Linguistics

Deliberate contextual vocabulary acquisition (CVA) is a reader’s ability to figure out a (not the) meaning for an unknown word from its “context”, without external sources of help such as dictionaries or people. The appropriate context for such CVA is the “belief-revised integration” of the reader’s prior knowledge with the reader’s “internalization” of the text. We discuss unwarranted assumptions behind some classic objections to CVA, and present and defend a computational theory of CVA that we have adapted to a new (...) classroom curriculum designed to help students use CVA to improve their reading comprehension. (shrink)

In the first part of this investigation we highlight two, seemingly irreconcilable, beliefs that suggest an impending crisis in the teaching, research, and practice of—primarily state-supported—mathematics: (a) the belief, with increasing, essentially faith-based, conviction and authority amongst academics that first-order Set Theory can be treated as the lingua franca of mathematics, since its theorems—even if unfalsifiable—can be treated as ‘knowledge’ because they are finite proof sequences which are entailed finitarily by self-evidently Justified True Beliefs; and (b) the slowly emerging, but (...) powerfully rooted in economic imperatives, belief that only those Justified True Beliefs can be treated as ‘knowledge’ which are, further, categorically communicable as Factually Grounded Beliefs—hence as comprehensible pre-formal ‘mathematical truths’—by any intelligence that lays claims to a mathematical lingua franca. We argue that this seeming irreconcilability merely reflects a widening chasm between an increasing under-estimation of the value to society of ‘semantic arithmetical truth’, and an increasing over-estimation of the value to society of ‘syntactic set-theoretical provability’; a chasm which must be narrowed and bridged explicitly. We thus proffer a Complementarity Thesis which seeks to recognize that mathematical ‘provability’ and mathematical ‘truth’ need to be interdependent and complementary, ‘evidence-based’, assignments-by-convention to the formulas of a formal mathematical language; where (a) the goal of mathematical ‘proofs’ may be viewed as seeking to ensure that any mathematical language intended to formally represent our pre-formal conceptual metaphors and their inter-relatedness is unambiguous, and free from contradiction; whilst (b) the goal of mathematical ‘truths’ must be viewed as seeking to ensure that any such representation does, indeed, uniquely identify and adequately represent such metaphors and their inter-relatedness. Our thesis is that, by universally ignoring the need to introduce goal (b) in our curriculum, the teaching of, and research in, mathematics at the post-graduate level cannnot justify its value to society beyond the mere intellectual stimulation of individual minds. In the second part we appeal to some recent—and hitherto unsuspected—unarguably constructive Tarskian interpretations, of the first-order Peano Arithmetic PA, which establish PA as both finitarily consistent, and categorical. Since we also show that the second order subsystem ACA0 of Peano Arithmetic and PA cannot both be assumed provably consistent, we conclude that there can be no mathematical, or meta-mathematical, proof of consistency for Set Theory. Hence the theorems of any Set Theory are not sufficient for distinguishing between (i) what we can believe to be a ‘mathematical truth’; (ii) what we can evidence as a ‘mathematical truth’; and (iii) what we ought not to believe is a ‘mathematical truth’; whilst the theorems of the first-order Peano Arithmetic PA are sufficient for distinguishing between (i), (ii) and (iii). We conclude from this that the holy grail of mathematics ought to be ‘arithmetical truth’, not ‘set-theoretical proof’. (shrink)

One theoretical charge (of Optimality Theory in its early conception) must have been to retain that sense of qualitative particularity as affecting as constraining theory relevant to a proscribed field when clearly a motivation was to divine in circumscriptions operational consequences conceived on a deferred abstractive level. An attraction of the theory's embodying results of constraint interactions as responsive to theory-internal qualitative implementation, as being in fact supplementarily transparent to co-ordinations of variously language specific implementations, qualitative identifications, was apparent naturalistic (...) coordination of defined features taken here—in OT—at one fell-swoop. Differently put, the uses of analyses of the relevant types of spaces (‘primitive from the viewpoint of linguistic theories’) will (latterly) involve a period of time-stretch or compression over a previously normal (I take it) process of embeddings in a new theorised and recursively enacted invocation/re-invocation of base as digestively present in results of corrected theories. Or as Prince and Smolensky have it 'What we have done, in essence, is to replace the iterative procedure (act/evaluate, act/evaluate,... ) with a recursive scheme: collect the results of all possible actions, then sort recursively.' OT, 16. (shrink)

Quantification, Negation, and Focus: Challenges at the Conceptual-Intentional Semantic Interface Tista Bagchi National Institute of Science, Technology, and Development Studies (NISTADS) and the University of Delhi Since the proposal of Logical Form (LF) was put forward by Robert May in his 1977 MIT doctoral dissertation and was subsequently adopted into the overall architecture of language as conceived under Government-Binding Theory (Chomsky 1981), there has been a steady research effort to determine the nature of LF in language in light of structurally (...) diverse languages around the world, which has ultimately contributed to the reinterpretation of LF as a Conceptual-Intentional (C-I) interface level between the computational syntactic component of the faculty of language and one or more interpretive faculties of the human mind. While this has opened up further possibilities of research in phenomena such as quantifier scope and scope interactions between negation, quantification, and focus, it has also given rise to a few real challenges to linguistic theory as well. Some of these are: (i) the split between lexical meaning – a matter supposedly belonging to the phase-wise selection of lexical arrays – and issues of semantic interpretation that arise purely from binding and scope phenomena (Mukherji 2010); (ii) partially relatedly, the level at which theta role assignment can be argued to take place, an issue that is taken up by me in Bagchi (2007); and (iii) how supposedly “pure” scopal phenomena relating to quantifiers, negation, and emphasizing expressions such as only and even (comparable to, e.g., Urdu/Hindi hii and bhii, Bangla –i and –o) also have dimensions of both focus and discourse reference. While recognizing all of these challenges, this talk aims to highlight particularly challenge (iii), both in terms of scholarship in the past and for the rich prospects for research on languages of south Asia with the semantics of quantification, negation, and focus in view. The scholarship of the past that I seek to relate this issue to is where, parallel to (and largely independently of) the research on LF that had been happening, Barwise and Cooper were developing their influential view of noun phrases as generalized quantifiers, culminating in their key 1981 article “Generalized Quantifiers and Natural Language” while, independently, McCawley, in his 1981 book Everything that Linguists have Always Wanted to Know about Logic, established through argumentation that all noun phrases semantically behave like generalized quantified expressions (further elaborated by him in the second – 1994 – revised edition of his book). I seek to demonstrate, based on limited data analysis from selected languages of south Asia, that our current understanding of quantification, negation, and focus under the Minimalist view owes something significant to the two major, but now largely marginalized, works of scholarship, and that for the way forward it is essential to adopt a more formal-semantic approach as adopted by them and also by later works such as Denis Bouchard’s (1995) The Semantics of Syntax, Mats Rooth’s work on focus (e.g., Rooth 1996, “Focus” in Shalom Lappin’s Handbook of Contemporary Semantic Theory), Heim and Kratzer’s Semantics in Generative Grammar (1998), and Yoad Winter’s (2002) Linguistic Inquiry article on semantic number, to cite just a few instances. (shrink)

