Semantics

The relationship between landscape and culture seen through language is an exciting and increasingly explored area. This groundbreaking book contributes to the linguistic examination of both cross-cultural variation and unifying elements in geographical categorization. The study focuses on the contrastive lexical semantics of certain landscape words in a number of languages. The aim is to show how geographical vocabulary sheds light on the culturally and historically shaped ways people see and think about the land around them. Notably, the study presents landscape concepts as anchored in a human-centred perspective , based on our cognition, vision, and experience in places. The Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) approach allows an analysis of meaning which is both fine-grained and transparent. The book is aimed, first of all, at scholars and students of linguistics. Yet it will also be of interest to researchers in geography, environmental studies, anthropology , cultural studies, Australian Studies, and Australian Aboriginal Studies because of the book's cultural take.

The Ukrainian sacred culture and especially its wooden
churches tradition is an outstanding European phenomenon which has been formed on complex intercultural basis. Being placed between eastern and western Christian brunches, Ukrainian culture has assimilated characters of both Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox
influence. On the other hand being located in the middle
of European area it occurred in the middle of multicultural interrelations, in the very center of European cultural traditions crossroad. The folk wooden architecture of Ukraine was developed in the context of Eastern Slavic traditions.
European architecture has also made its great impact on the Ukrainian culture. IX-XII century is connected with the time of architectural forms and constructions general unity development. In XVI-XVIII century the national specific features of Ukrainian wooden architecture was  intensively developed. That is why its features were manifested in Ukrainian distinguish of style.

Alfred Tarski’s semantic conception of truth is arguably the most influential – certainly, most discussed - modern conception of truth. It has provoked many different interpretations and reactions, some thinkers celebrating it for successfully explicating the notion of truth, whereas others have argued that it is no good as a philosophical account of truth. The aim of this work is to offer a systematic and critical investigation of its nature and significance, based on the thorough explanation of its conceptual, technical as well as historical underpinnings.

The methodological strategy adopted in the thesis reflects the author’s belief that in order to evaluate the import of Tarski’s conception we need to understand what logical, mathematical and philosophical aspects it has, what role they play in his project of theoretical semantics, which of them hang in together, and which should be kept separate. Chapter 2 therefore starts with a detailed exposition of the conceptual and historical background of Tarski’s semantic conception of truth and his method of truth definition for formalized languages, situating it within his project of theoretical semantics, and Chapter 3 explains the formal machinery of Tarski’s truth definitions for increasingly more complex languages. Chapters 4 - 7 form the core of the thesis, all being concerned with the problem of significance of Tarski’s conception. Chapter 4 explains its logico-mathematical import, connecting it to the related works of Gödel and Carnap. Having explained the seminal ideas of the model-theoretic approach to semantics, Chapter 5 tackles the question to what extent Tarski’s ‘The Concept of Truth in Formalized Languages’ (and related articles from the 1930s) anticipates this approach, and what elements might be missing from it. Chapter 6 then deals with the vexed question of its philosophical import and value as a theory of truth, reviewing a number of objections and arguments that purport to show that the method fails as an explanation (explication) of the ordinary notion of truth, and, in particular, that it is a confusion to think that Tarski’s truth definitions have semantic import. Finally, Chapter 7 is devoted to the question whether Tarski’s theory of truth is a robust or rather a deflationary theory of truth.

On the basis of a careful analysis, the thesis aims to substantiate the following view. [A] Tarski’s theory with its associated method of truth definition was primarily designed to serve logico-mathematical purposes. [B] It can be regarded a deflationary theory of a sort, since it completely abstracts from meta- semantical issues concerning the metaphysical or epistemological basis or status of semantic properties. Indeed, [C] this can be interpreted as its laudable feature, since by separating formal (or logico-mathematical) from meta-semantical (or foundational) aspects it usefully divides the theoretical labour to be done in the area of meaning and semantic properties in general. [D] In spite of the fact that Tarski’s conception of truth has this deflationary flavour, the formal structure of its method of truth-definition is quite neutral in that it can be interpreted and employed in several different ways, some of them deflationary, others more robust.

