixes, we address three properties that have been argued to fundamentally distinguish zero nominals from overtly suffixed nominals, with the implication that they instantiate a different word formation process: i) realization of verbal argument structure, ii) possibility of embedding verbalizing suffixes, and iii) semantic transparency in relation to the verb. By means of corpus data and two manually collected datasets of 561 English and 174 Italian zero nominals based on lexicographic information, we bring solid evidence against these claims, by arguing that: i) a great proportion of zero nominals do realize verbal argument structure, ii) the zero affix may embed verbalizing affixes within the limits of the selectional restrictions it independently imposes on its base, and iii) zero nominals present the same patterns of polysemy that suffixed nominals display. However, we show that zero nominals also present some idiosyncrasies to the extent that not all of them express compositional event readings with argument structure, a matter that deserves further research within the frame of their competition with suffixed nominals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the paper, the authors present the Schur m-power convexity and concavity for the general geometric Bonferroni mean of multiple parameters and establish comparison inequalities for bounding the general geometric Bonferroni mean in terms of the arithmetic, geometric, and harmonic means. These Schur convexity and concavity provide a unified generalization of the Schur convexity and concavity for the geometric Bonferroni means of two or three parameters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Whether it is based on philological data or on reconstruction, historical linguistics formulates etymological hypotheses that entail changes both in form and in meaning. Semantic change can be understood as a change in “patterns of lexification”, i. e., correspondences between forms and senses. Thus a polysemous word, which once lexified senses s1–s2–s3, evolves so it later encodes s2–s3–s4. Meanings that used to be colexified are now dislexified, and vice versa. Leaning on empirical data from Romance and from Oceanic, this study outlines a general model of historical lexicology, and identifies five types of structural innovations in the lexicon: split, merger, competition, shift, and relexification.

In this paper I study the expression χύσις τῆς κακίας, frequently used by Origen of Alexandria. The identification of its variants in Origen gives some criteria to identify its occurrences in pre-origenian literature. Three possible sources are examined: the pagan literature, the Scripture and Philo of Alexandria; the latter is most likely the model for Origen. Before studying the use of χύσις τῆς κακίας and its variants in Origen, I discuss the frequency of these expressions in his works. Curiously enough, Origen uses them far more often in the Against Celsus than in his other works. The most likely explanation is that the topics discussed in the apology led him to have recourse to these expressions. A survey of the multiple meanings of χύσις τῆς κακίας and its variants in all his works but the Against Celsus, then in the latter, confirms this hypothesis. Finally, I stress the originality of Origen. Although he probably found χύσις τῆς κακίας and its variants in Philo, Origen uses them in a different way: to demonstrate the necessity and the significance of Christ's actions. An addendum presents some possible traces of χύσις τῆς κακίας and its variants in the Latin translations of Origen's works. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In an eye-tracking during reading experiment we investigated the processing of ambiguous Polish imperfective verbs in contexts with disambiguating ('frequently' and 'yesterday') and neutral preceding adverbs. Grammatical number of NP objects was also manipulated. Verb regions received significantly longer regression path times when following a neutral compared to 'yesterday' contexts. This implies that in neutral contexts both senses of polysemous imperfective verbs are activated on the verbal region. Post-hoc analyses revealed more regressions from singular objects in neutral contexts, suggesting that a preference for a more frequent plural event sense was created before the first fixations on the object were made. Finally, we observed an effect consisting of longer first pass times on singular objects and more regressions from the following region in contexts with 'frequently', which is consistent with the view that imperfective aspect is underspecified for number. This pattern of results is compatible with Relevance Theory, which posits that the selection of one sense (single ongoing or plural) is an outcome of an inferential process based on frequency, context and world knowledge. However, the fact that sense frequency plays a role in this process indicates that it serves as input to context-based inferential processes suggesting that this information is pre-stored in the memory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within the field of phraseology, phrasemes are recognized as being semantically more complex than single words (Burger 2007: 79). The polysemy and ambiguity of idioms, their semantic approximation and the added value, their wide meaning, and their context-dependence has led many researchers to acknowledge that preparing "a range of semems" from the wider meaning of the idiomatic units in which they are used is problematic (Fleischer 1997: 