In the search of new approaches to the problem of emergence and evolution of natural languages, Mathematics, Theoretical Computer Science, as well as Molecular Biology and Neuroscience, both deeply penetrated and profoundly inspired by concepts originated in Mathematics and Computer Science, represent today the richest pools of formal concepts, structures, and methods to borrow and to adapt.

Scientific enterprise is a part and parcel of the contemporaneous to it general human cultural and, even more general, existential endeavor. Thus, the fundamental for us notion of evolution, in the modern sense of this characteristically Occidental term, appeared in the 19-th century, with its everything pervading, irreversible cultural and technological change and the existential turmoil. Similarly, a formerly relatively recherché word emergence, became a widely used scientific term only in the 20-th century, with its cultural, economical, political, and national (...) sagas of emergence and destruction played against a background of the universe emerging from the Big Bang and disappearing into its black holes, if not into its ultimate Big Collapse. Today, the rules of engagement in scientific emergence-evolution games, steadily spreading from natural to cognitive sciences, and beyond, are dominated by the 19-th century concept of natural selection which has inverted the time-arrow of the classical creationist dogma, with its rarely spelled out pessimistic implication that the life is moving from the highest biological organization to an entropic chaos. In its turn, the natural selection’s excessively contagious, “do-it-yourself” optimism might ultimately turn out to be its undoing : the natural selection conjecture, when transposed to such fields as linguistics from the strictly biological scene, with its times of engagement ranging from at most hundred years of life expectancy for an individual organism to at least millions and even billions of years for evolutionary processes to bring this or that organism to existence, becomes for the first time verifiable and even falsifiable. The present paper studies some implications of the well-known but almost universally disregarded tight combinatorial morphological-semantic structure of the verbal system of Biblical Hebrew, to show that this linguistic fossil testifies to the existence of a now extinct Proto-Language whose extremely tight verbal organization and meaningful architecture made it both structurally strikingly similar and expressively vastly superior to humanly designed Assembler languages, – an absolutely novel, paradoxical phenomenon, never before and nowhere else observed and apparently incompatible with the basic tenets of modern linguistic natural selection theories and, at the very least, crying out for new explanatory linguistic paradigms. (shrink)

Model of intelligence and new methods to assess IQ. MA thesis in 1998 (Comenius University). Art exhibitions "From Animation" London 2013, "Fading Memory" Weißenohe 2015, TAIF Tokyo 2017. Conferences in Santorini, Daejon 2016, Geneva 2017.

Covaluation is the generalization of coreference introduced by Tanya Reinhart. Covaluation distributes in patterns that are very similar yet not entirely identical to those of binding. On a widespread view, covaluation and binding distribute similarly because binding is defined in terms of covaluation. Yet on Reinhart's view, binding and covaluation are not related that way: binding pertains to syntax, covaluation does not. Naturally, the widespread view can easily explain the similarities between binding and covaluation, whereas Reinhart can easily explain the (...) dissimilarities. Reciprocally, the widespread view finds it harder to explain the dissimilarities, whereas Reinhart finds it harder to explain the similarities. Reinhart and others have proposed more than one explanation of the similarities, but as I argue, these explanations do not work. Hence although I adopt Reinhart's view, I propose a new explanation of the similarities and dissimilarities between binding and covaluation: While Reinhart has invoked semantic structure only to explain dissimilarities, I do so to explain both similarities and dissimilarities at once. Finally, I examine in light of this approach the topics of language acquisition, only-constructions, the identity predicate, the Partee/Bach/Higginbotham problem, the Dahl puzzle and its recent versions by Roelofsen. (shrink)

Sometimes (part of) the abstract of an article immediately resonates with you. Many factors enter into generating that feeling. Certain words, maybe an interval of sentences, may "ring true," Or not, so you move on to the next abstract. What are all of these philosophy papers (down through the ages)? Documents are recorded expressions of idio-microlects centered on key ideas represented by key words, which are intricately bonded by core sentences - often the ones that you might highlight for return (...) later. Seeing all of these abstracts is like wandering in the minerals collection at a museum of natural history. They are all so different, yet certain themes recur and maybe reflect one on another. And here and there an item immediately grips you. There are no doubt neural processes required for resonating with an expression. Biological evolution resulted in manifold possibilities for resonance. No two people resonate exactly the same way to the same expression: there is no representation that sets the standard for resonance, any more than the weights in large language models represent words. Bottom line: all we have are resonant expressions. A scientific theory of "the" mind would be expressed, if at all, in an idio-microlect. The "meaning" of an expression is not somehow "there" available for expression. No. The meaning is an abstraction from the expressions which resonate in a community, a resonant-community. (shrink)