Özet Dilin, tarihî lehçelerden çağdaş lehçelere doğru gelişimini belirli sözcükler ve bu sözcüklere bağlı kavram alanları içerisinde değerlendirmek mümkündür. Buradan yola çıkılan çalışmada, Eski Türkçede ip anlamına gelen yıp sözcüğü ve farklı tarihî dönemlerde kavram alanına giren bağ, uruk, örgen, urgan, arkan sözcükleri üzerinde durulmuştur. Söz konusu sözcükler tarihî ve çağdaş lehçelerde fonolojik, morfolojik gelişmeleri ve anlam bilimsel değişmeleri bakımından değerlendirilmiştir. Çalışmada öncelikle sözcüklerin kökeni, farklı tarihî dönemlerde karşılaşılan anlam genişlemesi, yazı sistemi değişimine bağlı olarak gerçekleşen eşgösterenlilik ve bulaşma, kullanımdan düşme vb. gelişmelerin izi sürülmüştür. Uruk sözcüğü, yazı sistemi değişiminin neticesinde "soy, aile" anlamına gelen Eski Türkçe urug sözcüğü ile eşgösterenli olmuştur. Bunun sonucunda muhtemelen bir eşgösterenliler çatışması yaşanmış ve uruk sözcüğü Çağdaş Türk lehçelerinde kullanımdan düşmüştür. Bağ, örgen, urgan ve arkan sözcüklerininse Eski Türkçe "ip" anlamına gelen yıp sözcüğünün temel anlamını, yakın anlama geçiş yoluyla kazandıkları ve çok anlamlı sözcükler olarak kullanımda oldukları görülmüştür. Abstract Evaluation of language from historical dialects towards contemporary dialects can be traced through studying the evaluation of specific words and the context conveyed through these words. This study while relying on this methodology focuses on Old Turkish word yıp and words bağ, uruk, örgen, urgan, arkan. Those words are scrutinized phonological, morphological, and semantically. This study primarily focuses on the etymology of words, homophony due to change of alphabet, semantic contamination, semantic restriction, through different historical periods. The Old Turkish uruk "rope" has been mixed with the word urug "family, lineage" from the result of changing alphabet, and then they have become homophonic. There was a conflict between two different meanings and the word uruk has forgotten in contemporary dialects. Bağ, urgan, örgen and arkan have gained the meaning "ip" due to semantic extension, and these words are still used in contemporary Turkish dialects.

This study aims at providing a possible model for linguistic representation, whose structure is able to describe the effects on sign’s indeterminacy (vagueness, ambiguities) and the dynamic nature of the system. In order to display the different ways of conceiving a linguistic system, various versions of the idea of "giving an order to the structures", that build up a theory, is taken into account: the Cartesian theory of generative grammar, the non-Euclidean one of hypertext networks, the complexity in genetic epistemology and in Jean Piaget’s cognitive development theory, and finally the theory of linguistic change by the language biologist Eric Lenneberg.

Scopo di questo studio è il tentativo di ipotizzare un modello di rappresentazione linguistica, la cui struttura sia capace di descrivere gli effetti dell'indeterminatezza del segno (vaghezza, ambiguità) e la dinamicità del sistema. Per mostrare differenti possibilità di concepire astrattamente un sistema linguistico, si considerano versioni diverse del concetto di “ordine delle strutture”: il sistema cartesiano nella grammatica generativa, la geometria non euclidea nelle reti ipertestuali, la (teoria della )complessità nella teoria dello sviluppo psicogenetico di Jean Piaget e nella teoria del mutamento del biolinguista Eric Lenneberg.

