Although the hallmark deficit in Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is an impairment in episodic memory, language abilities are also impaired very early in the disease course (for a review, see Caramelli, Mansur, & Nitrini, 1998). Declines in semantic processing are well-documented, but less explored are the lexical abilities of AD individuals. However, there exists one study suggesting, on the basis of ...

This paper proposes a model for describing lexical semantics within systemic-functional theory. Formal approaches to lexical semantics assume that words have meanings which exist independently from communication and are represented by means of (semi-) formal definitions. Functional approaches treat language as a tool for social interaction and, in the case of lexical semantics, assume that lexi...

In particular, we argue that what have been claimed to be rules of lexical sense extension operating on lexical items are instead to be accounted for by a process of reference transfer by which the referents of lexical items (and phrases) can be used to refer to related things, as governed by pragmatic rules of conversation and contextual knowledge. By contextual knowledge we include that infor...

This paper reports a pilot study related to public apologies in India, with reference to certain keywords found in them. The study is of importance as the choice of lexical items holds importance which goes beyond the surface meaning of the words. The analysis of the lexical items has been done using interlinked digital lexical resources which, in future, can lend this study to computational ta...

Most existing corpus-based approaches to semantic representation suffer from inaccurate modeling of domain-specific lexical items which either have low frequencies or are non-existent in open-domain corpora. We put forward a technique that improves word embeddings in specific domains by first transforming a given lexical item to a sorted list of representative words and then modeling the item b...

During early language acquisition, infants must learn both a lexicon and a model of phonetics that explains how lexical items can vary in pronunciation—for instance “the” might be realized as [Di] or [D@]. Previous models of acquisition have generally tackled these problems in isolation, yet behavioral evidence suggests infants acquire lexical and phonetic knowledge simultaneously. We present a...

The lexical component of a human language is typically heterogeneous and extremely complex. Before we can come to grips with the underlying lexical organization, we must reduce the bewildering complexity. Methods must be elaborated by which the interrelations between the units of the lexicon can be elucidated. This paper describes how a Swedish lexical material stored in a computer has been sem...