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Context (language Use)
In semiotics, linguistics, sociology and anthropology, context refers to those objects or entities which surround a ''focal event'', in these disciplines typically a communicative event, of some kind. Context is "a frame that surrounds the event and provides resources for its appropriate interpretation". It is thus a relative concept, only definable with respect to some focal event within a frame, not independently of that frame. In linguistics In the 19th century, it was debated whether the most fundamental principle in language was contextuality or compositionality, and compositionality was usually preferred.Janssen, T. M. (2012) Compositionality: Its historic context', in M. Werning, W. Hinzen, & E. Machery (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of compositionality', pp. 19-46, Oxford University Press. Verbal context refers to the text or speech surrounding an expression (word, sentence, or speech act). Verbal context influences the way an expression is understood; hence the norm of n ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Semiotics
Semiotics (also called semiotic studies) is the systematic study of sign processes ( semiosis) and meaning making. Semiosis is any activity, conduct, or process that involves signs, where a sign is defined as anything that communicates something, usually called a meaning, to the sign's interpreter. The meaning can be intentional such as a word uttered with a specific meaning, or unintentional, such as a symptom being a sign of a particular medical condition. Signs can also communicate feelings (which are usually not considered meanings) and may communicate internally (through thought itself) or through any of the senses: visual, auditory, tactile, olfactory, or gustatory (taste). Contemporary semiotics is a branch of science that studies meaning-making and various types of knowledge. The semiotic tradition explores the study of signs and symbols as a significant part of communications. Unlike linguistics, semiotics also studies non-linguistic sign systems. Semiotics includes ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Linguistic Anthropology
Linguistic anthropology is the interdisciplinary study of how language influences social life. It is a branch of anthropology that originated from the endeavor to document endangered languages and has grown over the past century to encompass most aspects of language structure and use.Duranti, Alessandro (ed.), 2004''Companion to Linguistic Anthropology'' Malden, MA: Blackwell. Linguistic anthropology explores how language shapes communication, forms social identity and group membership, organizes large-scale cultural beliefs and ideologies, and develops a common cultural representation of natural and social worlds.Society for Linguistic Anthropology. n.dAbout the Society for Linguistic Anthropology(accessed 7 July 2010). Historical Development Linguistic anthropology emerged from the development of three distinct paradigms that have set the standard for approaching linguistic anthropology. The first, now known as "anthropological linguistics," focuses on the documentation of ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sociolinguistics
Sociolinguistics is the descriptive study of the effect of any or all aspects of society, including cultural norms, expectations, and context, on the way language is used, and society's effect on language. It can overlap with the sociology of language, which focuses on the effect of language on society. Sociolinguistics overlaps considerably with pragmatics and is closely related to linguistic anthropology. Sociolinguistics' historical interrelation with anthropology can be observed in studies of how language varieties differ between groups separated by social variables (e.g., ethnicity, religion, status, gender, level of education, age, etc.) and/or geographical barriers (a mountain range, a desert, a river, etc.). Such studies also examine how such differences in usage and differences in beliefs about usage produce and reflect social or socioeconomic classes. As the usage of a language varies from place to place, language usage also varies among social classes, and ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Opaque Context
An opaque context or referentially opaque context is a linguistic context in which it is not always possible to substitute "co-referential" expressions (expressions referring to the same object) without altering the truth of sentences. The expressions involved are usually grammatically singular terms. So, substitution of co-referential expressions into an opaque context does not always preserve truth. For example, "Lois believes x is a hero" is an opaque context because "Lois believes Superman is a hero" is true while "Lois believes Clark Kent is a hero" is false, even though 'Superman' and 'Clark Kent' are co-referential expressions. Usage The term is used in philosophical theories of reference, and is to be contrasted with referentially transparent context. In rough outline: *Opacity: "Mary believes that Cicero is a great orator" gives rise to an opaque context; although Cicero was also called 'Tully',Tully is anglicised historic name from Tullius, sourceKate Kearns: Semanti ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Deixis
In linguistics, deixis (, ) is the use of general words and phrases to refer to a specific time, place, or person in context, e.g., the words ''tomorrow'', ''there'', and ''they''. Words are deictic if their semantic meaning is fixed but their denoted meaning varies depending on time and/or place. Words or phrases that require contextual information to be fully understood—for example, English pronouns—are deictic. Deixis is closely related to anaphora. Although this article deals primarily with deixis in spoken language, the concept is sometimes applied to written language, gestures, and communication media as well. In linguistic anthropology, deixis is treated as a particular subclass of the more general semiotic phenomenon of indexicality, a sign "pointing to" some aspect of its context of occurrence. Although this article draws examples primarily from English, deixis is believed to be a feature (to some degree) of all natural languages.Lyons, John (1977) "Deixis, space ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Conversational Scoreboard