Adam M. Croom, Ph.D., Visiting Assistant Professor of Cognitive Science, Case Western Reserve University (adam.croom@case.edu)
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With the emergence of the World Wide Web, analyzing and improving Web communication has become essential to adapt the Web content to the visitors’ expectations. Web communication analysis is traditionally performed by Web analytics software, which produce long lists of page-based audience metrics. These results suffer from page synonymy, page polysemy, page temporality, and page volatility. In addition, the metrics contain little semantics and are too detailed to be exploited by organization managers and chief editors, who need summarized and conceptual information to take high-level decisions. To obtain such metrics, we propose to classify the Web site pages into categories representing the Web site topics and to aggregate the page hits accordingly. In this paper, we show how to compute and visualize these metrics using OLAP tools. To solve the page-temporality issue, we propose to classify the versions of the pages using automatic classifiers.

We argue for a compositional semantics grounded in a strongly typed ontology that reflects our commonsense view of the world and the way we talk about it. Assuming such a structure we show that the semantics of various natural language phenomena may become nearly trivial.

Abstract—Forensic analysis of a suspect program is a daily challenge encounters forensic analysts and law-enforcement. It requires determining the behavior of a suspect program found in a computer system subject to investigation and attempting to reconstruct actions that have been invoked in the system. In this research paper, a forensic analysis approach for suspect programs in an executable binary form is introduced. The proposed approach aims to reconstruct high level forensic actions and approximate action arguments from low level machine instructions; That is, reconstructed actions will assist in forensic inferences of evidence and traces caused by an action invocation in a system subject to forensics investigation.

The limited aim here is to explain what John Dewey might say about the formulation of the grue example. Nelson Goodman’s problem of distinguishing good and bad inductive inferences is an important one, but the grue example misconstrues this complex problem for certain technical reasons, due to ambiguities that contemporary logical theory has not yet come to terms with. Goodman’s problem is a problem for the theory of induction and thus for logical theory in general. Behind the whole discussion of these issues over the last several decades is a certain view of logic hammered out by Russell, Carnap, Tarski, Quine, and many others. Goodman’s nominalism hinges in essential ways on a certain view of formal logic with an extensional quantification theory at its core. This raises many issues, but the one issue most germane here is the conception of predicates ensconced in this view of logic. The problem here is the implicit assumption that there is just one type of first-order predicate. P...

Biological and cultural factors have been found to have a significant influence on cognitive development and performance in neuropsychological instruments such as verbal fluency tasks (VFT). Variations of traditional VFT, involving unconstrained word production and increased retrieval times, may provide further data regarding the executive, attentional, mnemonic, and linguistic abilities involved in VFT. As such, the aim of this study was to investigate the impact of age and school type on the performance of 6- to 12-year-old children in unconstrained, phonemic, and semantic VFT. The VFT were administered to 460 participants. The effects of age and school type on verbal fluency (VF) performance were analyzed using a two-way analysis of variance, followed by Bonferroni post-hoc tests (p ≤ .05). A repeated-measures analysis was also used to evaluate VF performance over time (p ≤ .05). Main effects of age and school type were identified on all measures (effect sizes ranged from .05 to .32, p ≤ .05). VF scores increased with age and were higher among private school students. The influence of age on VFT may be associated with the development of executive functions. The impact of type of school on VF performance may be explained by the greater availability of cognitive stimulation (semantic knowledge) provided by private schools and families with better socioeconomic levels.

Graphical user interfaces design in software development process focuses on maximizing usability and the user's experience, in order to make the interaction for users easy, flexible and efficient. In this paper, we propose an approach for evaluating the usability satisfaction degree of a web-based system. The proposed method has been accomplished in two phases and implemented on an airlines website as a case study. In the first phase, a website usability test is implemented by a number of users, and then the results obtained are translated into charts for a final web-based system evaluation in the second phase. The results achieved were satisfactory, since the places where the weaknesses and gaps in the website are identified and recommended solutions to avoid them are drawn. The authenticity of the results have been confirmed by comparing them with user opinions acquired from a questionnaire, which proves the precision in which the website is rated.

