formulaic sequence (fs) is a general term often used to refer to various types of recurrent clusters. one particular type of fss common in different registers is lexical bundles (lbs). this study investigated whether lbs are stored and processed as a whole in the mind of language users and whether their functional discourse type has any effect on their processing. to serve these objectives, thr...

We investigate a logical semantics which unambiguously speciies the meaning of SQL-like referential actions of the form ON DELETE CASCADE and ON DELETE RESTRICT. The semantics is given by a translation of referential actions into logical rules. The proposed semantics is less restrictive than the standard SQL semantics, yet preserves all referential integrity constraints. First, a preliminary se...

In many avian species, vocal repertoire expands and changes throughout life as new syllables are added and sounds adapted to neighbours and circumstances. Referential signals, on the other hand, demand stability and lack of variation so that their meaning can be understood by conspecifics at all times. It is not known how stable such signals may be when the context is changed entirely but the p...

This study examines the processing of metaphoric reference by bilingual speakers. English dominant, Spanish dominant, and balanced bilinguals read passages in English biasing either a figurative (e.g., describing a weak and soft fighter that always lost and everyone hated) or a literal (e.g., describing a donut and bakery shop that made delicious pastries) meaning of a critical metaphoric refer...

In his development of formal semantics for natural language Montague [1970a]– Montague [1973], Richard Montague modeled the meaning (Frege’s sense) of a term A by its Carnap intension CI(A), the function which assigns to each state a, specifying a “possibleworld”, “time” and“context of use”, the denotationden(A)(a) of A in that state. Now this is surely not right: among other things, it makes “...