Language Maps

When a language is studied systematically,then meaning becomes crucial.As human beingsstart acquiring a language they naturally learn the meanings but as flexibility with language grows more complex meanings emerge.Students learn language by replicating the sounds for speech andsymbols for written. Ultimately,meaning has to be associated to the sounds and images.Thus,language acquisition is directly proportional to the study of Semantics.The area of Semantics is thus, concerned with various types of meaning that exists within a language providing insight into how a person is acquainted with the ability and understanding of the language.Key words

Springer eBooks, 2019

Maps are attempts to communicate, but is mapping a language? Like verbal texts, maps carry several kinds of messages at the same time. Many map symbols represent facts about specific places. At the same time, their positions on the map can reveal distances, directions, patterns, feature associations, and other spatial relationships. Unfortunately, human brains seldom remember shapes and sizes accurately. A workshop "game" helps us understand whythe human visual system processes incoming images through multiple, parallel pathways, only some of which typically lead to conscious awareness. Decades of research by cartographers have given us a

Artificial Intelligence, 2005

How does language relate to the non-linguistic world? If an agent is able to communicate linguistically and is also able to directly perceive and/or act on the world, how do perception, action, and language interact with and influence each other? Such questions are surely amongst the most important in Cognitive Science and Artificial Intelligence (AI). Language, after all, is a central aspect of the human mind-indeed it may be what distinguishes us from other species.

1983

Cognitive impairments in aphasia : new results and new problems 30 Florian Coulmas Underdeterminacy and plausibility in word-formation 46 Maxwell J. Cresswell A highly impossible scene. The semantics of visual contradictions

2021

Maps are rich with potential for meaning. Their geographic contents are what enable simple acts of wayfinding, say from the grocery store to the gas station. But they can also reinforce the tectonic outlines of global ideologies, like the dominance of First World nations over the Third World.1 The many meanings of a map can be visualized as a loosely organized sequence of concentric spheres. At the center is the most strict, conventional interpretation of a map as a representation of objects and features distributed in space. The spheres of meaning radiate out from that core in degrees of social dependence and political significance.2

ABSTRACT This study has examined the problematic issue of relationship between language and meaning. It is a problem that has always been a controversial issue; moreover, it is constantly present in philosophical, linguistic and social thought because of it has a close relationship with human understanding and it is supposed to lead to the effective interaction. Although this issue has received many studies presented by intellectuals, humanitarians, grammarians and linguists, it remains an important challenge that requires additional efforts to illuminate and clarify its different aspects. The researcher discussed the most important linguistic and philosophical attempts made by philosophers, scholars and well-known linguists to propose a solution to the problem under discussion, referring to their efforts which might include a mixture of positive elements and weaknesses. As a result, the researcher concluded that language is, in itself, a tool of misunderstanding as much as an instrument of understanding. The study included theoretical and applied aspects in English and Arabic. It has been rounded off with a number of conclusions and recommendations. Key Words: (language, meaning, significance, grammar, linguistics, understanding, misunderstanding, misreading)

About the meanings of words and letters, as well as about combinations of different meanings, 2021

The title of this essay seems somewhat unusual and vague, but I think that I will explain it in the course of my presentation, and thus everything will fall into place. In fact, this work is devoted to the analysis of the concept of "meaning", which I subject to a serious revision, offering for it a number of new interpretations and practical applications. I'll start with the reasons that prompted me to take this somewhat risky and far-reaching step.