Rhetorical relations include CAUSE_MARKERS = { " because ", " since ", " as a result of ", " due to ", " owing to ", " in consequence of ", }, RESULT_MARKERS = {" therefore ", " thus ", " hence ", " consequently ", " as a result ", " so "}CONTRAST_MARKERS = { " but ", " however ", " yet ", " whereas ", " while ", " in contrast ", " on the other hand ", (...) }, ONCESSION_MARKERS = { " although ", " though ", " even though ", " despite ", " in spite of ", " nevertheless ", " nonetheless ", " still "}, CONDITION_MARKERS = {" if ", " unless ", " provided that ", " in case ", " as long as "},EXAMPLE_MARKERS = {" for example ", " for instance ", " such as ", " e.g. ", " e.g. "}RESTATEMENT_MARKERS = {" in other words ", " that is ", " i.e. ", " namely "}, TEMPORAL_MARKERS = { " then ", " afterwards ", " afterward ", " before ", " after ", " subsequently ", " meanwhile ",} and ATTRIBUTION_MARKERS = { " according to ", " reported ", " reports ", " said ", " claims ", " claimed ", " stated ". Rhetoricality is a random variable defined on the space of intervals of sentences in a (PDF) document. It is the count of the total number of directed rhetorical relations between the sentences in the interval and all other sentences in the document. Rhetoricality is considered to be closely associated with semantics, the intended meaning of the document. Prevalence is also a random variable defined on that space of sentences. It is a calculation of the density of high-frequency words in an interval of sentences. Its virtue is that it is much more efficiently calculated than rhetoricality. The driving conjecture of this research is that Prevalence and Rhetoricality are significantly correlated in the sense of statistics. Should this conjecture be born out, it augures computationally rapid comparison of meaning among documents. This document is a compendium of computed evidence in support of the conjecture. Since the author may be getting ahead of himself, and the large language model ChatGPT (affectionately called, “gipity”) used to assist coding is entirely capable of subtle hallucinations, this work may be merely in support of a delusion born of a human and a computer. Therefore, the code and database are available on Github, and the hope is that the results are replicable by sufficiently experienced Python programmers. If so, then the correlation of prevalence and rhetoricality may be a scientific discovery. (shrink)

This article is an argument via analogies from biology, linguistics, mathematics and physics for a Rortyan anti-representationalism. It introduces the novel concepts of a general way of being, called a macropract, and a specialized way of speaking and writing called a microlect. The Rortyan turn is formalized in the concept of resonant-community, which is a mutable set of human beings who resonate among themselves with expressions of their parochial microlect. A microlect has a structure, and microlect-structures form a mathematical category. (...) The vast array of day-to-day micropract expressions is not readily recorded for study, nor are there microlects for discussing, describing, teaching, predicting, explaining, reasoning, arguing, and questioning about them. Instead, a real-time resonant community is simulated by a trove of published documents. The mathematical concept of ``prevalence" as high-density of keywords in sentences (in terms of weighted probabilities), and a computational substitute for human verbal-resonance called computational-resonance (in terms of cosine-similarity of sentential embeddings in a bidirectional encoder-representation transformer fine-tuned on the trove) can realize a conversation among the giants of science and philosophy. Examples are calculated and visualized for a probe of several documents by five core sentences from The Transcendental Aesthetic by Immanuel Kant in The Critique of Pure Reason (B version). (shrink)

Abstract -/- The death of Victor Yalom, a prominent psychotherapist and educator, raises an important philosophical question about the limits of contemporary psychology. This article does not argue that the death of a single individual invalidates psychology as a scientific discipline. Rather, it argues that such events invite a critical examination of psychology's epistemological foundations. According to the theory of Post-Language Psychology, the central crisis of psychology lies not primarily in clinical practice but in the entropy of language itself. When (...) language loses its structural integrity, systems of description, diagnosis, and treatment inevitably reproduce the same disorder. Building upon the theoretical foundations developed in Post_Language and The Foundation of Post-Language Psychology, this paper proposes a paradigm shift from language-dependent psychology toward a post-linguistic framework for understanding the human mind. (shrink)

Pejoratives are often divided into particularistic insults, such as asshole, and slurs, such as Kraut, on the assumption that only the latter derogate social groups. We argue instead that pejoratives form a uniform class. Group derogation is not special to slurs, but a graded interpretation whose availability scales with the entitativity of the collection of people who share the property attributed by a pejorative’s descriptive content—that is, how strongly that collection is perceived as a real, coherent group. Three studies test (...) this claim. Study 1 norms 60 American English pejoratives for entitativity and shows that the collections picked out by their descriptive content occupy a continuum of perceived group coherence rather than falling into discrete lexical classes. Study 2 uses a forced-choice task to show that entitativity predicts whether a pejorative applied to an individual referent receives an individual-directed or group-directed interpretation, and that comprehenders differ sharply and stably in how readily they select the group-directed reading. Study 3 uses the same task to show that this resolution is further shaped by context: actions stereotypical of the relevant category increase group-directed readings, whereas negative actions strengthen individual-directed ones. To account for this pattern, we propose that pejoratives share a two-part structure: an expressive dimension that contributes a generic negative speaker attitude, and a descriptive dimension that classifies the referent. The expressive attitude is target-underspecified: its target is resolved in context, onto the referent or onto the category, with resolution to the category becoming more likely the more entitative the category is. Pejoratives, on this account, differ not by belonging to separate lexical classes but by how strongly their descriptive content supports resolving a negative speaker attitude onto a group. (shrink)