This paper analyses a type of structurally complex time adjuncts in Portuguese, and focuses on aspects of linguistic variation - and sometimes anomaly -, witnessed by the coexistence of various forms to express the same temporal relation. The time adjuncts in question involve (retrospective or prospective) temporal measurement from an anchor point, as in the counterparts of the English expressions "two months ago", "two months before the elections" or "wo months from now". The awareness of the large amount of variation within the dating subsystem - observed in e.g. newspapers and science books - is of special importance for linguistic normalisation and natural language processing.

Auditory display has a long history as a tool to provide people with events and the needed actions by means of sound. The use of audio as media has its advantage of being non-directional and the ability to cover a large area. The field of auditory display design had a continuous improvement in the past years. As a major factor in developing a design is is to be easy to be recognized by the most of the listeners , as well as and simple in terms of understand the semantics and implications behind it. This area of study has been the interest of the industry and the scholars. Where all employed new and experimental methods that can be accepted as a social standard and an appropriate for the environment. In the awareness of the salient of the phenomena of using music as a method in creating an auditory display , raised the questions about how the music can transmit the information as alarm, what are the music and sound elements that have major role on the effectiveness and sensitivity on the listeners, and what are the concerns that can affect learnability aspect. The cultural respect of the music learnability and preferences can be an example of musical training and personality in different countries such as the Japanese train station alarms or the Japanese ambulance sirens . Considering these aspects this project will be an attempt to discuss the music in the auditory alarms design. As well as continuation to my previous project which spot the light on the contrast between icons and melodic alarms in regard of aspects of learnability and the sonic environment consideration . This project will include the process of designing melodic auditory display. As well as it will investigate the possible feature for improvement . It is a multidisciplinary progression that includes psychoacoustics, musicology and engineering. the project could be an interest for music composers , researchers , and industrial designers.

Six lexical decision experiments were conducted to examine the influence of complex structure on the processing speed of English compounds. All experiments revealed that semantically transparent compounds (eg, rosebud) were processed more quickly than matched monomorphemic words (eg, giraffe). Opaque compounds (eg, hogwash) were also processed more quickly than monomorphemic words. However, when the experimental materials and/or procedure encouraged decomposition/integration, this advantage ...

This paper investigates how large multinational corporations use multimodal meaning-making resources to communicate a trustworthy corporate identity. It combines insights from Forceville’s work on pictorial and multimodal metaphor (Forceville 1996, 2002; Forceville and Urios-Aparisi, 2009) and key features of Fuoli and Paradis’ (2014) model of trust-repair discourse to examine the discursive dynamics of trust- building in a corpus of promotional corporate videos produced by some of the world’s largest corporations. The analysis shows that multimodal metaphors are deployed as key persuasive devices to promote three fundamental attributes of the companies’ trustworthiness, i.e. ability, integrity and benevolence.

This paper sheds some light on how trustworthiness is constructed through multimodal resources in corporate discourse and contributes to our understanding of the discursive dynamics of trust, which is still limited and fragmentary (Fuoli and Paradis, 2014; Linell and Keselman, 2011). But the study also carries implications for cognitive linguistic theory, in particular for conceptual metaphor theory. Three theoretical issues requiring further discussion are highlighted: (i) the distinction between conventional and novel metaphor and the question of ‘deliberateness’ (Steen, 2008), (ii) the usefulness of the notion of metaphor scenario (Musolff, 2006) as a descriptive tool in the realm of multimodal discourse, and (iii) the adequacy of Lakoff and Johnson’s (1980) model versus Blending Theory (Fauconnier and Turner, 1996, 1998; Grady et al. 1999) for describing novel multimodal metaphors and accounting for the evaluative function they can perform in persuasive multimodal discourse.

Keywords: pictorial and multimodal metaphor, conceptual metaphor theory, blending, trust, corporate multimodal discourse