The Bible Translator’s Assistant (TBTA) is a natural language generator (NLG) designed specifically for field linguists doing translation work in minority languages. In particular, TBTA is intended to generate drafts of the narrative portions of the Bible as well as numerous community development articles in a very wide range of languages. TBTA uses the rich interlingua approach. The semantic r...

In this paper, I present Underspecified Minimal Recursion Semantics (UMRS), a representation language that represents structural ambiguities in terms of underspecifica-tion. It is argued that this kind of approach allows for transparent semantic representations and a straightforward syntax-semantics interface. UMRS is a semantic metalanguage, whose expressions describe expressions of an object ...

This paper investigates a methodology of using FM (FraenkelMostowski) sets, and the ideas of nominal set theory, to adjoin name generation to a semantic theory. By developing a domain theory for concurrency within FM sets the domain theory inherits types and operations for name generation, essentially without disturbing its original higherorder features. The original domain theory had a metalan...

I would like to begin by briefly reviewing the assumptions and hypotheses the NSM approach is predicated on. The goal of this exercise is to understand how these are interrelated, what hinges on every one of them, and what consequences arise from discarding an assumption or disproving a hypothesis. This process defines a number of projects which all agree up to some point and then depart. Prima...

In Anglophone public discourse, the word crisis plays a significant role in discussion of critical events and situations across wide range domains. This paper discusses word’s status as keyword mainstream unpacks its semantic contents through natural semantics metalanguage corpus-assisted collocational analysis, explores ideological cultural assumptions underpinning usage. It finds that idea “g...

This paper is a contribution to the reconstruction of Tarski’s semantic background and to the history of metalanguage and truth. Although in his 1933 monograph Tarski credits his master, Stanisław Leśniewski, with crucial negative results on the semantics of natural language, the conceptual relationship between the two logicians has never been investigated in a thorough manner. This paper shows...

The metalinguistic facilities of natural language are crucial to our ability to communicate, but the patterns behind the appearance of metalanguage—and thus the clues for how we may instruct computers to detect it—have remained relatively unknown. This paper describes the first results on the feasibility of automatically identifying metalanguage in English text. A core metalinguistic vocabulary...

In their criticisms of traditional theories politeness, Watts et al. (2005 [1992]) and Eelen (2001) call for first-order approaches to (im)politeness. While ‘discursive approach’ has faced its own criticisms, one useful strand which emerged from this research is a focus on how (im)politeness evaluated discussed. However, compared other (im)politeness, such language received little attention. St...

Following Adam Smith’s line of argument, we examine the semantics four economic principles in Chapter III Wealth Nations that compose his famous proposition “that division labour is limited by extent market.” We apply Natural Semantic Metalanguage framework linguistics to produce a series explications are clear and plain, cross-translatable into any language, intelligible twenty-first-century r...