The frfragmentation of knowledge constitutes a fufundamental obstacle to addressingintertwined global crises, ranging frfrom climate change to geopolitical disorder. Thispapaper proposes "Ziben Dynynamics" ( 资 本 动 力 学 , Z ī b ě n Dònglìxué) — ameta-theoretical frframework rk aimed at bridging this divide. By redefifining "Ziben" (资本, Zīběn) as the totality of a system's "intrinsic capapacity" and "relational properties" upupon which it depends fofor survrvival and fufunction, this frframework rk enabables a unififiedanalysis frfrom quantum systems to human civilizations. (...) Based on this, human historyryis reconstruructed as a sequence of fifive dominant foforms of Ziben (Natural, Human-body, Geo-political, Financial, and Capapabability Ziben), driven by the "MetababolicTax-Paradigm Attraction" model. This model reveals that the rise and fafall ofcivilizations stem frfrom the dynynamic game between systemic complexity ty costs(Metababolic Tax) and institutional effffificiency advantages (Paradigm Attraction). WeWefufurther outline its mathematical pathway and propose three testabable predictions. Thisresearch lays the conceptual fofoundation fofor estabablishing a self-f-aware, computabablescience of civilization. (shrink)

Corrected: This study reconstructs Ibn Taymiyya’s theory of language as a comprehensive philosophy linking semantics, cognition, and theology. Rejecting both Aristotelian essentialism and kalām formalism, Ibn Taymiyya grounds meaning in communal usage (ʿurf), context (siyāq), and human convention (waḍʿ) enabled by divine creation of human capacity. Language, for him, is not an autonomous structure but a living medium of truth through which reason and revelation converge. Against the classical dichotomy between literal and metaphorical meaning, he advances a realist account of (...) analogical expression (al-alfāẓ al-mushaqqaqa), where words apply to both divine and human realities by sharing a common conceptual core (qadr mushtarak) without implying equivalence. This framework anticipates modern cognitive semantics, particularly prototype theory and the graded nature of meaning identified by Eleanor Rosch and George Lakoff, while grounding their insights in a theocentric epistemology of divine capacity and Salaf-fixed convention. Ibn Taymiyya’s linguistic hierarchy—revelation, prophetic explanation, the early community, linguistic analysis, context, and reason—offers a hermeneutic method that reconciles scriptural fidelity with rational inquiry. His reflections on semantic change, exemplified by the evolution of ṣalāh from supplication to ritual prayer, prefigure modern theories of semantic drift and grammaticalization. Moreover, his theology of divine speech unites transcendence with intelligibility: God truly speaks with uncreated words and meanings, while their audible and written effects in creation are contingent. Through this synthesis, Ibn Taymiyya articulates a form of theological conventionalism that secures language as a trustworthy bridge between mind, world, and revelation. The result is an original theory of meaning that dissolves the modern anxiety over linguistic fragility by anchoring meaning in Salaf usage and divine preservation of text. (shrink)

Language sophistication indicates the development of language that incorporates differentiation or diversity that is constrained by integration that facilitates organization or unity. This prelude provides the backdrop for discussing language sophistication. Of necessity, any language that was a part of the continuum of salvation history (Heilsgeschichte ) should: 1) possess the sophistication necessary to re-define OT terminology, 2) have the hegemony to launch the NT church, 3) enjoy the universality that allowed for translation into contemporary languages, and 4) retain the (...) portability that enables interpretation in post-modern languages. (shrink)

Qur’an 5:38 is often treated either as a legal verse whose severity must be contained by classical jurisprudence or as an ethical difficulty to be softened through modern reinterpretation. This article pursues a different route. It argues that the literal sense of the verse remains linguistically robust: al-sariq wa-l-sariqah designates the male and female thief as agents constituted by unauthorised appropriation; fa-qta’u is an imperative of cutting; and aydiyahuma names the hands as the direct object. The verse itself does not (...) state a minimum material threshold or replace cutting with restitution or pardon. Rather than cancelling this literal meaning, the article asks why theft is marked with such uncompromising clarity. Its thesis is that literal theft is both the ontological threshold and the pure form of what this article calls theft-structure: the appropriative structure disclosed when a reflective agent takes, seizes, destroys, dominates, or usurps a protected domain without right or consent. Fraud, slander, corruption, tyranny, sexual violence, psychological cruelty, and murder are not reduced to property theft; nevertheless, each involves a reflective agent taking, seizing, destroying, dominating, or usurping a protected domain that is not his or hers to command. Read within Qur’an 5:27-40, the verse belongs to a wider discourse on violated boundaries: life, public security, property, repentance, and divine judgement. Classical jurisprudence, Prophetic reports, Islamic ethical resonances, and philosophical interlocutors from Hegel to contemporary theories of recognition and property clarify the distinction between literal meaning, penal specification, and ontological significance. The result is neither a modern legal endorsement of unqualified amputation nor a metaphorical cancellation of the verse, but a philosophical reconstruction of theft-structure as the clearest form of taking without right. (shrink)

This is just an initial finding and needs to be verified by a larger, more thorough study. Part 1 of this paper demonstrates that we unconsciously select words based on letter sounds that we like or dislike. Part 2 demonstrates that there may be harmony and dissonance in the pattern of frequency of letter usage, at least in the case of the vowels. To the best of my knowledge this is a new idea/discovery. The following paper contains graphs of the (...) data collected from 15 classic works of literature including 4 works of HG Wells and 4 works of Jane Austen. Also a separate analysis is done using just the vowels from Shakespeare’s Sonnets and the Eminem Recovery album. (shrink)

