The ideal introduction for students of semantics, Lexical Meaning fills the gap left by more general semantics textbooks, providing the teacher and the student with insights into word meaning beyond the traditional overviews of lexical relations. The book explores the relationship between word meanings and syntax and semantics more generally. It provides a balanced overview of the main theoretical approaches, along with a lucid explanation of their relative strengths and weaknesses. After covering the main topics in lexical meaning, such as (...) polysemy and sense relations, the textbook surveys the types of meanings represented by different word classes. It explains abstract concepts in clear language, using a wide range of examples, and includes linguistic puzzles in each chapter to encourage the student to practise using the concepts. 'Adopt-a-Word' exercises give students the chance to research a particular word, building a portfolio of specialist work on a single word. (shrink)

This book explores how some word meanings are paradigmatically related to each other, for example, as opposites or synonyms, and how they relate to the mental organization of our vocabularies. Traditional approaches claim that such relationships are part of our lexical knowledge (our "dictionary" of mentally stored words) but Lynne Murphy argues that lexical relationships actually constitute our "metalinguistic" knowledge. The book draws on a century of previous research, including word association experiments, child language, and the use of synonyms and (...) antonyms in text. (shrink)

To examine the influence of hypnotic suggestibility testing as a source of individual differences in hypnotic responsiveness, we compared behavioral and subjective responses on three scales of hypnotic suggestibility: The Harvard Group Scale of Hypnotic Susceptibility, Form A . Harvard Group Scale of Hypnotic Susceptibility. Berlin: Consulting Psychologists Press); the Carleton University Responsiveness to Suggestion Scale . The Carleton University Responsiveness to Suggestion Scale: Normative data and psychometric properties. Psychological Reports, 53, 523–535); and the Group Scale of Hypnotic Ability . (...) The Group Scale of Hypnotic Ability and response booklet. Australian Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis, 27, 20–31). Behavioral and subjective responses to the CURSS were significantly different than those on the HGSHS: A and GSHA. More participants were classified as “low suggestible” on the CURSS and they reported subjective experiences more similar to everyday mentation. Attitudes and expectancies of participants who received the GSHA were less predictive of responding, but rates of responding and subjective experiences were similar on the GSHA and the HGSHS: A. Discussion focuses on implications for the use of group hypnotic suggestibility scales. (shrink)

Canada’s commercial seal hunt has been the subject of controversy for over 40 years. Much of the debate has centered on the question of humane killing. The reality, however, is that debates about commercial sealing are political debates involving conflicting values and ethics. We argue that the time has come for conservationists, scientists, managers of free-living animals, bureaucrats, politicians, and society at large to think beyond populations and ecosystems and consider also the well-being of individual, sentient animals. The fundamental question (...) then becomes, “Can commercial seal hunts be morally justified in the twenty-first century?”. (shrink)

The relation between sex hormones and responses to partner infidelity was explored in two studies reported here. The first confirmed the standard sex difference in relationship jealousy, that males (n=133) are relatively more distressed by a partner’s sexual infidelity and females (n=159) by a partner’s emotional infidelity. The study also revealed that females using hormone-based birth control (n=61) tended more toward sexual jealousy than did other females, and reported more intense affective responses to partner infidelity (n=77). In study two, 47 (...) females were assessed four times across one month. Patterns of response to partner infidelity did not vary by week of menstrual cycle, but significant relations between salivary estradiol level and jealousy responses were obtained during the time of rising and high fertility risk. The implications, at least for females, are that any evolved psychological, affective, or behavioral dispositions regarding reproduction-related relationships are potentially moderated by estradiol, and that the use of synthetic hormones may disrupt this relation. (shrink)

The upcoming U.S. Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization has the potential to eliminate or severely restrict access to legal abortion care in the United States. We a...

The idea of “postponed withholding,” proposed by Syltern et al. (2022), is a provocative one, and like all good provocative ideas, provokes deeper thinking from fresh perspectives. Our attention wa...

The editor of this volume takes it to mean that a prior experience affects behavior without the individual's appreciation (ability to report) of this...