In linguistics and philosophy of language, the conversational scoreboard is a tuple which represents the discourse context at a given point in a conversation. The scoreboard is updated by each speech act performed by one of the interlocutors. Most theories of conversational scorekeeping take one of the scoreboard's elements to be a common ground, which represents the propositional information mutually agreed upon by the interlocutors. When an interlocutor makes a successful assertion, its content is added to the common ground. Once in the common ground, that information can then be presupposed by future utterances. Depending on the particular theory of scorekeeping, additional elements of the scoreboard may include a stack of questions under discussion, a list of discourse referents available for anaphora, among other categories of contextual information. The notion of a conversational scoreboard was introduced by David Lewis in his most-cited paper ''Scorekeeping in a Lan ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Context-sensitive Language
In formal language theory, a context-sensitive language is a language that can be defined by a context-sensitive grammar (and equivalently by a noncontracting grammar). Context-sensitive is one of the four types of grammars in the Chomsky hierarchy. Computational properties Computationally, a context-sensitive language is equivalent to a linear bounded nondeterministic Turing machine, also called a linear bounded automaton. That is a non-deterministic Turing machine with a tape of only kn cells, where n is the size of the input and k is a constant associated with the machine. This means that every formal language that can be decided by such a machine is a context-sensitive language, and every context-sensitive language can be decided by such a machine. This set of languages is also known as NLINSPACE or NSPACE(''O''(''n'')), because they can be accepted using linear space on a non-deterministic Turing machine. The class LINSPACE (or DSPACE(''O''(''n''))) is defined the same, e ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Context Principle
In the philosophy of language, the context principle is a form of semantic holism holding that a philosopher should "never ... ask for the meaning of a word in isolation, but only in the context of a proposition" (Frege 884/1980x). Analysis The context principle is one of Gottlob Frege's "three fundamental principles" for philosophical analysis, first discussed in his Introduction to ''The Foundations of Arithmetic'' (''Grundlagen der Arithmetik'', 1884). Frege argued that many philosophical errors, especially those related to psychologism in the philosophy of logic and philosophy of mathematics, could be avoided by adhering carefully to the context principle. The view of meaning expressed by the context principle is sometimes called semantic contextualism. This view need not be contrasted with the view that the meanings of words or expressions can (or must) be determined prior to, and independently of, the meanings of the propositions in which they occur, which is often referred t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Aberrant Decoding
Aberrant decoding or aberrant reading is a concept used in fields such as communication and media studies, semiotics, and journalism about how messages can be interpreted differently from what was intended by their sender. The concept was proposed by Umberto Eco in an article published first in 1965 in Italian and in 1972 in English. Concept Every communication act requires that the messages must be encoded into a set of signs by the sender. These signs must then be transmitted and decoded by the receiver to understand the contained messages. The code system must be shared by both the sender and the receiver in order for the communication to succeed. For example, thoughts must be encoded into words, transmitted through air, and then be decoded back to thoughts. Often the sender has a certain meaning to convey with his message, hoping the receiver will interpret it correctly. This right interpretation can be called the ''preferred decoding'' or ''preferred reading''. When the in ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Word-sense Disambiguation
Word-sense disambiguation (WSD) is the process of identifying which sense of a word is meant in a sentence or other segment of context. In human language processing and cognition, it is usually subconscious/automatic but can often come to conscious attention when ambiguity impairs clarity of communication, given the pervasive polysemy in natural language. In computational linguistics, it is an open problem that affects other computer-related writing, such as discourse, improving relevance of search engines, anaphora resolution, coherence, and inference. Given that natural language requires reflection of neurological reality, as shaped by the abilities provided by the brain's neural networks, computer science has had a long-term challenge in developing the ability in computers to do natural language processing and machine learning. Many techniques have been researched, including dictionary-based methods that use the knowledge encoded in lexical resources, supervised machine le ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Co-occurrence
In linguistics, co-occurrence or cooccurrence is an above-chance frequency of occurrence of two terms (also known as coincidence or concurrence) from a text corpus alongside each other in a certain order. Co-occurrence in this linguistic sense can be interpreted as an indicator of semantic proximity or an idiomatic expression. Corpus linguistics and its statistic analyses reveal patterns of co-occurrences within a language and enable to work out typical collocations for its lexical items. A ''co-occurrence restriction'' is identified when linguistic elements never occur together. Analysis of these restrictions can lead to discoveries about the structure and development of a language. Co-occurrence can be seen an extension of word counting in higher dimensions. Co-occurrence can be quantitatively described using measures like correlation or mutual information. See also * Distributional hypothesis * Statistical semantics * Co-occurrence matrix * Co-occurrence networks Co-oc ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Indexicality
In semiotics, linguistics, anthropology, and philosophy of language, indexicality is the phenomenon of a '' sign'' pointing to (or ''indexing'') some object in the context in which it occurs. A sign that signifies indexically is called an index or, in philosophy, an indexical. The modern concept originates in the semiotic theory of Charles Sanders Peirce, in which indexicality is one of the three fundamental sign modalities by which a sign relates to its referent (the others being iconicity and symbolism). Peirce, C.S., "Division of Signs" in ''Collected Papers'', 1932 897 Peirce's concept has been adopted and extended by several twentieth-century academic traditions, including those of linguistic pragmatics, linguistic anthropology, and Anglo-American philosophy of language. Words and expressions in language often derive some part of their referential meaning from indexicality. For example, ''I'' indexically refers to the entity that is speaking; ''now'' indexically refers to ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