Math literacy is miniscule compared to the near universal language literacy of mother tongues. Our search for the root cause of this undesirable human condition led us to: Grammar (or the abstract essence) of a language. Language learning begins with grammar, unless the language happens to be mathematics, which is unique in not even considering including the grammar (abstract general/theory) of mathematics in the mathematical pedagogy. Here we make a case for introducing the abstract essence of mathematics--Conceptual Mathematics--in high school (...) math curriculum. Recognizing that the singular purpose of education is to nurture the universal yearning for understanding, we show how a nurturing pedagogy naturally resolves the "learning crisis", with the solution manifesting as human development. Furthermore, the nurturing pedagogy that we advocate invariably results in the culture of research excellence. (shrink)

This paper explores the intricate relationship between Indian philosophical thought, language formation, and socio-historical discrimination. It delves into the works of early Indian grammarians, logicians, and epistemologists like Pānini, Bhartṛhari, Nāgārjuna, and Dignāga, highlighting their nuanced investigations into the nature of language, time, and reality. The study contrasts differing schools of thought regarding substantiality and non-substantiality in linguistic and philosophical frameworks, particularly how linguistic discrimination fueled social hierarchies. It critiques the epistemic oversight of prioritizing equanimity over equality, tracing the emergence (...) of caste stratification through the misapplication of linguistic categorization. Concluding with a call to harness transformative energies (Śakti) to dismantle entrenched hierarchies, the paper offers a profound philosophical lens on the intersection of linguistics, epistemology, and social injustice in Indian thought. (shrink)

Predicates such as 'are extinct' or 'are widespread' have long been assumed to apply only to kinds. I present evidence that the predicates typically described as kind-level are numerous-type collective predicates, based on their interaction with all and their failure to exhibit homogeneity effects. This undermines the principal semantic motivation for analysing their bare plural arguments as kind-denoting. Instead, I argue that their arguments are type e expressions and that plural kind predication is just plural predication. I give a compositional (...) semantics for bare plurals and explain differences between bare and definite plurals in terms of the situation argument that can restrict their domain. -/- To appear in Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 30. (shrink)

This essay explores a subtle but pervasive linguistic pattern: when people speak of their own body or brain in the third person — “my brain wants dopamine,” “my heart is restless,” “my body craves sugar.” Such phrasing creates a split: the self as observer versus the self as embodied. The text analyzes the double-edged effect of this distancing and proposes a formula for reintegration — reclaiming authorship of impulse without denial. Language, by framing our relationship to our impulses, can either (...) become a tool for self-regulation or a trap that erodes personal agency. (shrink)

There are several linguistic phenomena that, when examined closely, give evidence that people speak through characters, much like authors of literary works do, in everyday discourse. However, most approaches in linguistics and in the philosophy of language leave little theoretical room for the appearance of characters in discourse. In particular, there is no linguistic criterion found to date, which can mark precisely what stretch of discourse within an utterance belongs to a character, and to which character. And yet, without at (...) least tentatively marking the division of labor between the different characters in an utterance, it is absolutely impossible to arrive at an acceptable interpretation of it. As an alternative, I propose to take character use seriously, as an essential feature of discourse in general, a feature speakers and listeners actively seek out in utterances. I offer a simple typology of actions in discourse that draws on this understanding, and demonstrate its usefulness for the analysis of a conversation transcript. (shrink)

This paper documents the methodological origin and development of the Segeren 2026 research programme in interaction-level AI governance. It is written as a methods and positionality statement — an account of how the research was actually generated, what questions drove it, and why the path taken produced the framework it did. The programme did not begin with artificial intelligence. It began with a question about how human beings make meaning — how symbolic systems have allowed people across history and culture (...) to navigate complexity without collapsing it into false certainty. That question, followed far enough, produced a governance framework for AI interaction: named failure conditions, a preventive control architecture, and a forensic audit protocol applicable to any interaction record without access to the underlying model. None of it was designed in advance. Each element emerged from the previous one — from symbolic cognition through a live incident that had no name, through the slow work of naming what had happened, to external validation from within the academic lineage the research independently arrived at, and to a convergence finding that confirmed the problem is real enough to be found from two entirely different directions at once. (shrink)

After half a century in oblivion, the nature of consciousness is now the hottest topic in the behavioral sciences and philosophy. Beginning with the pioneering work of Ludwig Wittgenstein in the 1930’s (the Blue and Brown Books) and from the 50’s to the present by his logical successor John Searle, I have created the following table as an heuristic for furthering this study. The rows show various aspects or ways of studying and the columns show the involuntary processes and voluntary (...) behaviors comprising the two systems (dual processes) of the Logical Structure of Consciousness (LSC), which can also be regarded as the Logical Structure of Rationality (LSR-Searle), of behavior (LSB), of personality (LSB), of reality (LSOR), of Intentionality (LSI) -the classical philosophical term, the Descriptive Psychology of Consciousness (DPC) , the Descriptive Psychology of Thought (DPT) –or better, the Language of the Descriptive Psychology of Thought (LDPT), terms introduced here and in my other very recent writings. I will make minimal comments here since those wishing further description may consult my articles and reviews of books by Wittgenstein, Searle and others on academia.edu, vixra.org, researchgate.net and on Amazon. (shrink)

the young generation seeking for a better future.

Psychoanalisys, Marcuse, Freud articulated with some toughts of Karl Jung.

In the search of new approaches to the problem of emergence and evolution of natural languages, Mathematics, Theoretical Computer Science, as well as Molecular Biology and Neuroscience, both deeply penetrated and profoundly inspired by concepts originated in Mathematics and Computer Science, represent today the richest pools of formal concepts, structures, and methods to borrow and to adapt.

