Measuring meaning is a central problem in cultural sociology and word embeddings may offer powerful new tools to do so. But like any tool, they build on and exert theoretical assumptions. In this paper, I theorize the ways in which word embeddings model three core premises of a structural linguistic theory of meaning: that meaning is coherent,…

Given that both spoken and written language are subject to corruption from speech errors, disfluencies, and environmental noise, successful language comprehension sometimes requires deriving a non-veridical understanding of the linguistic input. Recent work has demonstrated that these non-veridical understandings are not merely semantic, but that,…

This dissertation explores the robust confluence of syntactic and cultural factors involved in the structure and content of chengyu. It unpacks a number of structural tendencies in the data sample, and illuminates selected underlying cultural themes. The presence of syntactic and semantic parallelism within chengyu, as an expression of the…

In broad terms, this paper is concerned with adjunct construction in Persian, which is an Indo-Iranian Language. During the recent century, specially in its final decades, different researches have been done about adjuncts and adjunction among different languages, but despite the fact that they are very important in Persian language, no attempts…

Two consecutive sentences in Russian with the same verbal predicate often show an aspectual shift. The thematic role of the verb is underlined by lexical items that signal the communicative structure of the sentence. Interdependence between theme-rheme articulation is more important than the relationship between aspect and modality. (Text is in…

Modified version of a talk given at Bloomington, Indiana on March 29, 1971. (VM)

The reply is divided into three sections discussing the data on derivations that Zaitchik had cited against the author's theory, some minor points on the internal structure of the theory, and two major points about explicitness. (SC)

Suggests that the evolutionary process in each child's acquisition of language is a mirror image of the historical evolution of the language. (TO)

Recent experiments in machine translation have given the semantic elements of collocation in Russian more objective criteria. Soviet linguists in search of semantic relationships have attempted to devise a semantic synthesis for construction of a basic language for machine translation. One such effort is summarized. (CHK)

Cited are 573 U.S. and foreign articles, reports, and books particularly relevant to the field of computational linguistics with selective coverage in the fields of computation and programming, and social science uses of computers as language processors. In the area of linguistics, a fairly broad view of structural theory and semantics is taken…

An important question in the study of language production is the nature of the semantic information that speakers use to create syntactic structures. A common answer to this question assumes that thematic roles help to mediate the mapping from messages to syntax. However, research using structural priming has suggested that the construction of…

Traces the development of discourse analysis in modern linguistics, and presents a semantic analysis, based on a comparative word frequency count, of two political speeches made by the socialist Jean Jaures. (AM)

Original version of this paper appeared in "Voprosy jazykoznanija", v5, p37-48, 1971. (DD)