Related papers: Is there an aesthetic component of language?
Over the last million years, human language has emerged and evolved as a fundamental instrument of social communication and semiotic representation. People use language in part to convey emotional information, leading to the central and…
Some aspects of the physical nature of language are discussed. In particular, physical models of language must exist that are efficiently implementable. The existence requirement is essential because without physical models no communication…
In order to design strong paradigms for isolating lexical access and semantics, we need to know what a word is. Surprisingly few linguists and philosophers have a clear model of what a word is, even though words impact basically every…
We construct a formal theory, which we call reflectica, whose language possesses the following properties of natural language: it is a self-reflecting language and an intensional language. By a self-reflecting language we understand an…
We use language to communicate our thoughts. But is language merely the expression of thoughts, which are themselves produced by other, nonlinguistic parts of our minds? Or does language play a more transformative role in human cognition,…
Traditional linguistic theories have largely regard language as a formal system composed of rigid rules. However, their failures in processing real language, the recent successes in statistical natural language processing, and the findings…
It is well recognized that sensory perceptions and language have interconnections through numerous studies in psychology, neuroscience, and sensorial linguistics. Set in this rich context we ask whether the use of sensorial language in…
Human languages employ constructions that tacitly assume specific properties of the limited range of phenomena they evolved to describe. These assumed properties are true features of that limited context, but may not be general or precise…
Selection through iterated learning explains no more than other non-functional accounts, such as universal grammar, why language is so well-designed for communicative efficiency. It does not predict several distinctive features of language…
Studying the ways in which language is gendered has long been an area of interest in sociolinguistics. Studies have explored, for example, the speech of male and female characters in film and the language used to describe male and female…
Research on metaphorical language has shown ties between abstractness and emotionality with regard to metaphoricity; prior work is however limited to the word and sentence levels, and up to date there is no empirical study establishing the…
The origin and meaning of facial beauty represent a longstanding puzzle. Despite the profuse literature devoted to facial attractiveness, its very nature, its determinants and the nature of inter-person differences remain controversial…
Given a specific discourse, which discourse properties trigger the use of metaphorical language, rather than using literal alternatives? For example, what drives people to say "grasp the meaning" rather than "understand the meaning" within…
We analyse the expressiveness of the two-valued semantics of abstract argumentation frameworks, normal logic programs and abstract dialectical frameworks. By expressiveness we mean the ability to encode a desired set of two-valued…
Speech is the fundamental mode of human communication, and its synthesis has long been a core priority in human-computer interaction research. In recent years, machines have managed to master the art of generating speech that is…
A sharp tension exists about the nature of human language between two opposite parties: those who believe that statistical surface distributions, in particular using measures like surprisal, provide a better understanding of language…
A large body of research on gender-linked language has established foundations regarding cross-gender differences in lexical, emotional, and topical preferences, along with their sociological underpinnings. We compile a novel, large and…
Compositionality is a widely discussed property of natural languages, although its exact definition has been elusive. We focus on the proposal that compositionality can be assessed by measuring meaning-form correlation. We analyze…
Linguistic variables represent crisp information in a form and precision appropriate for the problem. For example, to answer the question "How are you?" one may say "I am fine." the linguistic variables like "fine", so common in everyday…
Language expression is known to be dependent on attributes intrinsic to the author. To date, however, little attention has been devoted to the effect of interfaces used to articulate language on its expression. Here we study a large corpus…