This paper provides a semantic analysis of the particles afinal (European Portuguese) and alla fine (Italian) in terms of the notion of truth unpersistence, which can be situated at the intersection of epistemic modality and discourse structure. In the analysis proposed, the particles are propositional operators and require that the truth of a proposition p* fail to persist through a temporal succession of epistemic states, this proposition being incompatible with the prejacent, and that the interlocutors share knowledge of a previous (...) epistemic attitude toward p*. We analyze two main cases (plan-related and non plan-related propositions) and also show that these particles are indexical to one (or more) epistemic agent(s) and allow for shifts in perspective. (shrink)

This conference explores the connection between theoretical aspects of pragmatics and philosophy. We still believe that intentions play a fundamental role in communication and that the hearer’s task is mainly to reconstruct those intentions on the basis of what is explicitly said (the semantics of a linguistic expression) and of contextual clues and cues (Dascal 2003). Sometimes, as Mey argues (Mey 2001), a priori knowledge of a frame and a script will determine interpretation even if one partially says what one (...) wants to say. Both bottom-up and top-down inferential processes are involved (see Jasczolt’s notion of merger representations). Pragmatics can be put to use in understanding of philosophical puzzles (see Igor Douven The pragmatics of belief or Capone (2016) on simple sentences and substitution). Implicit indirect reports can, in some cases, be taken to resolve issues. We welcome contributions in theoretical pragmatics, philosophical pragmatics, societal pragmatics, intercultural pragmatics, clinical pragmatics, pragmatics and cognition, contributions that relate to conversational presuppositions, if-clauses, the pragmatics of ‘de se’ attitudes, proper names, quasi-proper names, proper names as speech acts, pragmemes and speech acts in the cultural context, evolutionary pragmatics, pragmatics and culture, rhetoric and argumentation, pragmatics and the world languages (e.g. Japanese, Persian, Tok Pisin, Papua New Guinea languages, in general, African languages, Asian languages, South American languages, etc.), the pragmatics of funerary rites, natural language semantics, the semantics/pragmatics debate. The organizers will consult with K. Jaszczolt, Mitchell Green, Igor Douven, Yael Sharvit, Louise Cummings, Fabrizio Macagno, Alison Hall, Daniele Panizza, Roberto Graci, Yoko Mizuta, Chusni Hadiati, Alessandra Giorgi for the acceptance of the abstracts and then the selected papers to appear in the book(s). The books are likely to be published in Capone’s series for Springer. (shrink)

This article gives mathematical pseudocodes for large language model training based on a dataset from a corpus, inference, and chat with possibly lengthy human prompts and generated replies. It introduces the concepts of “microlect" and “resonantcommunity." Most generally, a microlect is a specialized behavioral "language" consisting of expressions called "cores" built upon units called "keys." It is a minimal and adequate representation of a mental model. An expression may resonate more or less with a mental model. A resonant- community is (...) a set of human beings whose expressions resonate with one another. These notions are helpful in understanding of how the “frozen matrices" of a large language model are a conduit for resonance between human-beings and a zeitgeist represented in a corpus. The primary objectives are to encapsulate the functionality of large language models in a succinct technical representation, and to explain how this functionality connects human beings to their ambient cultural zeitgeist as represented in a textual corpus. The research draws on relevant literature in psychology, linguistics, mathematics, physics, and software engineering. The significance of the research is to embed the explanation in a perspective on the entirety of human expressiveness. The study can provide valuable insights based on resonances between human beings among themselves and with computing machines. (shrink)

Italian irrealis conditionals with a double imperfect (Imperfetto Irrealis) have puzzling temporal and aspectual properties: unlike well-known core uses (continuative, progressive, habitual/generic) of Romance imperfects to describe an eventuality as past, they allow for the whole range of temporal interpretations, namely, the events described by the protasis and the apodosis can be past, present or future; in addition, the ongoingness condition characteristic of those core uses is not relevant anymore, since the events described by the protasis and the apodosis are (...) seen as culminated. Imperfetto Irrealis are also puzzling for their modal properties: unlike the other indicative conditionals, which are generally interpreted as epistemic, they express counterfactual meaning. By relying on data of mixed CFs (in which an Imperfetto combines with a past Subjunctive or a past Conditional), we show that Imperfetto Irrealis are closer to two pasts CFs than to one past CFs. The data suggest that, in spite of the latitude of their temporal interpretations, Imperfetto Irrealis preserve the true past tense active in core uses of Romance imperfects. Building on a previous analysis of imperfective sentences in Del Prete (2013), combined with crucial insights on CF semantics from Ippolito (2004, 2006), Arregui (2005) and Anand and Hacquard (2010), we propose a formal account of Imperfetto Irrealis which allows a partially unified view of the semantics of the Imperfetto across conditional and non-conditional uses. The main insight making this partial unification possible bears on the morphosyntactic structure of Imperfetto Irrealis and is inspired by previous formal analyses of CFs (Iatridou 2000, Ippolito 2006, Ferreira 2016): the two realizations of the Imperfetto found in this type of conditional are the morphosyntactic reflexes of a single higher PAST+IPFV, therefore the true semantically active Imperfetto is not situated where one can see/hear the Imperfetto morphology but higher in the syntactic structure. (shrink)

This study investigates whether morphosyntactic iconicity echoes across gesture and intonation within the framework of Construction Grammar (CxG). Using corpus data from the NewsScape archive, three verbal patterns – repeatedly, over and over (OAO), and over and over and over (OAOAO) – were compared in terms of their co-expressive gestures and intonation. Bayesian mixed-effects logistic regression analyses confirmed that morphosyntactic iconicity affects both gestural and vocal iconicity, with cyclic gestures, repeated beats, and duplicate pitch increasing in parallel with the degree (...) of morphosyntactic iconicity. Crucially, cyclic gestures, as opposed to repeated beats and duplicate pitch, qualitatively transform the utterance’s meaning through their embodied metaphoricity iteration as cycle. We argue that such qualitative contributions to meaning are key to positing a multimodal construction, whereas formal features that contribute only quantitatively to meaning, such as repeated beats and duplicate pitch, are best understood as constituting mere associations with verbal expressions, thus remaining as variations of a construction conceived as a prototype category. By combining qualitative analysis with quantitative findings, this study advocates for a “qualitative turn” in the study of multimodal constructions, emphasizing iconicity, embodiment, and idiomaticity over frequency alone. (shrink)