168). This belief has marginalized the debate about the boundaries between meanings and their variants. In linguistics, studies based on language use and cognitive approaches are playing an increasingly important role, and there has been a "corpus revolution" in phraseography. This means that lexical ambiguity, polysemy and vagueness have gained greater relevance. In phraseology, developing the capture and description of idiomatic meaning cannot be achieved without a theoretical discussion of "the wide meaning". The aim of this study is to explore a selection of the problems facing linguists when they try to capture meaning and describe phrasemes from a cognitive perspective. The study will focus on questions of ambiguity, polysemy and vagueness, and their impact on the theory and practice of phraseology and phraseography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Zeitschrift für Romanische Philologie is the property of De Gruyter and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

A brief state of the art for Phlegon of Tralles' De Mirabilia 3 anti-Roman prophecies is followed by a reassessment of four of its components: the historical identification of the Roman protagonist "Publius", Naupaktos as the main stage for the prophecies, the multiple meanings of the Red Wolf as well as the Oak Tree, and the Roman military retreat. By analyzing these specific elements, it will be argued that these presages were not only associated with events during the Antiochean and Mithridatic Wars, but were also related with historical experiences from the First Macedonian Conflict. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The debate over the relation between grammatically relevant (specifically, what we term event referential) and idiosyncratic aspects of verb meaning has produced a considerable literature. Some authors, such as Levin and Rappaport Hovav, have appealed to figurative uses of verbs as a source of data when the analysis of their literal uses has been controversial, a move that has sometimes been criticized. However, the question of whether figurative uses of verbs preserve the event referential properties of their literal counterparts and are therefore a valid source of data has not, to our knowledge, been systematically explored. We offer two detailed cross-linguistic case studies of Spanish and English verbs to provide an argument that figurative verb uses indeed are a reliable source of evidence for identifying event referential components of meaning: In each case study we find clear evidence for the preservation of these components across uses, indicating that these aspects of meaning both constrain and facilitate figurative uses of verbs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study is part of a larger research project developing computational tools for large-scale corpus-based semantic analyses. One such tool represents semantic structure with vector space models (VSMs). The paper shows that this tool and the models built require a deeper understanding, especially with a view to how its results relate to cognitive theories of meaning. Although token-based VSMs are increasingly used in corpus-based cognitive semantics, we believe it is insufficiently appreciated how alternative parameter settings deal with a range of semantic issues, such as granularity of meaning, prototypicality of the domain of application and interaction with syntactic patterns. For the purpose of this paper, we will focus on only one of those issues, viz. the prototypicality of the domain of application, presenting the results of three of our case studies on the Dutch adjectives heilzaam, hoekig, hachelijk and geldig. The models presented are built from a 520MW corpus of contemporary Dutch and Flemish newspapers and by varying parameters such as window size, part-of-speech and frequency thresholds in the selection of features. The resulting VSMs are evaluated through visual analytics: although multidimensional, they can be reduced to 2D and represented in scatterplots where more similar tokens appear closer to each other. The color-coding with manual sense tags employed here makes it possible to compare the groupings provided by human annotators with those of the computational models in a way consistent with the cognitive approach to meaning and categorization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

GIFs, short audio-free loops of moving sequences, are active members of social semiotic resources in the era of Internet 2.0 that could generate humor, mediate power and signal identity. This paper proposes the perspective of visual nominalization and visual telicity as GIF properties that, in the environment of social media technologies, become capable of expressing polyphonic evaluation, transcontexualized polysemy, and dual deixis. Visual nominalization expresses the freeing of movement from integration into a time-dependent narrative and the abstraction resulting in deemphasized participants and emphasized processes. These traits are activated and realized by visual telicity, which is looping movement that can be conceptualized as an atelic visual container which packages and expresses both telic and atelic processes. This paper argues that visual nominalization and visual telicity are what establishes GIFs' semiotic differences from still images and film videos, and facilitates their integration with written language in online and computer-mediated discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Hindu Kush, or the mountain region of