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Even a cursory look at conference programs and proceedings reveals
a burgeoning interest in the field of social and affective factors
in home language maintenance and development. To date, however,
research on this topic has been published in piecemeal fashion,
subsumed under the more general umbrella of 'bilingualism'. Within
bilingualism research, there has been an extensive exploration of
linguistic and psycholinguistic perspectives on the one hand, and
educational practices and outcomes on the other. In comparison,
social and affective factors - which lead people to either maintain
or shift the language - have been under-researched. This is the
first volume that brings together the different strands in research
on social and affective factors in home language maintenance and
development, ranging from the micro-level (family language policies
and practices), to the meso-level (community initiatives) and the
macro-level (mainstream educational policies and their
implementation). The volume showcases a wide distribution across
contexts and populations explored. Contributors from around the
world represent different research paradigms and perspectives,
providing a rounded overview of the state-of-the-art in this
flourishing field.
Current progress in linguistic theorizing is more and more informed
by cross-linguistic (including cross-modal) investigation.
Comparison of languages relies crucially on the concepts that can
be coded with similar effort in all languages. These concepts are
part of every language user's ontology, the network of
cross-connected conceptualizations the mind uses in coping with the
world. Assuming that language comparability is rooted in the
comparability of user ontologies, the idea of the present volume is
to further instigate progress in linguistics by looking behind the
interface with the conceptual-intentional system and asking a still
underexplored question: How are ontological structures reflected in
intra- and cross-linguistic regularities? This question defines the
research program of ontology based linguistics or ontolinguistics.
Recent advances in the theory of language have been characterized
by an emphasis on external explanatory adequacy and thus on
relating language to other phenomena. The research program
introduced in this volume adds a decisively distinct and fresh
aspect to this emerging new contextualization of the field by
bringing together insights from different areas, mainly
linguistics, but also neuroscience, philosophy, and artificial
intelligence. In providing these disciplines with a new common
task, the exploration of the impact of ontological structures on
linguistic regularities, the ontolinguistic approach promises to
develop into a vital branch of cognitive science. Documenting the
beginnings, the book aims to instigate future interdisciplinary
research in this area. It will be of interest to researchers in
linguistics, artificial intelligence, philosophy, and cognitive
science in general.
This book presents a unique approach to the semantics of verbs. It
develops and specifies a decompositional representation framework
for verbal semantics that is based on the Unified Modeling Language
(UML), the graphical lingua franca for the design and modeling of
object-oriented systems in computer science. The new framework
combines formal precision with conceptual flexibility and allows
the representation of very complicated details of verbal meaning,
using a mixture of graphical elements as well as linearized
constructs. Thereby, it offers a solution for different semantic
problems such as context-dependency and polysemy. The latter, for
instance, is demonstrated in one of the two well-elaborated
applications of the framework within this book, the investigation
of the polysemy of German setzen. Besides the formal specification
of the framework, the book comprises a cognitive interpretation of
important modeling elements, discusses general issues connected
with the framework such as dynamic and static aspects of verbal
meanings, questions of granularity, and general constraints
applying to verbal semantics. Moreover, first steps towards a
compositionalsemanticsare undertaken, and a new verb classification
based on this graphical approach is proposed. Since the framework
is graphical in nature, the book contains many annotated figures,
and the framework's modeling elements are illustrated by example
diagrams. Not only scholars working in the field of linguistics, in
particular insemantics, will find this book illuminating because of
its new graphical approach, but also researchers of cognitive
science, computational linguistics and computer science in general
will surely appreciate it.
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