Over the past 15 years, both linguists and psycholinguists have shown a growing interest in the idea that syntactic structures can carry meanings that are independent of the meanings of specific words. This article considers how this idea relates to traditional notions of compositionality in generative grammar, and examines two modern theories that, although based on different starting assumpti...

Among other things, humans talk about what they perceive and do, like "glowing,""hopping," and "squeaking." What is the relationship between our sensory-motor experiences and word meanings? Does understanding action-verbs rely on the same neural circuits as seeing and acting? The available evidence indicates that sensory-motor experience and word meanings are represented in distinct, but intera...

A range of social forces contributed to the effective recruitment of women to cigarette smoking in the crucial period between 1900 and 1940. Cigarette advertisers and public relations experts recognized the significance of women's changing roles and the rising culture of consumption, and worked to create specific meanings for the cigarette to make it appeal to women. The cigarette was a flexibl...

This paper argues for a focus on the social meaning of variation, based in a study of stylistic practice. It is common in the study of variation to interpret variables as reflections of speakers’ membership in social categories. Others have argued more recently that variables are associated not with the categories themselves, but with stances and characteristics that constitute those categories...

Communicating in a second language could be seen as a process requiring the deconstruction and reconstruction of cultural meanings. If this is the case, how do second language (L2) learners express cultural meanings of their first language (L1) expressions that do not have semantically equivalent L2 expressions? Twentynine Japanese students learning English as a second language in the US were a...

Is it possible to analyze building materials’ culturally specific meanings? How can understanding such meanings be useful in the integration of sustainable practices local communities? Our research explores this question with objective informing future pathways transition a carbon-neutral built environment including locally sourced materials. Relying on environmental behavior studies and using ...

We deal with a wide range of colors in our daily life. They are such ubiquitous phenomena that is hard and next to impossible to imagine even a single entity (be it an object, place, living creature, etc) devoid of them. They are like death and tax which nobody can dispense with. This omnipresence of colors around us has also made its way through abstract and less tangible entities via the inte...

A bird’s-eye-view of the approach offered by the computational physics to the solution of the problems of physics is given with emphasis on the key issue of reliability. Some meanings of the reliability are illustrated by specific examples.

The availability of data spanning different epochs has inspired a new analysis of cultural, social, and linguistic phenomena from a temporal perspective. This paper describes the application of Temporal Random Indexing (TRI) to the news context. TRI is able to build geometrical spaces of word meanings that consider several periods of time. Hence, TRI enables the analysis of the evolution in tim...