Dayal's (2004) theory of kind terms accounts for the definiteness and number marking patterns in kind terms in many languages. Brazilian Portuguese has been claimed to be a counter-example to her theory as it seems to allow bare ``singular'' kind terms, which are predicted to be impossible according to her theory. However, the empirical status of the relevant data has not been clear so far. This paper presents a new data point from Singlish and confirms the existence of bare ``singular'' (...) kind terms. A modified theory of kind terms is proposed that accounts for it. The proposed theory puts forth a number system with three basic categories, i.e. singular, plural and general. It is claimed that bare ``singular'' kind terms are in fact derived from general NPs, which are associated with number-neutral properties. The paper also discusses why bare ``singular'' kind terms are not perfectly acceptable in Brazilian Portuguese. (shrink)

Following the research developed in Kant's Place, Ó Beagáin presents a comprehensive examination of the influence of Immanuel Kant on language studies from the 18th to 20th centuries. The author argues convincingly that Kant’s mark can be seen in the comparative study of languages most eloquently put forward by Wilhelm von Humboldt and in later developments by Franz Boas and Edward Sapir. It is also felt in the turn to inborn capacities by Noam Chomsky following the work of his mentor (...) Zellig Harris, and that of Leonard Bloomfield's on transformations. Chomsky's work is developed further by thinkers like Jerry Fodor and Paul Pietroski and ideas such as theirs presented under the generative programme are strongly influenced by the Kantian interests of thinkers like Gottlob Frege and Kurt Gödel et al. Ó Beagáin’s historical reconstruction builds a comprehensive genealogy that searches for homologies in thought. It culminates in a thorough analysis of linguistics from the mid 20th to early 21st centuries, examining climates of opinion, its innate-turn, and the ever-evolving developments in the generative programme. A final analysis traces the connections running from Kant onward and reveals the homologies that lay bare the influence of the great Enlightenment thinker. In his analysis, Ó Beagáin uses methods that are standard approaches in linguistic historiography, such as explanatory-descriptive analysis, textual analysis, philological methods, and the construction of relevant biographical and conceptual histories. Kant and the Foundations of Contemporary Linguistics will appeal to researchers and graduate students working in philosophy of language, history of philosophy, linguistics, and cognitive science. (shrink)

Neste capítulo, cujo título é "Repensar a língua: caminhos para compreender as políticas linguísticas", convida-se o leitor/ a leitora a repensar o próprio conceito de língua[gem], deslocando-se de perspectivas monolíngues e homogêneas para compreensões mais plurais, críticas e socialmente situadas, capazes de ampliar os modos de compreender as políticas linguísticas.

This paper challenges the “sequence bottleneck” hypothesis, which claims that limitations in sequence memory constrain animal cognition and that human language emerged by overcoming this universal limit. Drawing on comparative neuroscience, behavioral ecology, and language evolution research, we argue that long, linear sequences in human language are not the generative core of linguistic capacity but a niche-specific output format. Across taxa, the hippocampal system — and its analogues — supports the generation of hierarchical, multimodal event structures that are flexibly adapted (...) to each species’ ecological demands. Human language arose when these ancient hierarchical generators were co-opted into a multimodal communicative system shaped by the “linguistic niche,” where pressures for precise, rapid, and cumulative transmission favored the linearization of complex conceptual structures. We highlight three core critiques of the bottleneck view: (i) hippocampal sequence generation is evolutionarily widespread and hierarchically organized, not inherently limited in length; (ii) laboratory sequence tasks often lack ecological validity, underestimating non-human capacities; and (iii) many species achieve sophisticated communication through non-linear, multimodal formats. We propose an integrative neuroecological model in which sequence form is contingent on niche-specific adaptive pressures, reframing cross-species comparisons around the diversity of representational formats rather than deficits in linear output. This approach replaces a deficit-oriented metric with a framework that recognizes both the deep continuity of neural mechanisms and the adaptive divergence of communicative solutions across species. (shrink)

Research in experimental philosophy of language has been taken to show that non-philosophers do not uniformly assign reference in accordance with the causal-historical account of reference determination. The setup most frequently used in this research is one that is modelled on Kripke’s Gödel case. This paper will distinguish three cognitive mechanisms behind participants’ responses that might potentially result in responses of relevance to theories of reference. If participants utilize the first cognitive mechanism, their response is based on what I call (...) their “acquired use”, that is, on how they understand the reference of the target term in their own idiolect. If participants utilize the second or third cognitive mechanism, their response is based on their explicit or implicit theories of reference, respectively. I will argue that the first and second way of answering the probe question cannot deliver responses that tell us anything about which theory of reference is true. Additionally, I will argue that if the third way of answering the probe question can result in responses that tell us something about which theory of reference is true, such responses cannot be distinguished from those that don’t. If correct, Gödel-style setups cannot properly support a theory of reference. (shrink)

Usage-based accounts of sociolinguistic learning assign a pivotal role to the frequency with which a linguistic variant and a social category co-occur in listeners’ input. However, few studies have so far compared the effects of varying frequency distributions on acquisition in a lab-based context. This paper presents a critical assessment of methodological implications and considerations with regard to investigating such questions, thereby focusing on the upcoming paradigm of artificial sociolinguistic language learning. Based on the available literature on this paradigm, we (...) designed a semi-artificial language learning experiment that manipulates the probabilistic association between a new linguistic variable and macro-social categories between participants. In a first training phase, participants were exposed to the variable – (de)voicing of the word medial stop in disyllabic pseudowords – produced by two male and two female sounding speakers (social categories of ‘gender’). Participants’ learning of the link between the linguistic variable and perceived speaker gender was subsequently tested in a perception task which also tested the generalisation of learning to words that participants did not hear during training. Results show relatively limited learning overall, yet the experiment points to key methodological insights, particularly regarding the role of salience and relevance in lab-based learning tasks. (shrink)

fear of God, spiritual subsistence, consciousness , conscious and uncounscious.

