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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 ...
A more restrictive and technical definition requires that homonyms be simultaneously homographs and homophones [1] —that is, they have identical spelling and pronunciation but different meanings. Examples include the pair stalk (part of a plant) and stalk (follow/harass a person) and the pair left ( past tense of leave ) and left (opposite of ...
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. [33]
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.
Linguist James R. Hurford notes that in many English dialects "there are colloquial equivalents of Yes and No made with nasal sounds interrupted by a voiceless, breathy h-like interval (for Yes) or by a glottal stop (for No)" and that these interjections are transcribed into writing as uh-huh or mm-hmm. [22]
In semantics, a donkey sentence is a sentence containing a pronoun which is semantically bound but syntactically free. They are a classic puzzle in formal semantics and philosophy of language because they are fully grammatical and yet defy straightforward attempts to generate their formal language equivalents.
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.