northern Pakistan, north-eastern Afghanistan and the northern-most part of the Indian-administered Kashmir region, is home to approximately 50 languages belonging to six different genera: Indo-Aryan, Iranian, Nuristani, Sino-Tibetan, Turkic and the isolate Burushaski. Areality research on this region is only in its early stages, and while its significance as a convergence area has been suggested by several scholars, only a few, primarily phonological and grammatical, features have been studied in a more systematic fashion. Cross-linguistic research in the realms of semantics and lexical organization has been given considerably less attention. However, preliminary findings indicate that features are geographically bundled with one another, across genera, in significant ways, displaying semantic areality on multiple levels throughout the region or in one or more of its sub-regions. The present study is an areal-typological investigation of kinship terms in the region, in which particular attention is paid to a few notable polysemy patterns and what appears to be a significant geographical clustering of these. Comparisons are made between the geographical distribution of such patterns and those of some other linguistic features as well as with relevant non-linguistic factors related to shared cultural values or identities and a long history of small-scale cross-community interaction in different parts of the region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"Dla" and "ku" are widely considered to be multifunctional and polysemous prepositions sharing at least some semantic components. While agreeing with their wide functional spectrum, the author argues for them to be monosemous: "dla" brings a positive evaluation of something from a given perspective, whereas "ku" points to something happening when something else occurs. By analysing their connectivity and interchangeability, the author proves that, against lexicographic descriptions, the semantic structures of these prepositions are not identical and, in fact, do not share any semantic components. The semantic differences between the two prepositions make them prone to different types of contexts. "Dla" appears in purposive-intentional and benefactive contexts and collocates with various types of nouns, from gerunds to personal nouns. "Ku" prefers resultative sentences, in which it introduces a special stylistic tone of sobriety. Due to this, possible collocations of this preposition are very limited, and many are reported to be undergoing lexicalization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Tātic, a modern Northwest Iranian language group, =rā is a polysemous postposition which has not evolved into an accusative marker, unlike what happened in Modern Persian. Tātic varieties, which include all Tāti, Tālyshi and Tātoid dialects spoken in northwest Iran, exploit the postposition =rā to mark many different case roles. This paper studies the various functions of the postposition =rā and its variants in this language group. The data for the study have been gathered through fieldwork and interviews with Tāti native speakers as well as through available descriptive grammars. Using the dative semantic-map approach, we show that the main functions that =rā marks in all Tātic dialects are 'beneficiary', 'reason' and 'purpose'. We conclude that because some of the functions of =rā are not among the semantic roles in the conventional dative semantic map, this needs to be expanded in order to account for the polysemy patterns of =rā in the Tātic language group. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I analyze the cyclic linguistic evolution of questions via Bardenstein's 'persistence principle' (Bardenstein, Ruti. 2020b. Persistent argumentative discourse markers. The case of Hebrew rectification-marker be-ʕecem ('actually'). Journal of Pragmatics 172. 254–269) and argue that questions become "polysemous" via a core function. I show that it is the question's initial rhetorically-recruited function that motivates its semantic change (alongside grammatical and prosodic changes) and it is that function that also persists throughout its history. I focus my analysis on question-based exclamatives whose peresistent function is the speaker's strong stance and show that this function persists even when the question-based exclamative cyclically evolves into an adverbial NPI (Negative Polarity Item). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The origin and development of the compound suffix -ARÍA in (Latin and) Romance has repeatedly been addressed in works on the history of Romance word formation, without however reaching a broad consensus. In the present article, the problem is discussed again from a pan-Romance perspective and on a broad factual basis. The first chapter argues that the compound suffix's second element, i.e. -ÍA, was already highly polysemous in (late) Latin and that the Romance languages inherited this polysemy. It is therefore misguided to treat the semantic fragmentation of the suffix as a process that took place independently in the single Romance languages. We then turn to a description of the single Romance languages and dialects, treating first the state of the art for each of these and then presenting the different patterns that can be observed, especially in the older stages. The next chapter looks at the single patterns one by one, discussing to what extent they are present in each Romance language and at the dialectal level. The lexemes that turned out to be crucial from a