This paper is concerned with neg-words that are usually defined by their occurrence in NC constructions. The common definition of neg-words has several weaknesses: for example, it does not allow to define NC in a non-circular way or it cannot explain why DN is possible in many NC languages. Therefore, an alternative definition is proposed in this paper: Neg-words are indefinite pronouns (or adverbs) that contain a negative morpheme, or indefinite pronouns (or adverbs) that have replaced such an indefinite pronoun (...) (or adverb). Defining neg-words in this way has several advantages: it allows a non-circular and precise definition of NC, it can also explain why DN is also possible in NC languages (therefore, the term negative quantifier can be dispensed with), and it allows an alternative typological classification of NC and non-NC languages to the usual one in which NC and DN languages are contrasted. According to the view expressed here, non-NC languages are languages without neg-words (as defined here) and they cover a group of languages to which 80% to 90% of all languages belong. In addition, I analyze neg-words as Heimian indefinites with an interpretable neg-feature. This explains the wide range of uses of neg-words from weak indefinites (the default case) to negated existential quantifiers to universal quantifiers that scope over negation. (shrink)

The relationship between symbolic and connectionist approaches to artificial intelligence has been a foundational tension in the field for decades. This paper proposes a hybrid account where symbols can emerge from structured transformations over distributed representations in contemporary AI systems. I develop operational tests for symbolic competence and evaluate evidence from large language models, retrieval-augmented generation, and neuro-symbolic architectures. The framework distinguishes between functional symbolic behavior and genuine symbolic representation while providing criteria for assessing when AI systems exhibit symbolic competence. (...) Case studies in compositional generalization, systematic reasoning, and grounding problems demonstrate how hybrid approaches can advance our understanding of language, meaning, and representation in machines. (shrink)

The book has xi + 191 pages, beginning with an editorial forward by Brian D. Joseph, the managing editor for the series, Empirical Approaches to Linguistic Theory, in which he outlines his prior acquaintance and collaboration with the author, Paul M. Postal (PMP). The book has five chapters comprising an introduction, three substantive chapters, and a concluding chapter. The three substantive chapters, Chapters 2–4, are revised versions of papers published on LingBuzz by PMP in 2012, 2023, and 2019 respectively. The (...) book takes its place among many other related critical papers and books published by him over a number of decades, some of which I shall mention in passing. (shrink)

Recurrent multiword units (RMUs) are central to language processing, yet their systematic identification and networked organization remain understudied. This study combines corpus-based and network-analytic methods to examine how RMUs contribute to the emergence of constructional schemas. Drawing on a 185-million-word corpus of Taiwan Mandarin, we pursue two aims. First, we propose a quantitative method for identifying cohesive RMUs based on word predictability in context. Second, we model RMUs as a network in which nodes represent RMUs and edges encode structural and (...) semantic similarity, estimated with a state-of-the-art large language model. A comparison with a random sequence network confirms the non-random structure of the RMU network. Analysis of its topology reveals exemplar-based semantic groupings that support higher-level generalizations. These findings highlight RMUs as key building blocks in linguistic categorization, where subgroupings emerge through sequential lexical associations that underlie the formation of grammatical patterns and hierarchical structure. (shrink)

This article explores the evolution of colour terms in French, with a focus on the comparative analysis of brun, marron, and châtain, all of which fall within the spectrum of the colour brown in English. Within the framework of Schmid’s Entrenchment-and-Conventionalization model, we investigate how the system of colour terms, as patterns of associations in the minds of speakers and communicative behaviours among the members of a speech community, shapes the meanings and usages of these terms over time. We claim (...) that marron has emerged as an all-purpose and denotatively focused expression, establishing it as a Basic Colour Term. Brun, by contrast, is characterized by its broad semantic scope which encompasses various hues and meanings, but it lacks the precise chromatic focus seen in marron. (shrink)

Traditional vocabulary research often overlooks the crucial role of metaphorical language, essential for comprehensive lexical understanding. The presence of conceptual metaphors in English language textbooks for nonnative speakers remains under-examined, despite their pervasive nature. This study addresses this gap, investigating conceptual metaphors of time in selected Malaysian English language textbooks to highlight their importance for second language learning. A qualitative, corpus-driven study analysed conceptual metaphors of time in two intermediate and upper-intermediate secondary English language textbooks: Healan et al.’s (2018) Close-Up (...) and Mitchell and Malkogianni's Full Blast Plus 4 (2019). Using Sketch Engine’s Word Sketch and Concordance tools, the research identified verb + time collocations, cross-referencing them with the British National Corpus (BNC). For comparative analysis, the Malaysian Web Corpus in Sketch Engine was used to investigate verb + waktu (Malay for time) collocations. Linguistic metaphors in both corpora were manually analysed to identify incongruous vehicle terms and their target domain (time). Analysis of verb + time collocations in Close-Up and Full Blast Plus 4 revealed nine distinct verbs: have, take, spend, and leave. All identified collocations were metaphorical, predominantly conceptualising TIME as MONEY, VALUABLE COMMODITY, or LIMITED RESOURCE. A comparative analysis with the Malaysian Web Corpus showed striking similarities, with Malay waktu + verb collocations also conceptualising time as MONEY, VALUABLE COMMODITY, and LIMITED RESOURCE. The conceptual metaphor TIME IS MONEY emerged as a pervasive underlying system characterising all time-related collocations in both languages, reflecting cultural conceptualisation tied to time's quantification. The results of the current study have substantial theoretical and practical implications for integrating conceptual metaphor understanding in second language teaching. (shrink)