There is broad agreement among evolutionary linguists that the emergence of human language, as opposed to other primate communication systems, is characterised by two key phenomena: the use of symbols, and the use of grammatical structure (Tomasello 2003). In this paper, we show that these two defining aspects of language actually emerge from the same set of underlying cognitive mechanisms with...

The structural theory of metaphor (STM) uses techniques from possible worlds semantics to generate and interpret metaphors. STM is presented in detail in The Logic of Metaphor: Analogous Parts of Possible Worlds (Steinhart, 2001). STM is based on Kittay’s semantic field theory of metaphor (1987) and ultimately on Black’s interactionist theory (1962, 1979). STM uses an intensional calculus to sp...

Recently a new metaphor for diagramming, the intelligent diagram has emerged. This new metaphor provides an excellent basis for diagram beautification since it automatically collects geometric constraints which capture the semantics of a diagram during diagram construction. By applying visual-language-specific layout rules which impose additional desired constraints on the diagram component pla...

Interpersonal metaphor, as one constituent of grammatical metaphor in systemic-functional grammar, is mainly represented by mood and modality. The language the movie Carnage abound with interpersonal metaphors diverse context “communication” “conflict” respectively. By summarizing application two types specific contexts “conflict”, int...

In this paper I describe how a significant class of cases that would involve (possibly complex) structural transfer in nmchine translation can be handled avoiding transfer. This is achieved by applying a semantic organization developed for monolingual text generation that is sufficiently abstract to remain invariant, within theoretically specifiable limits, across different languages. The furth...