This book develops a theory of enriched meanings for natural language interpretation that uses the concept of monads and related ideas from category theory, a branch of mathematics that has been influential in theoretical computer science and elsewhere. Certain expressions that exhibit complex effects at the semantics/pragmatics boundary live in an enriched meaning space, while others live in a more basic meaning space. These basic meanings are mapped to enriched meanings only when required compositionally, which avoids generalizing meanings to the worst case. Ash Asudeh and Gianluca Giorgolo show that the monadic theory of enriched meanings offers a formally and computationally well-defined way to tackle important challenges at the semantics/pragmatics boundary. In particular, they develop innovative monadic analyses of three phenomena - conventional implicature, substitution puzzles, and conjunction fallacies - and demonstrate that the compositional properties of monads model linguistic intuitions about these cases particularly well. The analyses are accompanied by exercises to aid understanding, and the computational tools used are available on the book's companion website. The book also contains background chapters on enriched meanings and category theory. The volume is interdisciplinary in nature, with insights from semantics, pragmatics, philosophy of language, psychology, and computer science, and will appeal to graduate students and researchers from a wide range of disciplines with an interest in natural language understanding and representation.

Does the word symbol make you shudder? Words are powerful magic, imbued with nuance, subtext, connotation, and emotions that reside deep within our collective consciousness. Words and symbols impart meanings readers respond to on a visceral level, that extend beyond the literal meaning. Discover all the ways that iconic symbols can provide thematic, foreshadowing, contextual, plot, and characterization beyond the superficial. This is a quick guide, a springboard meant for you to leap high and dive into powerful symbolic word choices. Symbols and their layered meanings act as a diving board into a deep pool of emotional, psychological, spiritual, cultural, and intellectual dynamics that you decide how to mold and manipulate. It’s just one more tool for your writing toolbox.

This book presents a comprehensive, state-of-the-art treatment of the acquisition of Indo- and Non-Indo-European languages in various contexts, such as L1, L2, L3/Ln, bi/multilingual, heritage languages, pathology as well as language impairment, and sign language acquisition. The book explores a broad mix of methodologies and issues in contemporary research. The text presents original research from several different perspectives, and provides a basis for dialogue between researchers working on diverse projects with the aim of furthering our understanding of how languages are acquired. The book proposes and refines new theoretical constructs, e.g. regarding the complexity of linguistic features as a relevant factor forming children’s, adults’ and bilingual individuals’ acquisition of morphological, syntactic, discursive, pragmatic, lexical and phonological structures. It appeals to students, researchers, and professionals in the field.

Clausal connection is one of the key building blocks of language and thus a field where a wide range of syntactic, semantic, pragmatic and cognitive phenomena meet. The availability of large databases as well as considerable advances in corpus-linguistic methods have strengthened the interest in the history of features linking clauses or larger chunks of text. The papers in this volume combine a thorough corpus-based analysis of the history of individual connectives, their co-occurrence patterns, and patterns of variation and change from both intra- and inter-systemic perspectives with a variety of methodological tools, ranging from sophisticated methods of grammatical analysis to pragmatics, text linguistics and discourse analysis. Drawing on quantitatively and qualitatively improved data, the studies reconstruct the history of a wide range of connectives in English from various new theoretical perspectives.