University of Sydney / Faculty of Arts / Department of English / Staff / Academic Staff

Dr Nicholas Riemer

BA PhD. Sydney
Lecturer

Research areas

  • 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

  • in press: Grammaticality as evidence and as prediction in a Galilean linguistics. Language Sciences (2008), doi:10.1016/j.langsci.2008.04.001
  • Reductive paraphrase and meaning: a critique of Wierzbickian semantics. Linguistics and Philosophy 29:347–379. 2006.
  • The semantics of polysemy. Reading meaning in English and
    Warlpiri.     Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 2005. Errata.
  • 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.
  • Servant of two masters? NSM and semantic explanation. Theoretical Linguistics 29 283-294. 2003.
  • 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.
  • 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. 2003.
  • 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.
  • Verb polysemy and the vocabulary of percussion and impact in Central Australia. The Australian Journal of Linguistics 22:1 45-96. 2002.
  • 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. 2002.
  • Remetonymizing metaphor: Hypercategories in semantic extension. Cognitive Linguistics 12-4 379-401. 2001.
  • A study of semantic extension of percussion/impact vocabulary in English and Warlpiri. Glot International 5: 9/10 327-328. 2001.
  • The Grammaticalization of Impact: bang and slap in English. The Australian Journal of Linguistics 18:2 1998.
  • Grammatical optionality and meaning difference: examples from
    English. In Riemer, N. and M. Amberber (eds) Selected Language Papers from the Joint International Conference on Cognitive Science, Sydney 2003. Amsterdam: Elsevier. Accepted 2004.
  • Introducing Semantics. Cambridge: CUP. Under contract.
  • La métaphore et la sémantique lexicale. In: Guéron, J. and C. Delmas, (eds) Grammaire et figures de style. Paris: Presses de la Sorbonne nouvelle. Accepted 2004.
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