One cue that may facilitate children's word learning is iconicity, or the correspondence between a word's form and meaning. Some have even proposed that iconicity in the early lexicon may serve to help children learn how to learn words, supporting the acquisition of even noniconic, or arbitrary, word–referent associations. However, this proposal remains untested. Here, we investigate the iconicity of caregivers’ speech to young children during a naturalistic free‐play session with novel stimuli and ask whether the iconicity of caregivers’ speech (...) facilitates children's learning of the noniconic novel names of those stimuli. Thirty‐four 1.5‐2‐year‐olds (19 girls; half monolingual English learners and half bilingual English‐Spanish learners) participated in a naturalistic free‐play task with their caregivers followed by a test of word‐referent retention. We found that caregivers’ use of iconicity, particularly in utterances in which they named the novel stimuli, was associated with the likelihood that children learned that novel name. This result held even when controlling for other factors associated with word learning, such as the concreteness and frequency of words in caregiver speech. Together, the results demonstrate that iconicity not only can serve to help children identify the referent of novel words (as in previous research) but can also support their ability to retain even noniconic word‐referent mappings. (shrink)

A longitudinal study of 308 white -collar U.S. employees revealed that feelings of hope and gratitude increase concern for corporate social responsibility. In particular, employees with stronger hope and gratitude were found to have a greater sense of responsibility toward employee and societal issues; interestingly, employee hope and gratitude did not affect sense of responsibility toward economic and safety/quality issues. These findings offer an extension of research by Giacalone, Paul, and Jurkiewicz.

Perhaps I am wrong to take this article personally, but when the authors refer to Cassandras “voicing concern about a post-Roe degradation of pregnant persons’ right to chart their own medical cour...

This essay critiques feminist treatments of maternal-fetal "relationality" that unwittingly replicate features of Western individualism (for example, the Cartesian division between the asocial body and the social-cognitive person, or the conflation of social and biological birth). I argue for a more reflexive perspective on relationality that would acknowledge how we produce persons through our actions and rhetoric. Personhood and relationality can be better analyzed as dynamic, negotiated qualities realized through social practice.

A friend once told me I was wasting my time writing about cross-cultural perspectives on the beginnings of life. “Your work is interesting for its curiosity value,” he said, “but fundamentally worthless. What happens in other cultures is totally irrelevant to what is happening here.” Those were discouraging words, but as I followed the American debates about the beginnings and ends of life, it seemed he was right. Anthropologists have written a great deal about birth and death rites in other (...) societies and about non-western notions of personhood, but to date our findings have had little impact on American policy, ethics, or law. The recognized experts on contentious topics such as abortion and euthanasia tend to come from the fields of philosophy, bioethics, theology, law, and biology, but rarely from the social sciences. I was a bit surprised, therefore, to be invited to address the Thomas A. Pitts Memorial Lectureship on “Defining the Beginning and the End of Human Life.”. (shrink)

Today's personable, sanitized images of human embryos and fetuses require an audience that is literally and metaphorically distanced from dead specimens. Yet scientists must handle dead specimens to produce embryological knowledge, which only then can be transformed into beautiful photographs and talking fetuses. I begin with an account of Gertrude Stein's experience making a model of a fetal brain. Her tactile encounter is contrasted to the avant-garde artistic tradition that later came to dominate embryo imagery. This essay shows the embryo (...) visualizations portrayed in a contemporary coffee-table book about gestational development to be a remarkable political achievement predicated, in part, on keeping hidden the unsavory details of anatomical technique that transform dead specimens into icons of life. (shrink)

When a caregiver names objects dominating a child’s view, the association between object and name is unambiguous and children are more likely to learn the object’s name. Children also learn to name things other than solid objects, including nonsolid substances like applesauce. However, it is unknown how caregivers structure linguistic and exploratory experiences with nonsolids to support learning. In this exploratory study of caregivers and children we compare caregiver-child free-play with novel solid objects and novel nonsolid substances to identify the (...) linguistic and exploratory experiences associated with children’s word learning. We found systematic differences in interactions with novel objects, such that children performed more manual actions on solids than nonsolids and caregivers named solids more than nonsolids. Additionally, there was less synchrony between caregivers’ naming and children’s manual and visual exploration of nonsolids than solids. Consistent with prior work, we found that synchronous naming was associated with accurate recognition of solid object names. However, naming synchrony was not associated with recognition of nonsolid substance names or with generalization. Together these findings, though exploratory, suggest the coordination of caregiver-child play can shape what children remember about novel word-object associations for solid objects, but not nonsolid substances. (shrink)

We review here the data indicating a role for epidermal growth factor receptor (EGF receptor) signalling in early mouse development. Embryonic development of the metazoan embryo generally begins with the formation of a cystic structure and epithelial layers that subsequently form anlagen of the definitive body parts and organs. For the mammalian embryo, this cystic structure is a blastocyst whose wall consists of trophectoderm, the first epithelium to develop during mammalian embryogenesis. The onset of expression and function of EGF receptors (...) is coincident with the onset of trophectoderm development. Modulating EGF receptor expression and function modulates trophectoderm differentiation, leading to the hypothesis that functional EGF receptors participate in the induction of trophectoderm development and perhaps of other embryonic epithelial derivatives such as nervous tissues. (shrink)

