language-and-linguistics

Modern communication theory is built on a foundational category mistake: it treats symbolism—a meaning bearing medium—as if it were a syntactic object to be parsed. This paper argues that the entire communication industry, from Shannon theory to contemporary semantic AI research, inherited an ontological confusion that collapses meaning into signal structure. By assuming that meaning can be encod…

Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, Published online: 07 May 2026; doi:10.1057/s41599-026-07138-7 An interdisciplinary perspective on the definition of evaluative meaning: what can linguistics learn from psychology and philosophy?

Abstract This article investigates politeness strategies in eight ninth-century Arabic private letters of request from the Fayyoum, in Egypt. The large corpus of Arabic letters written on papyrus that is preserved and edited so far, forms a rich resource for those interested in pragmatics. While historical Greek and Latin ( Dickey 2010 , 2012 , 2016b ), English ( Kohnen 2008 ; Ridealgh and Jucker…

Parents say the insistence on Mandarin in schools is eroding the country’s language and culture right from early childhood Weeks after a Tibetan-speaking five-year-old started preschool, she had “completely stopped speaking Tibetan”, according to her mother. Nine months later, although the child could still understand Tibetan, she only answered in Mandarin, and at best a few single-word answers i…

Currently, when public opinion is measured, expressed and disputed through social media, political discourse that leaves diplomatic rhetoric aside is gaining ground, while, at the same time, algorithmic preferences favour messages of explicit violence. A public space without symbolic mediation, without the constraints of language, is rapidly crystallising, leaving no room for analysis of how this…

Language is integral to human doing, being, becoming and belonging, and its acquisition is naturally distributed in and across activity spaces over time. Different learning experiences form 'a dialectical unity', where one brings the others into existence, and the capacities fostered in one inform and transform those in the others. Thus, connected learning across time and space is fundamental to …

This paper investigates the structure and classification of terminological systems in visual dictionaries from a modern lexicographic perspective. The aim is to identify the principles governing term organization and classification in multimodal lexicographic resources. The study applies descriptive, structural, comparative, and modeling methods. The results indicate that visual dictionaries oper…

This paper examines two highly frequent English expressions that participate differently in understanding formation: if and maybe. Existing studies often treat if as a conditional connective and maybe as a marker of uncertainty or modality. However, such analyses largely remain at the level of semantic content or pragmatic function, and less frequently address how these expressions influence the …

Thia Paper establishes Adagana as a structured language system built on sound-based encoding rather than symbolic communication. It presents language as a functional tool for generating and directing processes through controlled phonemic construction. This work defines the core architecture of Adagana, including phonemic behavior, vowel-field mapping, structural formation (Root - Force - Modifier…

This Element explores multilingual university spaces and decoloniality, critically examining how coloniality and neoliberalism intersect. While neoliberal language policies aim to equip students with English as a 'lingua academia', critical issues relating to students' translingual identities and belonging are often overlooked. Empirical data are shared from a linguistic landscape study involving…

Old English had a few letters not used in modern English. The letter wynn ƿ, derived from the Futhark letter wunjo ᚹ via Anglo-Frisian Futhorc, represented the /w/ sound in Old English. The glyph ...

_Linguistics and Philosophy_ 45 (6):1395-1445. 2022Subjective predicates have two interpretive and distributional characteristics that have resisted a comprehensive analysis. First, the use of a subjective predicate to describe an object is in general felicitous only when the speaker has a particular kind of familiarity with relevant features of the object; characterizing an object as _tasty,_ fo…

This paper examines three English expressions associated with wish and non-current states—if only, I wish, and the noun wish—and suggests that their differences should not be understood merely in terms of semantic content or emotional intensity, but rather in terms of how wishes are formed in understanding through different structural modes. In existing analyses, these expressions are often group…

This study presents a comprehensive philological, onomastic, and historical-linguistic analysis of the personal names Daniel, Danilo, and Daniela within the framework of a model of stratified onomastic transmission. The research traces the origin of these names from their Biblical Hebrew form דָּנִיֵּאל (Dāniyyēl), with a detailed examination of its internal morphological structure (dān + -ī + ʾē…

YouTube’s search and recommendation algorithms are driving children to Russian-language content even when they seek out videos in Kyrgyz, creating a cultural shift that concerns some parents.