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A consolidated approach to the study of the mental representation of word meanings has consisted in contrasting different domains of knowledge, broadly reflecting the abstract-concrete dichotomy. More fine-grained semantic distinctions have emerged in neuropsychological and cognitive neuroscience work, reflecting semantic category specificity, but almost exclusively within the concrete domain. Theoretical advances, particularly within the area of embodied cognition, have more recently put forward the idea that distributed neural representations tied to the kinds of experience maintained with the concepts' referents might distinguish conceptual meanings with a high degree of specificity, including those within the abstract domain. Here we report the results of two psycholinguistic rating studies incorporating such theoretical advances with two main objectives: first, to provide empirical evidence of fine-grained distinctions within both the abstract and the concrete semantic domains with respect to relevant psycholinguistic dimensions; second, to develop a carefully controlled linguistic stimulus set that may be used for auditory as well as visual neuroimaging studies focusing on the parametrization of the semantic space beyond the abstract-concrete dichotomy. Ninety-six participants rated a set of 210 sentences across pre-selected concrete (mouth, hand, or leg action-related) and abstract (mental state-, emotion-, mathematics-related) categories, with respect either to different semantic domain-related scales (rating study 1), or to concreteness, familiarity, and context availability (rating study 2). Inferential statistics and correspondence analyses highlighted distinguishing semantic and psycholinguistic traits for each of the pre-selected categories, indicating that a simple abstract-concrete dichotomy is not sufficient to account for the entire semantic variability within either domains. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mojeño Trinitario shows a split-intransitivity system combined with a differential marking pattern for third-person A/S. The pronominal system of the A/S paradigm is quite complex. There are five markers for third person, specified for humanness, number, gender, and speaker's gender. Interestingly, these markers compete with another marker for third person, the prefix ty-, which is semantically unspecified. The most important factor in the distribution of the two alternatives for third-person A/S marking is transitivity. The transitivity of a construction cannot be determined just by the valence of the root (the number of participants) but depends also on other parameters such as the semantic characteristics of the participants and the discourse function of the utterance. As a consequence, transitivity must be seen as a continuum rather than a dichotomy. Since most roots are ambitransitive, transitivity is a category of the utterance level rather than the lexical level. This fluid transitivity is an essential characteristic of Mojeño Trinitario. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: While the semantic approaches differ on whether there is a negative operator (¬: ) or a non-negative inequality operator (>: ) in the comparative, various issues remain unresolved surrounding the “negativity” of comparatives. This paper proposes a novel dichotomy of comparatives between ‘rhetorical’ comparatives (RCs) and regular ‘degree’ comparatives (DCs), and shows that only RCs convey “negativity” in a way parallel to negativity in rhetorical questions; while regular DCs merely establish an ordering between two objects. The variation concerning negativity in turn squares neatly with the presupposition toward the content of the standard (negative presupposition in RCs and no presupposition in DCs). In exploring the semanticopragmatic properties of RCs, it is shown that rhetorical effects can be triggered by negative polarity items, expletive negation, and the subjunctive mood. This result supports an important insight that negative polarity items and the subjunctive are of similar nature (), and goes one step further to suggest another important link between expletive negation and the subjunctive mood. This analysis implicates that the three components are closely connected under the principle of non-veridicality. The notion of RCs in the sense that we suggest here can give us a plausible foundation for the analysis of rhetorical effects in other environments, for instance, rhetorical questions. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The article provides information on the dichotomy issue cited in moral philosophy. It notes that several moral philosophers have debated over the ethical and central issues of the words "good" and "right" and notes the relativity of the two terminologies in an ethical way. It highlights the varieties of goodness and rightness. Moreover, the semantic analysis of the two words is also discussed.

This article argues that Puerto Ricans talk about race in a shifting linguistic pattern defined here as "slippery semantics." Such usage is highly dependent on context and defies the often sharp dichotomization made between binary forms of classification associated with the US and more ambiguous forms or racial terminology associated with Latin America. The author argues that both forms can co-exist and proposes an incipient typology of contexts that considers when binary or multiple terminologies are deployed and the social implications of such usages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]