Dr Nicholas Riemer

BA PhD. Sydney
Lecturer

+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

2010 Introducing Semantics. Cambridge: CUP. Publisher’s description
2005 The semantics of polysemy. Reading meaning in English and Warlpiri. Berlin/New York: Mouton. Errata

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