diachronic perspective receive special attention. The final chapter summarizes the main findings, which depart in important ways from traditional wisdom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Keywords: individual differences; network theory; polysemy; quantitative methods; word sense disambiguation EN individual differences network theory polysemy quantitative methods word sense disambiguation 65 93 29 02/14/22 20220201 NES 220201 1 Introduction Cognitive linguists have shown enduring curiosity about individual differences and polysemy but have said little about the prospect of individual differences I in i polysemy. These ideas, that word senses vary across individuals, and that successful communication might depend on accessing a coarse-grained sense, cast doubt on the idea that a fine-grained exposition of word senses is necessary in a cognitively realistic description of language. This section has described the precedents for using sentence-sorting tasks in polysemy research, using statistical models of agreement to interpret sorting data, and invoking networks as a means of describing the organisation and representation of polysemous words and their senses. Where a fine-grained sense tag is consistently inaccurate, such a model provides an alternative, coarser-level sense; alternatively, it might suggest a different fine-grained sense that is subsumed under the same coarse sense. Some of the canonical literature in polysemy (e.g., [7]; [8]; [75]) propose senses of I over i , and describe how those senses relate to each other, on the basis of introspection. [Extracted from the article]

We also considered the diachronic relationships between locative and copular verbs and found that in Type II languages (mainly represented by a subset of Sinitic and Hmong), the source of locative verbs is the copula: Copula > Locative. (Saul and Wilson 1980: 72) ht It appears more plausible in terms of regular semantic change for a two-argument dwell verb to undergo semantic shift to a locative and thence to a copula rather than postulating that a dwell verb directly evolves into a copula and then reverts to a two-place locative verb. Keywords: existential and possessive verbs; locative; Mainland East and Southeast Asian linguistic area (MESEA); polysemy sharing; semantic typology EN existential and possessive verbs locative Mainland East and Southeast Asian linguistic area (MESEA) polysemy sharing semantic typology 1 82 82 01/18/22 20220101 NES 220101 1 Introduction Over the past century, the relationship of existence and location to possession has been the subject of a vast field of research including studies in both linguistics and philosophy. Apart from the Type II languages, where the copula shares a form with the locative verb, the copula is always distinguished formally from the other three verb categories in Type III and Type IV (that is, from locative, existential and possessive verbs). 5.1.3 C opular > Locative Pathway (ii) When the source of a locative verb is I not i a Postural or Dwell verb, locatives may be diachronically linked with copulas in our Asian survey. [Extracted from the article]

This paper studies perfect auxiliary selection of the verb stehen ›to stand‹ in 17th and 18th century corpora as well as in dialect and newspaper corpora of contemporary German. Being restricted to the auxiliary haben ›have‹ in central and northern German varieties, stative verbs denoting the maintenance of a physical body's position such as stehen are well known to allow both haben ›have‹ and sein ›be‹ in southern German varieties. Our study reveals that this variability was even more widespread in historical stages of German. We witness a preponderance of sein in the 17th century. Over the course of the 18th century, haben usages increased at the expense of sein. Strikingly, only central-eastern varieties tended to prefer haben over all periods under scrutiny. In addition to region, the polysemy of the verb stehen contributed to the choice of the auxiliary in that non-literal or idiomatic usages tended to prefer haben. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a case study conducted on 17th and 18th century German corpora, confirming that both attraction and differentiation are important mechanisms of change, which interact with socio-symbolic properties of constructions. The paper looks at the frequencies and semantics of wo 'where' clauses at the beginning of the New High German period, which are compared to the frequencies and semantics of the connector da 'there, since' in the same period. The study reveals that the subordinating connectors wo and da overlapped in their functions and were highly polysemous (or semantically vague), establishing spatial, temporal, causal, conditional, and contrast links between clauses. This suggests that the connectors had become functionally similar by means of mutual attraction; however, they differed in that they belonged to different registers. Over the course of the 18th century, the polysemy of wo and da clauses reduced. Being gradually confined to one single meaning, the connectors became less similar. This differentiation occurs because the connectors aligned to distinct high-level schemas in the associative network. The study confirms that analogy is crucial to both attraction and differentiation of functionally overlapping constructions. While attraction involves analogy of specific instances of constructions, differentiation occurs in analogy to high-level abstract constructions in the associative network. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The global outbreak of Covid-19 in 2020 changed the world in many ways. Language reflects these changes at various levels. The article considers the linguistic effects of the pandemic with humorous potential: various types of puns, the jocular exploitation of the polysemy of corona, and playful components of contemporary trending words. As a result, not only do portmanteaus and compounds prove to be particularly prone to entertain, but it is also shown that the various forms of word play generally depend on ludic remotivation, a kind of remotivation which is finally situated and defined between the scholarly and the folk etymological type. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The miracle play 'Erscheinung am Lichtmesstage' of the late medieval 'Passional' offers a literary interpretation of the 'Candlemas' and its procession with lighted candles. After a woman has been enraptured into transcendent space, she partakes in a light procession together with the Virgin Mary and various other figures. Each of the participants carries a candle, whose light, as the text says, is sacrificed at the end of the procession. One candle, however, becomes subject of a dispute between the woman and a messenger from the Virgin Mary, causing the candle to split in two. The text repeatedly addresses the actual touching of the candle, suggesting that this wax artefact plays an essential role in bridging the immanent and transcendent. This article explores the candle as a 'Semiophore', revealing the broad semantic spectrum of the candle and its light. Through the acts of giving, holding, depositing, seizing, pulling, braking, and touching as well as possessing and keeping the candle become the locus of multiple meanings. Ultimately, it functions as a bridge between the ordinary and the divine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The acquisition literature has documented several different types of misinterpretations of telic sentences by children, yet a comprehensive analysis of these child interpretations has not been attempted and a crosslinguistic perspective is lacking. This task is not easy, for, on the surface, children's non-adultlike interpretations appear to be scattered and even contradictory across languages. Several cognitive biases have been proposed to explain given patterns (children initially adhere to a Manner bias, or alternatively a Result bias). Reviewing a wide range of studies on the acquisition of telic sentences in relation to tense-aspect markers, we show that children's non-adultlike interpretations fall into three different patterns. We conclude that the diversity of non-adultlike interpretations that is found across child languages is incompatible with accounts that rely on these cognitive, language-independent principles, but instead is triggered by language-specific properties. Analyzing these patterns in detail, it appears that child learners across languages have problems with tense-aspect forms with variable meanings, in contrast to forms with a one-to-one form/meaning mappings which are acquired earlier. While adults use a context-sensitive interpretation of forms with multiple meanings, various semantic-pragmatic sources can explain children's difficulties with interpreting such forms. All explanations that we identify across child languages rely on children's immature command of pragmatic reasoning, albeit in very different ways for the three different patterns. Thus, by taking a crosslinguistic semantic approach and integrating detailed insights from the tense-aspect semantics of specific languages with universal pragmatic effects, we explain the non-adultlike interpretation of telic sentences in a variety of child languages in a comprehensive way. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the diachronic evolution of the polysemy of the Spanish verb sentir ('to feel') by means of a corpus-based dynamic behavioral profile (BP) analysis. Methodologically, it presents the first application of the BP approach to historical data and proposes some methodological innovations not only within the current body of research in historical semantics but also with regard to previous applications of the BP approach. First, whereas the majority of existing studies in quantitative historical semantics are largely based on observed frequencies or percentages of collocational co-occurrence, our study leverages more complex historical data that are based on the similarities of vectors. Second, this study also provides an extension of the methodological apparatus of the BP approach by complementing the traditional hierarchical agglomerative cluster analysis (HAC) with a dynamic BP approach derived from multidimensional scaling maps (MDS). Theoretically, this methodology contributes to a comprehensive perspective on the process of Constructionalization and the nature of networks, which is illustrated on the basis of the development of the Discourse Marker (DM) lo siento ('I'm sorry'). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Languages differ in their number of basic verbs that describe perceptual experience. Some languages have only two such verbs: one for visual perception and another for non-visual perception. How do speakers of these languages conceptualize sensory perception? To shed light on this question, this paper investigates the perception verbs mɔ̀ 'see' and nu 'hear/feel/taste/smell' in Avatime (Kwa, Niger-Congo). These verbs are studied together with the constructions in which they occur, using both translated data and spontaneous discourse. Both perception meanings and meanings outside the domain of perception are taken into account. The detailed picture that emerges shows some previously undocumented patterns of perception encoding and enriches our understanding of the conceptualization of the senses more generally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to bridge the relationship between metalinguistic if you like as a non-propositional discourse marker and its conditional counterparts. This paper claims that metalinguistic if you like is polysemous between a hedge that denotes the speaker's reduced commitment to some aspect of the main clause, and an optional yet potential conditional reading that interlocutors can legitimately draw on in interaction which is brought about due to the 'if p, q' sentence form. That is, although the metalinguistic reading is most likely obtained automatically by default, it also carries an available conditional reading that is akin to other metalinguistic conditional clauses such as if you see what I mean. Next, a semantic representation of metalinguistic if you like is developed that takes on board a characterization of conditionality that departs from lexico-grammatical conventions, such that conditionals of the form 'if p, q' no longer bear a one-to-one correspondence with "conditional" truth conditions. Employing a radical contextualist semantic framework in which the unit of truth-conditional analysis is not constrained to the sentence form, utterances employing metalinguistic if you like are given a semantic representation such that the if-clause does not contribute propositional content, yet they also maintain their status as conditionals as the sentence form gives rise to a potential conditional secondary meaning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Approaching the interplay of medieval prayer and artificial light, my article shows how artificial light had multiple levels of meaning and functions pertaining to the situation, the subject, and the intention of praying. It served practical purposes such as illuminating and highlighting spaces of prayer, thus enabling the devotees to read. What is more, artificial lighting contributed to orchestrating places of prayer, especially in church buildings, as spaces removed from everyday life, thereby emphasizing the sacredness of liturgical prayers and acts. In this context light also visualized the divine counterpart of prayer and the supernatural par excellence. Furthermore, it enveloped the praying person, who through his baptism regarded himself as a child of light, as it were. The goal of prayer, God's love and care, seemed to be fulfilled in the here and now and materialized in the light. Artificial lighting was therefore immanent and transcendent at the same time. It communicated the divine and how this reality could reveal itself to human beings in the light – like a medium of salvation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conversion is a unique way of forming new words, when derived word has the same shape as the original word. In traditional grammars, quite dominant is the definition that during conversions there is a change in the belonging of the part of speech or at least the change of the syntactic category of the word, without any change in the shape. The morpho- syntactic approach is based solely on changing the part of speech, while the lexical approach relies on the creation of the new lexical unit. This paper is an effort to expanded approach and perspective, because conversion in Albanian occurs also within the same parts of speech, or without changing it. While in English and German conversion is one of the most productive ways of word formation, in French, Spanish and Slavic languages it hardly exists. Italian applies conversion in a slightly different way. Albanian, on the other hand, is extremely advanced in this respect, since we have identified more than 500 cases of undoubted conversion as well as hundreds of cases of polysemy with a tendency of dissolution with high chances of differentiation of meaning, making those words new lexical units. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the cognitive models that frame our understanding of what is traditionally called "metaphoric polysemy", a well-established principle at work when it comes to naming the animals around us. In particular, taking the Roman nomenclature of aquatic animals as a case study, polysemy is redefined according to some basic cognitive principles of ethnobiological classification such as analogical similarity, biological essentialism and the role of simultaneous metaphoric and metonymic associations to the perceptual/cultural constraints targeted on the biological referent for naming it – the result is at least two kinds of metaphoric polysemy, to be called "external" (or exo-polysemy) and "internal" (or endo-polysemy), respectively. The idea is that the naming patterns that emerge from the ethnozoological nomenclature under examination may not only provide a better understanding of an ancient people's zooanthropology but a paradigm for analysing descriptive ethnobiological naming in general. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper focuses on a two aspectual morphemes in Moksha Mordvin (