Theo Janssen, Gisela Redeker (Eds.) Cognitive Linguistics: …

What is meaning, what is it for a sign to be meaningful, how can meaning best be analyzed, and in what sense is linguistic meaning proper or unique to language? Cognitive linguistics offers answers to these questions that challenge two traditional dogmas of linguistic theory, philosophy of language and cognitive science. However, although they have notionally abandoned both these dogmas, many cognitive linguists retain an ambiguous loyalty to some of their underlying presuppositions. I hope to convince them of the necessity to review their deep theoretical commitments, in order to rebut, once and for all, the charge that cognitive semantics entails a Subjectivist theory of meaning. 1 The two dogmas are: (1) the Dogma of the Autonomy of linguistic meaning; and (2) the Dogma of the Compositionality of linguistic meaning. Both these dogmas are variants of a more general, fatal misconception of the nature of linguistic meaning, namely that "Meanings are Objects": a misconception of the nature of meaning that I shall call, following Zlatev (1997), Reificatory Semantics. Obviously, no-one would seriously propose that meanings are the kind of physical objects that you can put in your handbag or hide under your bed-which is why the first dogma consists of variants on the theme that meanings are "mental" (or ideal) rather than "material" objects. Yet these supposedly ideal or mental objects retain, somehow, many properties of the impenetrable, massy objects of the thing-world-particularly their decomposability into smaller units or atoms, a notion consecrated by the second dogma. The Two Dogmas of Reificatory Semantics can be spelled out as follows: The Dogma of the Autonomy of Linguistic Meaning. Meanings are immaterial Objects. The sphere of linguistic meaning is autonomous from the material world, existing in the realm of "mental objects" (mental representations), or in the realm of Durkheimian "social facts", or in the realm of ideal, Platonic and Fregean "senses". The Dogma of the Compositionality of Linguistic Meaning. Meanings are decomposable into (immaterial) atomic Objects, actual legal combinations of which are the meanings of expression-items, which in turn can be combined with each other in certain ways to yield semantically valid (meaningful) expressions. The atoms themselves remain unchanged throughout their various combinations. Both of these dogmas depend upon the acceptance of a certain view of, or metaphor about, linguistic communication, which is in essence Reddy's (1978) Conduit Metaphor for communication. The conduit metaphor sees language as a conduit or vehicle for the transportation of meanings from the inside of one person's head to the inside of another person's head: for this reason it has also been called the "telementation theory" of communication (Harris, 1988). The version of the metaphor which I want to focus on as particularly relevant to the Two Dogmas of Reificatory Semantics can be called the "container-contents" metaphor of meaning and expression, where meanings are contents and expressions are containers. It can be pictured as if linguistic expressions are collections of pouches of marbles, the marbles being the atoms of meaning, and the pouches being the expression items containing the meaning-atoms. Semantics is then the theory of which marbles can legally be put in the same pouches, and which pouches can be gathered together; and syntax the theory of how the pouches are organised into ordered collections. (If you like, you can substitute handbags for pouches). It is rarely remarked, even by cognitive linguists who might be expected to notice it, that the container-contents metaphor of meaning and expression is almost built into the terminology of traditional linguistic theory, with its talk of semantic content, meaning-components, and selection restrictions. 2. "Ideas", other minds and the problem of representation The provenance of the theory that meanings are mental objects or contents, and expressions are their containers, is of great antiquity-perhaps because the conduit-container metaphor of communication and language is so all-pervasive in ordinary discourse. The philosophical formulation of the theory is given by Aristotle: "Spoken words are the signs of affections of the soul, and written words are the signs of spoken words." Aristotle was a universalist who believed in what was later to be called the "psychic unity" of mankind; he was also a realist. He continued: "Just as all men have not the same writing, so all men have not the same speech sounds, but the affections of the soul which these signify are the same for all [universalism], as also are those things of which our experiences are images [realism]." 