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ConTeXt
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 no ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Semiotics
Semiotics ( ) is the systematic study of sign processes and the communication of meaning. In semiotics, a sign is defined as anything that communicates intentional and unintentional meaning or feelings to the sign's interpreter. Semiosis is any activity, conduct, or process that involves signs. Signs often are communicated by verbal language, but also by gestures, or by other forms of language, e.g. artistic ones (music, painting, sculpture, etc.). Contemporary semiotics is a branch of science that generally studies meaning-making (whether communicated or not) and various types of knowledge. Unlike linguistics, semiotics also studies non-linguistic sign systems. Semiotics includes the study of indication, designation, likeness, analogy, allegory, metonymy, metaphor, symbolism, signification, and communication. Semiotics is frequently seen as having important anthropological and sociological dimensions. Some semioticians regard every cultural phenomenon as being able to ... [...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 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sociolinguistics
Sociolinguistics is the descriptive, scientific study of how language is shaped by, and used differently within, any given society. The field largely looks at how a language changes between distinct social groups, as well as how it varies under the influence of assorted cultural norms, expectations, and contexts. Sociolinguistics combines the older field of dialectology with the social sciences in order to identify regional dialects, sociolects, ethnolects, and other sub-varieties and styles within a language, as well as the distinctions and variations inside each of these. A major branch of linguistics since the second half of the 20th century, sociolinguistics is closely related to and can partly overlap with pragmatics, linguistic anthropology, and sociology of language, the latter focusing on the effect of language back on society. Sociolinguistics' historical interrelation with anthropology can be observed in studies of how language varieties differ between groups ... [...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 the opaque case, "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, source: we can't simply substitu ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Deixis
In linguistics, deixis () is the use of words or phrases to refer to a particular time (e.g. ''then''), place (e.g. ''here''), or person (e.g. ''you'') relative to the Context (language use), context of the utterance. Deixis exists in all known natural languagesLyons, John (1977) "Deixis, space and time" in ''Semantics'', Vol. 2, pp. 636–724. Cambridge University Press. and is closely related to Anaphora (linguistics), anaphora, with a sometimes unclear distinction between the two. In linguistic anthropology, deixis is seen as the same as, or a subclass of, indexicality. The term's origin is . To this, Chrysippus () added the specialized meaning ''point of reference'', which is the sense in which the term is used in contemporary linguistics. Types There are three main types of deictic words, as described by Charles J. Fillmore: personal, spatial, and temporal.Fillmore, Charles J (1971) ''Lectures on Deixis''. CSLI Publications (reprinted 1997). In some languages, these may ove ... [...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 La ... [...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 known as type-1 in the Chomsky hierarchy of formal languages. 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 ... [...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 refe ... [...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 i ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Word-sense Disambiguation
Word-sense disambiguation 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. 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 learning methods in which a classifier is trained for each distinct word on a corpus of manually sense-annotated examples, and completely unsupervised methods that cluster occurrences of words, thereby inducing word senses. Among these, supervised learning approaches have been the most successful algorithms to date. Accuracy of current algorithms is diffi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Co-occurrence
In linguistics, co-occurrence or cooccurrence is an above-chance frequency of ordered occurrence of two adjacent terms in a text corpus. 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 a massive correlation or mutual information. See also * Distributional hypothesis * Statistical semantics * Idiom (language structure) * Co-occurrence matrix * Co-occurrence networks * Similarity measure * Dice ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Indexicality
In semiotics, linguistics, anthropology, and philosophy of language, indexicality is the phenomenon of a ''Sign (semiotics), sign'' pointing to (or ''indexing'') some element in the context (language use), 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 Symbolic anthropology, symbolism).Charles Sanders Peirce, Peirce, C.S., "Division of Signs" in ''Collected Papers'', 1932 [1897]. 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 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