We have conducted a retrospective study of deaths on a paediatric medical intensive care unit over a two-year period and reviewed similar series from outside the UK. There were 89 deaths out of 651 admission (13.7% mortality). In almost two-thirds of the cases death occurred with a decision to limit medical treatment or withdraw mechanical ventilation, implying that additional or further therapy was considered futile. We highlight this as a crucially important issue in the practice of intensive care. More comprehensive (...) studies are needed to help clinicians derive consensus on what constitutes a futile intervention, and therefore when such an intervention should be withheld. This will help families and society better understand the limitations of intensive care. (shrink)

When Andromache emerges from the inner chamber in Book 22, ascends the walls of Troy and looks out over the plain, she beholds a spectacle of ruthless brutality. She who has not been aware of the final combat, nor of the slaying of her husband, is suddenly confronted by the receding trail of utter defeat. Swift horses drag her husband's corpse into the distance, the cherished head disfigured as it is dragged, raking the dust of what was once their homeland. (...) The violence of the scene is forcefully conveyed by one word in particular. The swift horses drag Hektor κηδστως —without κδος without care, ‘sans soucier de, brutalement’. In itself the word κηδστως provides a definition of violence, one captured in Shakespeare's phrase ‘careless force’. Violence is, in its harsh brutality, specifically heedlessness, an absence of any form of care. When Achilles hurls the slain suppliant Lykaon into the river he utters the taunt, ‘the fish, κηδες, will lick clean your wound's blood’ . The discarded corpse is denied funeral rites: in place of the care that the relations of the dead traditionally bestow in tending, washing, enshrouding, lamenting, and burying the dead, here the heedless creatures of nature, fleeting visitors, will attend to the corpse, ‘clean’ it, but utterly without care, completely oblivious to the oblivion they create by destroying. In Book 24 Achilles will describe the gods themselves as κηδες. (shrink)

Purpose Recent research has found unrealistic optimism among patient-subjects in early-phase oncology trials. Our aim was to investigate the cognitive and motivational factors that evoke this bias in this context. We expected perceptions of control to be a strong correlate of unrealistic optimism. Methods A study of patient-subjects enrolled in early-phase oncology trials was conducted at two sites in the USA. Respondents completed questionnaires designed to assess unrealistic optimism and several risk attribute variables that have been found to evoke the (...) bias in other contexts. Results One hundred and seventy-one patient-subjects agreed to be interviewed for our study. Significant levels of perceived controllability were found with respect to all nine research-related questions. Perceptions of control were found to predict unrealistic optimism. Two other risk attribute variables, awareness of indicators and mental image, were correlated with unrealistic optimism. However, in multivariate regression analysis, awareness and mental image dropped out of the model and perceived controllability was the only factor independently associated with unrealistic optimism. Conclusion Patient-subjects reported that they can, at least partially, control the benefits they receive from participating in an early-phase oncology trial. This sense of control may underlie unrealistic optimism about benefiting personally from trial participation. Effective interventions to counteract unrealistic optimism may need to address the psychological factors that give rise to distorted risk/benefit processing. (shrink)

In the 4 1/2 to 5 days between fertilization and implantation, the mouse conceptus must gain the abilities to implant and produce an embryo. Each of these is the sole developmental responsibility of one of two cell types forming the blastocyst, trophectoderm and inner cell mass (ICM), respectively. Trophectoderm is a polarized transporting epithelium while the ICM is an aggregate of non‐epithelial pluripotent stem cells. These two cell types originate from the division of polar blastomeres when their cleavage furrows parallel (...) their apical surfaces. Blastomeres polarize in response to asymmetric cell–cell contact, and understanding the mechanism of this induction is regarded as the key to understanding the origin of trophectoderm and ICM. Here we propose a model based on transcellular ion current loops for the induction of cell polarity during the development of the first epithelium, trophectoderm. (shrink)

The main goal of this study was to identify factors motivating pragmatic transfer in advanced learners of English. Based on a cross-cultural comparison of requesting behavior between Koreans and Americans, this study determined the impact of individual subjective motives on pragmatic language choice. Two different groups of subjects participated in this study: 30 Korean participants and 30 American college students. Data were collected by using a Discourse Completion Task. Korean participants provided the data for Korean and English versions of DCT. (...) Semi-structured interviews were also conducted with 13 Korean ESL learners who showed the most and least amount of pragmatic transfer. Findings showed evidence of pragmatic transfer in the request responses given by Korean ESL learners in their requestive strategies, level of directness, and perspectives of head acts. The interview data revealed that Korean students were conscious of differing rules for making requests. Learners’ judgment of L2 pragmatic norms, perception of their own language, and their attitudes of the target language influence language use. Furthermore, findings showed that purpose of learning English, different types of motivation, and the length of intended residence contribute to the extent of pragmatic transfer. (shrink)