Dr Nicholas Riemer

BA PhD. Sydney

Senior Lecturer

nick.riemer@sydney.edu.au

+61 2 9036 7039

Research areas

* Philosophy of linguistics

* Modern English language, especially verb semantics

* meaning in language (semantic description and theory; polysemy; semantic change)

* semiotic theory (the foundations of semiotics; semiotics and grammar)

* metaphor

* language and subjectivity, especially the place of emotion in theories of language

Selected publications

Books

* 2010 Introducing Semantics. Cambridge: CUP. Publisher’s description

* 2005 The semantics of polysemy. Reading meaning in English and Warlpiri. Berlin/New York: Mouton. Errata

Articles and chapters

* 2009 (a) Grammaticality as evidence and as prediction in a Galilean linguistics.

Language Sciences 31: 612-633. Preprint

* 2009 (b) On not having read Itkonen: empiricism and intuitions in the generative data debate. Language Sciences 31: 649-662. Preprint

* 2006 Reductive paraphrase and meaning: a critique of Wierzbickian semantics.

Linguistics and Philosophy 29: 347–379. Preprint

* 2003 (a). Meaning change in verbs: the case of strike. In Blake, Barry and Kate Burridge (eds) Historical Linguistics 2001: Selected papers from the 15th International Conference on Historical Linguistics, Melbourne 13-17 August 2001. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

* 2003 (b). Les Nominaux dans les complexes verbaux du warlpiri [Nominals in Warlpiri verb complexes]. Actances 12 (working papers of GDR 749, ‘Relations intercatégorielles: les variations aspecto-temporelles et les structures diathétiques’, CNRS, France), 55-72. Preprint

* 2003 (c). Servant of two masters? NSM and semantic explanation. Theoretical Linguistics 29: 283-294. Preprint

* 2003 (d). Syntactic evidence and the mental representation of polysemy. In Slezak, P. (ed) Proceedings of the Joint International Conference on Cognitive Science. Sydney: University of New South Wales, 2003.

* 2002 (a). Interpreting semantic extension: metaphor and metonymy on different levels of lexical categorization. In Cynthia Allen (ed.) Proceedings of the 2001 meeting of the Australian Linguistic Society.

* 2002 (b). Verb polysemy and the vocabulary of percussion and impact in Central Australia. The Australian Journal of Linguistics 22:1 45-96.

* 2002 (c). When is a metonymy no longer a metonymy? In Dirven, René and Ralf Pörings (eds) Metaphor and Metonymy in Comparison and Contrast. Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

* 2001 (a). Interpreting Semantic Extension: Metaphor and Metonymy on Different Levels of Lexical Categorization. In Cynthia Allen (ed), Proceedings of the 2001 conference of the Australian Linguistic Society. Full text

* 2001 (b). Remetonymizing metaphor: Hypercategories in semantic extension. Cognitive Linguistics 12-4 379-401.

* 1998. The Grammaticalization of Impact: bang and slap in English. The Australian Journal of Linguistics 18:2 1998. Preprint