Language policies and terminology policies complement and influence each other. This is especially the case in Canada where bilingual, multilingual and indigenous language policies have shaped the ...linguistic landscape. To deal with the economic and cultural hegemony of the English language, Canadian policy-makers have opted mainly for legislative and legal measures to protect and promote minority languages, especially the French language.This chapter looks at key policies formulated by federal, provincial and territorial governments to examine how Canadian language policies have influenced terminology policies and used terminology management as an implementation tool. The overview and outcomes of Canadian language policies are cast against historical and present-day backgrounds.
C. S. Peirce illustrates the distinction between types and their tokens by using words as an
example. The length of a manuscript is measured by counting word tokens, but a person's
vocabulary can be ...measured by counting word types. According to Peirce, a word type is not an
existing object but a "“significant form"” of a token; thus he seems to make a distinction
between the orthographic or phonological character of a word and its individual occurrences
(inscriptions or utterances). However, there is more to words than their character and their
individual occurrences. This paper examines different interpretations of the concept of type,
distinguishes four different ways of individuating names and other words, and discusses the
relevance of the ontology of words to questions about the sense and reference of names.
Rigidity and Essentiality Gómez-Torrente, Mario
Mind,
04/2006, Volume:
115, Issue:
458
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Is there a theoretically interesting notion that is a natural extension of the concept of rigidity to general terms? Such a notion ought to satisfy two Kripkean conditions. First, it must apply to ...typical general terms for natural kinds, stuffs, and phenomena, and fail to apply to most other general terms. Second, true ‘identification sentences’ (such as ‘Cats are animals’) containing general terms that the notion applies to must be necessary. I explore a natural extension of the notion of rigidity to general terms, the notion of an essentialist predicate. I argue that, under natural assumptions, this notion satisfies the two Kripkean conditions.
Tests of famous faces are used to study language and memory. Yet, the effect of stimulus properties on performance has not been fully investigated. To identify factors influencing proper name ...retrieval and to probe stimulus-specific parameters within proper name lexicon, we analysed the results obtained by 300 healthy participants on a test of famous faces that includes 74 personalities. A factor analysis yielded five main factors that were characterized by language (national or foreign names), epoch of peak popularity (current, recent or past) and occupation (politicians, entertainment and sports) of the personalities. Multiple regression analysis showed that participants’ education, age and gender accounted for 10–32% of the variance in factor scores. These results indicate that there are variables of the stimulus and participants’ that must be taken into account in proper name testing and in designing tests aimed to differentiate age-associated difficulties from cognitive decline.
Scott Soames has argued that Rigidifìed Descriptivism wrongly predicts that one cannot believe, say, that Joe Strummer was born in 1952 without having a belief about the actual world. Soames suggests ...that agents in other possible worlds may have this belief, but may lack any beliefs about the actual world, a world that they do not occupy and have no contact with. I respond that this argument extends to other popular actuality-involving analyses. In order for Soames to hold on to his argument against Rigidified Descriptivism, he must provide alternatives to these analyses. I argue that there is reason to think that these alternatives are not forthcoming, so Soames should surrender his argument against Rigidified Descriptivism.
In this essay, the return of character as a literary-critical concept is explored for what it tells us about the intricate relations between the one and the multiple in the long modern period. The ...contemporary resurgence of character studies stops short at the dawn of the twentieth century; and for good reason. It is with the modern novel that literary character begins to undergo, and rapidly develops, its most radical encounter with multiplicity—to the extent that its achieved unity gives way. At the same time, the emergence of commercial cinema, which typically regressed to a very primitive model of character in its narrative logic, stimulated these literary experiments with characterological erosion from within. However, the subsequent trend of novels being written for the screen, and of films beginning to do their own multiple-thinking, suggests a curious double chiasmus, whose logic might provide a key to the thinking of subjective constitution in the late modern period.
Selective impairment of word categories such as nouns vs verbs has suggested a regional representation of lexical knowledge in the human brain. The time course of visual word processing was ...investigated using event-related potentials (ERPs) in normal adults. Subjects performed a word classification task with five categories of stimuli: animal names, verbs, numerals, proper names and meaningless consonant strings. A bilateral posterior ERP difference between words and consonants first appeared 192 ms following stimulus onset, probably reflecting the construction of the visual word form. Category-specific ERP differences began to appear around 260 ms. There was a left temporo-parietal negativity for animal names and verbs, a left inferior temporal negativity for proper names, and a bilateral positivity for numerals. These results provide a bilateral parietal positivity evidence for timing and coarse localization of category-specific word processing in the normal human brain.
Reference and Response deRosset, Louis
Australasian journal of philosophy,
03/2011, Volume:
89, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
A standard view of reference holds that a speaker's use of a name refers to a certain thing in virtue of the speaker's associating a condition with that use that singles the referent out. This view ...has been criticized by Saul Kripke as empirically inadequate. Recently, however, it has been argued that a version of the standard view, a response-based theory of reference, survives the charge of empirical inadequacy by allowing that associated conditions may be largely or even entirely implicit. This paper argues that response-based theories of reference are prey to a variant of the empirical inadequacy objection, because they are ill-suited to accommodate the successful use of proper names by pre-school children. Further, I argue that there is reason to believe that normal adults are, by and large, no different from children with respect to how the referents of their names are determined. I conclude that speakers typically refer positionally: the referent of a use of a proper name is typically determined by aspects of the speaker's position, rather than by associated conditions present, however implicitly, in her psychology.
