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James Raymond Hurford, FBA (born 16 July 1941) is a retired linguist and academic. [1]He was the General Editor of the book series Oxford Studies in the Evolution of Language, [2] as well as a member of the Centre for Language Evolution (formerly Language Evolution and Computation) research group at the University of Edinburgh where he is an emeritus professor.
In formal semantics, a Hurford disjunction is a disjunction in which one of the disjuncts entails the other. The concept was first identified by British linguist James Hurford. [1] The sentence "Mary is in the Netherlands or she is in Amsterdam" is an example of a Hurford disjunction since one cannot be in Amsterdam without being in the ...
In semantics, pragmatics, and philosophy of language, a question under discussion (QUD) is a question which the interlocutors in a discourse are attempting to answer. In many formal and computational theories of discourse, the QUD (or an ordered set of QUD's) is among the elements of a tuple called the conversational scoreboard which represents the current state of the conversation.
Semantics studies the rule systems that determine expressions' meanings. Within generative grammar, semantics is a species of formal semantics , providing compositional models of how the denotations of sentences are computed on the basis of the meanings of the individual morphemes and their syntactic structure.
The principle of compositionality (also known as semantic compositionalism) is highly debated in linguistics. Among its most challenging problems there are the issues of contextuality , the non-compositionality of idiomatic expressions , and the non-compositionality of quotations .
Figure 1 - containment image schema. An image schema (both schemas and schemata are used as plural forms) is a recurring structure within our cognitive processes which establishes patterns of understanding and reasoning.
Before the 1950s, there was no discussion of a syntax–semantics interface in American linguistics, since neither syntax nor semantics was an active area of research. [17] This neglect was due in part to the influence of logical positivism and behaviorism in psychology, that viewed hypotheses about linguistic meaning as untestable.
In the philosophy of language and metaphysics, metasemantics is the study of the foundations of natural language semantics (the philosophical study of meaning). [1] [2] [3] Metasemantics searches for "the proper understanding of compositionality, the object of truth-conditional analysis, metaphysics of reference, as well as, and most importantly, the scope of semantic theory itself" [4] and ...