This paper analyzes the usage of frequent polysemous verbs by native speakers and by L2 learners and it makes several pedagogical suggestions on how to teach polysemous verbs in a L2 classroom. To achieve these objectives, we have examined the case of the Spanish verb quedar, which means "to remain", "to stay", "to be left", "to make an appointment", etc. A methodology based on narratives and sentence elicitation has been created. The experiences were accomplished by Spanish speakers (adults and children), and French university students of Spanish, who performed productions in Spanish (L2) and in French (L1). The results of this study seem to confirm that adult native speakers used the semantic network of polysemous verbs in a very conventional manner. Meanings appear to have been acquired thanks to usage, by storing linguistic experiences as patterns, and operating mostly by analogy process. Children seem to have primarily elicited quedar in conventional situations (for instance, to fix an appointment) and depending on a cost-effectiveness criteria (only if this verb adds a pragmatic gain compared to simpler options). The acquisition path of quedar by children (L1) seems to be driven by different factors than for L2 learners. French learners of Spanish used quedar meanings differently from native speakers and they were highly influenced by their L1, both semantically and syntactically. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This introduction provides an overview of the intersection between Applied Cognitive Linguistics and Second/Foreign Language Learning. First, the relevance of Cognitive Linguistics (CL) for Applied Linguistics in general is discussed. The second section explains the main principles of CL and how each relates to the acquisition of second languages: (i) language and human cognition, (ii) language as symbolic, (iii) language as motivated; and (iv) language as usage-based. Section three offers a review of previous literature on CL and L2s that are different from English, as it is one the main aims of this Special Issue to provide state-of-the-art research and scholarship to enhance the bigger picture of the field of Second Language Acquisition beyond English as the target language. Spanish as L2/FL in Applied Cognitive Linguistics is the focus of the next section, which leads to a brief overview of the papers included in the Issue, featuring Spanish as the L2 with L1s such as English, French, German and Italian. Polysemy, Motion Events Typology, Cognitive Grammar and Construction Grammar are the Cognitive Linguistics areas addressed in the contributions here presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Chinese as a Second Language Research is the property of De Gruyter and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The study addresses the relationship between diachronic change and synchronic polysemy based on the use of diminutives in four closely related Southeastern Mande languages. It explores the synchronic patterns of use of cognate diminutive markers deriving from the word 'child', and accounts for differences between the languages in terms of a Radial Category network, which is designed to capture in one representation both mechanisms of diachronic change and mechanisms of regular meaning extension. The study argues that the same approach can be used to account for the ways diminutive markers acquire new meanings and for the ways an old diminutive category disintegrates, when new markers start replacing the old one in some of the core diminutive functions. The invasion and expansion of new markers may result in discontinuous semantic structures that can only be understood when the diachrony is taken into account (in this particular case study, the evidence for historical change comes from a synchronic comparison with closely related languages). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ez 21,33–34a enthält Polyseme, die gegen Babylon polemisieren. Ausgehend von einer Übersicht mesopotamischer Praktiken für das Beleben und Beseelen von Waffen werden vergleichbares Vokabular und vergleichbare Bildsprache behandelt, die in Ez 21,33–34a verwendet werden, um ein quasi-hypostasiertes Schwert zu beschreiben. Dabei liegt das Augenmerk auf der Darstellung des Schwertes als »geöffnet« (פתוחה) und als von »Visionen« (חזות) und »Divination« (קסם) beeinflusst. Diese Beschreibungen erzeugen eine Polysemie, die einerseits die Vorstellung übermittelt, dass die Waffe für den Kampf vorbereitet und geschwungen wurde, und andererseits eine rituelle Praxis ins Gedächtnis rufen, die Waffen durch Divination für den Kampf bereitet. This article contends that Ezek 21:33–34a contain polysemes that facilitate a polemic against Babylon. It begins by overviewing Mesopotamian practices for enlivening and animating weapons and thereafter treats similar vocabulary and imagery that is used in Ezek 21:33–34a to describe a quasi-hypostatized sword. Particular attention is paid to the presentation of the sword as »opened« (פתוחה) and as affected by »visions« (חזות) and »divination« (קסם).It is argued that these descriptions constitute instances of polysemy that conveyed the idea that the weapon had been readied and brandished for battle and, at the same time, evoked a ritual practice that allegedly empowered weapons for combat through divination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite challenges for U.S.-Mexico border Indigenous activists in their efforts to counter dominant discourses about both border policy and Native rights, Indigenous activists assert their rights as they advocate for public policies and actions that affirm and protect these rights. This article explores some of the discursive strategies used by Indigenous activists to index Indigenous identities and lifeways and to counter mainstream conceptualizations of Native identity and Indigenous rights on the U.S.