Scalar implicatures are inferences that arise when a weak expression is used instead of a stronger alternative. For example, when a speaker says, ‘‘Some of the children are in the classroom,’’ she often implies that not all of them are. Recent processing studies of scalar implicatures have argued that generating an implicature carries a cost. In this study we investigated this cost using a sent...

The meaning of symbol is open, based on which the learner can gradually establish his or her own symbol library and develop the capability of meaning construction. Relying on "linguistic symbol" and "non-linguistic symbol" -based symbol literacy improvement, medium literacy and cultural literacy education and training, multiple intelligence education, course ontology research, etc., we can impr...

This paper argues that the nature of IS research that deals with indigenous culture must be informed as much by context as it is by culture models, which has been the focus of such research in the past. This is considered important because it better reflects the meaning of the data collected for the researcher. To appreciate the importance of context this papers also argues that research subjec...

the body-part term dast ‘hand’ is investigated in this article as used in the first part of 160 farsi compound nouns. the questions are: how is the semantic change pattern of hand used in persian compound nouns? also how the collective mind and social/ cultural memory of persian linguistic society can be accounted for and compared with chinese and english? the aim is investigation of semantic c...

In China, the word, xin 心 (often translated as ‘heart’) is frequently used and its concept is central to Chinese culture. However, its meaning is not exactly the same as ‘heart’ in English. Using qigong as the context, this article aims to explore the meaning of xin as a cultural keyword in order to gain an indepth understanding of Chinese culture and knowledge within that cultural system. Qigo...