We formulated, tested, and supported, in 6 studies, a theoretical model according to which individuals use nostalgia as a way to reinject meaningfulness in their lives when they experience boredom. Studies 1-3 established that induced boredom causes increases in nostalgia when participants have the opportunity to revert to their past. Studies 4 and 5 examined search for meaning as a mediator of...

The world is too complex to manage without radical functional simplification. Meaning appears to exist as the basis for such simplification. The meaning that guides functional simplification may be usefully considered as consisting of three classes. The first class consists of meanings of the determinate world. These are meanings based in motivation, emotion, and personal and social identity. F...

There are two different approaches to meaning formalization: one logical, another cognitive. The logical approach, going back to Frege and developed and explicitly applied to natural language semantics by Montague, is characterized by establishing semantics from primitive semantic structures of sentential type. This approach is most consistently represented by type logical grammars (see collect...

The Web is an information resource with unlimited potential. However, this potential is not yet fully used since it is difficult for machines to process and integrate the meaning of the information stored on the Web. Recently the Internet community has begun to explore the potential of associating web content with explicit meaning, in order to create the "Semantic Web". Rather than relying on s...

This paper addresses the form-meaning relation of multimodal communicative actions by means of a grammar that combines verbal input with hand gestures. Unlike speech, gesture signals are interpretable only through their semantic relation to the synchronous speech content. This relation serves to resolve the incomplete meaning that is revealed by gestural form alone. We demonstrate that by using...

Translation, ipso facto, is an understanding and a transferal of meaning from one language into another. Therefore, it may be fitting to conclude that a suitable semantic theory should underpin any attempt to that end. This paper advocates implementing Systemic Functional Linguistics (henceforth SFL) which subscribes to a view of language as a "meaning-potential". In fact, Halliday and Matthies...

Aspects of utterance meaning It is widely accepted within pragmatics that there is a distinction to be made between the explicit content and the implicit import of an utterance. There is much less agreement about the precise nature of this distinction, how it is to be drawn, and whether any such two-way distinction can do justice to the levels and kinds of meaning involved in utterance interpre...

A computationally relevant theory of lexical semantics must take into consideration both the form and the content of three different static knowledge sources -the lexicon, the ontological domain model and a text meaning representation language. Meanings of lexical units axe interpreted in terms of their mappings into the ontology and/or their contributions to the text meaning representation. We...

The paper introduces oscillatory networks as a model of the realization of lexical and non-lexical complex concepts in the cortex. The network has both perceptual and semantic capabilities. Three adequacy conditions, the compositionality of meaning, the compositionality of content, and the co-variation with content, are satisfied. Coherency chains and hierarchical mechanisms of binding are disc...