Scalar inference, the process by which we infer meanings stronger than what was explicitly said, has long been a central topic of investigation in theoretical semantics-pragmatics, as well as in psycholinguistics. Upon encountering the sentence "Mary ate some of the deep dish", for instance, hearers regularly compute the pragmatic…

Comprehension substantially benefits from attending to, thinking about, and mentally representing the sources of any presented information. Such processes require mental effort and unfortunately people do not always engage in such activities. The current article presents a nascent, evolving model of discourse comprehension that formalizes…

The aim of the present paper is examining the mental representations activated by semantic networks in media discourse. It studies the cognitive frames that are mentally constructed and activated about illegal immigrants, in general, and Syrian refugees in particular. Any word class can evoke frames, but to limit the scope of analysis,…

Within phenomenological philosophy four topics, (1) Body, (2) Time, (3) Others and the Social Order and (4) World serve as the major contexts in which human perception, action and reflection take place. At present only three of these domains have been studied from an empirical perspective, leaving Body as the one domain requiring further analysis.…

This dissertation centers on the application of the mental space theory to expand our understanding of the role lexical discourse markers (LDMs) play in discourse. LDMs have been recognized by many researchers for their discourse connective function(s) (Levinson, 1983; Schiffrin, 1987; Blakemore, 1989, 2000, 2001, 2002; Fraser, 1996, 1999, 2006).…

Linguistics research has demonstrated the commonness and functions of metaphors to carry cognitive frames, which influence the way people understand and act on information. This work conveys the results of three analyses employed to describe cognitive frames: forms of linguistic metaphors used, functions of systematic metaphors that emerged, and…

This paper is an application of Robert E. MacLaury's Vantage Theory (VT) to the analysis of real life spoken discourse. It utilizes Dennis R. Preston's (1994) modification of MacLaury's VT. It elucidates how cognitive processes of coordinate selection and combination contribute to the on-line construction of category membership in the abstract…

In this article I posit translation as philosophical operation that disrupts commonsense meaning and understanding. By defamiliarising language, translation can arrest thinking about a text in a way that assumes the language is understood. In recent work I have grappled with the phrase "ways of knowing", which, for linguistic and conceptual…

The paper investigates Polish punk and hip hop (rap) song lyrics broken down into frequency lists. In an analysis inspired by MacLaury's view of categorization, the construals of punk and hip hop worldviews are shown to vary in the distance of the observer from the world, the width of the viewing frame, as well as the granularity and density of…

Descriptions of educational practice offer an array of important, but typically hidden dimensions of meaning which provide potentially rich resources for understanding the practices. This paper illustrates: (1) how analysis, interpretations, and assessments interpenetrate what appear to be descriptions and suggest how readers can tease out these…

Focuses on the semantic-conceptual structure that contains the ideas and information a speaker wishes to convey to a listener. Reviews the status of temporal cycles using appropriate design and statistical procedures. Explores the correlates and dynamics of temporal cycles in spontaneous spoken discourse. (Author/VWL)

Reports on a study of how people create names for individuals characterized by role descriptions. Concludes that context scenarios that involved the individual denoted by a role description elicited names less literally based on the actual role description than did less involving scenarios, and that less literal names appeared to directly…

Describes a computational model of high-dimensional context space: the Hyperspace Analog to Language (HAL). Shows that HAL provides sufficient information to make semantic, grammatical, and abstract distinctions. Demonstrates the cognitive compatibility of the representations with human processing; and introduces a new methodology that extracts…

Offers an introduction to the theory and implementation of Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA), a theory and method for extracting and representing the contextual-usage meaning of words by statistical computations applied to a large corpus of text. Gives an overview of applications and modeling of human knowledge to which LSA has been applied. (SR)