-Mexico border. Through such semiotic strategies, Indigenous border activists create indigenized and legitimized political spaces for the assertion of their beliefs. Indigenous border activists achieve this through metasemiotic constructs that draw from stereotypes about Native people and their use of language as well as through the active mobilization of schemas for conceptualizing both Native American experiences and the U.S.-Mexico border. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Apart from references to perception, words such as see and listen have shared, non-literal meanings across diverse languages. Such cross-linguistic meanings have not been systematically investigated as they appear in their natural home - informal spoken interaction. We present a qualitative examination of the semantic associations of perception verbs based on recorded everyday conversation in thirteen diverse languages. Across these diverse communities, spontaneous interaction provides evidence for two commonly-discussed extensions of perception verbs - perception~cognition, hearing~linguistic communication -- as well as illustrating other meanings and functions (e.g., the use of perception verbs as discourse markers) that have been less appreciated heretofore. The range of usage that is readily observable in informal conversation makes it clear that this type of data must take center stage for the empirically grounded study of semantics. Moreover, these data suggest that commonalities in polysemous meanings may rely not only on universal cognition, but also on the universal exigencies of social interaction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We survey the predicative functions of reduplication and analyze the relationships between them in terms of semantic affinity and iconicity. Forty-five functions are identified in 108 languages. The most frequent ones have to do with repetition/continuity of events, multiplicity of participants, and intensity. Reduplication can be polysemous. Based on high cross-linguistic frequency of expression by a common reduplicative form and cases of ambiguity, we identify semantic affinities among twelve functions, together comprising a semantic map. We also analyze the functions in terms of five iconicities—iconic relationships between specific aspects of form and meaning. An interesting relationship emerges: for any pair of semantically closely related functions, the iconicities of one are always a superset of the iconicities of the other. On the widely-held assumption that initial uses are high in iconicity, the picture is one of monotonic loss of iconicity as use is extended. As well as showing empirically how the functions relate to each other, we also review three earlier proposals which were largely based on reasoning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to study instrumental related functions in some Western Iranian languages. The data were collected from descriptive grammars, and interviews in some cases. Narrog's instrumental semantic map is the basis for analyzing polysemy patterns in these languages. The data show that two main polysemy patterns are attested: (1) Instrumental and companion functions are coded alike. (2) They are coded differently. These two patterns are distributed areally. Furthermore, some languages are shifting/have shifted between these two types mainly as a result of contact-induced matters. In languages in which two or more functions are not directly connected, one marker generally has both instrumental and dative functions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this study is to make a detailed description of the polysemic structure of the phraseme a conciencia. The methodology is based on an understanding of lexical semantics including the parameter of frequency of use in corpora (see Sinclair 1991), with data drawn from Corpus del Espanol del Siglo XXI (CORPES XXI). I will first discuss briefly certain issues relating to polysemy that will arise in the analysis; second, I will make an initial approach to the meaning of a conciencia based on lexicographic information, to be followed by a presentation of the corpus analysis itself. Finally, I will consider the semantic study of this particular phraseme by considering its combinability as seen in the contexts studied. In the conclusions I will try to show the internal structure of the form. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Expressions like English ago have been claimed to be among the most likely candidates for postposition crosslinguistically, and the reason for this has been conjectured to be diachronic. A few previous contributions notwithstanding, however, we still lack a typologically wider-ranging account of such temporal adpositions and adverbials and of how they develop. These are the main goals of the present article. Relying on a sample of 100 languages, it has been found that: (i) the structure instantiated in English by ago is far from universal and is geographically unevenly distributed; (ii) these expressions are indeed predominantly postposed, which does not hold for their mirror images for the future; and (iii) evidence from etymology, patterns of polysemy, and documented semantic extensions suggests that this asymmetry is the result of past and future markers having different diachronic sources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]