2 Note then, that for Aristotle, as Harris and Taylor (1989: 33) point out, "Words ... are signs or symbols of the 'affections of the soul' (i.e. what is stored in the mind); whereas the 'affections of the soul' are not signs or symbols of things in the real world, but copies of them (although natural copies and therefore identical for the whole human race)." Ferdinand de Saussure (1915, [1966]) conveyed exactly this idea with his celebrated drawing of a tree. There (in the world) is a tree, here (in my head) is an imagistic "idea" of a tree, I happen to label it tree, Saussure happens to label it arbre, et voilà, signs are arbitrary, but concepts are not. The same theory of meaning is expressed in slightly different terms by John Locke: "That then which Words are the Marks of, are the Ideas of the Speaker: Nor can anyone apply them, as Marks, immediately to anything else, but the Ideas, that he himself hath." 3 Again, Saussure repeats, in almost as many words, Locke's formulation: "The linguistic sign unites, not a thing and a name, but a concept and a sound-image." (Saussure, 1966: 66). Note, now, that Locke's formulation immediately raises a problem, the problem sometimes referred to as Hume's problem, or the problem of Other Minds. If words stand for, or express, "ideas", how can I (as speaker) be, in fact, sure that you (as hearer), actually share the same "ideas" of things as I do? Aristotle's solution was "category realism": our ideas (categories of the mind) are reflections of objective reality. We all live in the same (objective) world, and have the same experiences of that world, and this means that our concepts (images) of the things that cause these experiences (affections of the soul) are also the same. The problem with the Aristotelian story is that, as Saussure fully recognised and illustrated with a different example, Eng. sheep vs. Fr. mouton, not only do we not all have the same speech-sounds, but "equivalent" speech sounds sometimes map to different configurations of "affections of the soul". In this case, as is well known, the French (but not the English) term maps to the meat, as well as the animal from which the meat is butchered. Aristotle's elegant story is undermined, or at least problematized, by even the most seemingly banal linguistic relativity. At this point there seem to be three available theoretical options. The first is to accept the relativity, and locate meaning not in image and concept, but in the semantic values constituted by the system of langue. This is, in essence, structuralism's solution. Since, however, structuralism never explicitly disavowed its other, ideationist, commitment, to meaning as mental object, its price is incoherence and contradiction. Given the structuralist definition of language as consisting of a system of relationships between meanings and sounds, structuralism's problem was: what are meanings? Its answer was twofold: meanings are, on the one hand, imagistic conceptual content mapped onto the oppositions constituting the system of expression (meanings are thus individual, mental and prior to langue); and meanings are, on the other hand, nothing more than a "potential" inherent in the systemic (paradigmatic and syntagmatic) oppositions which are defined in terms of expression itself (meanings are thus social and defined by langue). The first answer is the one Saussure gives in his illustration of the signifier-signified relation, in which the signifier (French arbre, English tree) is arbitrarily attached to the signified concept. The second answer is the one he gives in the passage where he discusses the non-identity of the or semantic values of the English lexeme sheep and the French lexeme mouton. The two structuralist answers to the question "What is meaning?" are two different variants of the Dogma of Autonomy. In the first variant, meanings are "mental objects" defined over individual psychology; in the second variant, meanings are "social objects" defined over "langue". Structuralism, as a general theoretical enterprise in the human sciences, not just a specific linguistic theory, was unable to produce a coherent account of the relationship between the individual psychological explanatory level, and the socio-cultural explanatory level, precisely because its original theory of meaning was contradictory, simultaneously embracing two different versions (one individual-mentalist, one socialcollectivist) of the self-same Dogma of Autonomy. The contradiction was only ultimately resolved by excluding altogether reference both to conceptualization, and to languageindependent reality (this was the post-structuralist terminus of structuralism). The second option is to develop, as does formal semantics, a rigorously formal view of the meanings of terms as determined by truth conditions on their application, excluding conceptualization from consideration. The apparent clarity this buys comes, however, at the price of divorcing meaning both from experiential and ecological reality, and from "messy" natural language; substituting for the former uninterpreted "states of affairs", and for the latter a fleshless skeleton of univocal terms and formal syntax. As Lakoff (1987) showed, most of natural language...

This paper examines meaning in language. It is therefore a study in semantics. Semantics is the study of meaning in terms of the linguistics. Semantics begins from the stopping point of syntax and ends from where pragmatics begins. A separate discipline in the study of language, semantics has existed for decades. The term semantics was first used by Breal in 1987 and it does not suggest that there had never been speculations about the nature of meaning (Ogbulogo (2005). Words, phrases and sentences are used to convey messages in natural languages. Semantics is the study of meaning systems in language. If meaning is a system, then language is systematic in nature. In this paper, we investigate the nature of meaning to locate the significance of semantics in contemporary linguistics. Frege, cited in Sandt (1988:1) rightly notes that “... [If ] anything is asserted there is always an obvious presupposition that the simple or compound proper names used have reference.” Hinging on different submissions in the literature, we conclude that meaning is: socio-cultural, dynamic, grammar-driven, conventional, representative (referential), individualistic (non-conventional) and is not exhaustive.