From concepts to lexical items.

In this paper we address the question how in language production conceptual structures are mapped onto lexical items. First we describe the lexical system in a fairly abstract way. Such a system consists of, among other things, a fixed set of basic lexical entries characterized by four groups of information: phonetic form, grammatical features, argument structure, and semantic form. A crucial assumption of the paper is that the meaning in a lexical entry has a complex internal structure composed of more primitive elements (decomposition). Some aspects of argument structure and semantic form and their interaction are discussed with respect to the issue of synonymy. We propose two different mappings involved in lexical access. One maps conceptual structures to semantic forms, and the other maps semantic forms to conceptual structures. Both mappings are context dependent and are many-to-many mappings. We present an elaboration of Levelt's (1989) model in which these processes interact with the grammatical encoder and the mental lexicon. Then we address the consequences of decomposition for processing models, especially the nature of the input of lexical access and the time course. Processing models that use the activation metaphor may have difficulties accounting for certain phenomena where a certain lemma triggers not one, but two or more word forms that have to be produced with other word forms in between.     

Lexical Inheritance with Meronymic Relationships

In most computational ontologies, information inheritance is based on the taxonomic relation is_a. A given type inherits from other type only if the latter subsumes the former. We assume, however, that inheritance can be related, not only to the taxonomic relation, but also to the meronymic relationship between parts and wholes. The main aim of this paper is to organise upper-level ontologies associated with lexical information by taking into account part-whole subsumption. As we consider that parts may subsume wholes under specific conditions, ontologies can be defined in terms of systems in which wholes inherit information from its parts. In this article, we describe how part-whole subsumption and, then, meronymic inheritance can be used to deal with type mismatch and metonymic interpretation of polysemous nouns. For this purpose, we attempt to merge old assumptions from both formal ontology and lexical semantics into a homogeneous framework.     

Monster character profiling and Chinese classifier cognition: linguistic and conceptual perspectives

In this research, we explored the construal of mythical creatures created out of ordinary animals by approaching the selection of Chinese classifiers zhi and ge. Monster figures as such are viewed ambiguously as an animal or as a novel entity. From the lexico-semantic perspective, we surveyed the co-occurrences of these two classifiers with two Chinese labels commonly used for monsters: guaishou and guaiwu, which provide lexical cues for the finely nuanced difference in (non-)/animate readings respectively. From the conceptual perspective, we examined the acceptability as to the uses of these two classifiers for the monster figures, the structures of which incurred different effects of novelty. We found that the (non-)/animal-like interpretation is encoded by zhi and ge at both the linguistic and conceptual layers. The findings of our work have implications for the relation of language and thought, our understanding of fictional world entities, and our understanding of classifier cognition.     

Judging a book by its cover and its contents: the representation of polysemous and homophonous meanings in four-year-old children

Unlike homophonous meanings, which are semantically unrelated (e.g., the use of bat to refer to a baseball bat and a flying rodent), polysemous meanings are systematically related to one another (e.g., the use of book, CD, and video to refer to physical objects, as in ‘the leather book’, or to the intellectual content they contain, as in ‘the profound book’). But do perceived relations among polysemous meanings reflect the presence of generative lexical or conceptual structures that permit the meanings of these words to shift? If so, these structures may also support children’s early representations of polysemous meanings. In four studies, we demonstrate (1) that four-year-old children can understand both the concrete and abstract meanings of words like book, (2) that when taught a novel label for one of these meanings, children can readily understand an extension of that label to the other meaning, and (3) that extension does not occur between two homophonous meanings, which share a common phonological form but are otherwise unrelated. We conclude that the polysemous meanings of words like book rely on a common representational base early in development, and suggest that this may be the result of foundational, generative properties of the lexicon or conceptual system.     

Feature Statistics Modulate the Activation of Meaning During Spoken Word Processing

Understanding spoken words involves a rapid mapping from speech to conceptual representations. One distributed feature‐based conceptual account assumes that the statistical characteristics of concepts’ features—the number of concepts they occur in (distinctiveness/sharedness) and likelihood of co‐occurrence (correlational strength)—determine conceptual activation. To test these claims, we investigated the role of distinctiveness/sharedness and correlational strength in speech‐to‐meaning mapping, using a lexical decision task and computational simulations. Responses were faster for concepts with higher sharedness, suggesting that shared features are facilitatory in tasks like lexical decision that require access to them. Correlational strength facilitated responses for slower participants, suggesting a time‐sensitive co‐occurrence‐driven settling mechanism. The computational simulation showed similar effects, with early effects of shared features and later effects of correlational strength. These results support a general‐to‐specific account of conceptual processing, whereby early activation of shared features is followed by the gradual emergence of a specific target representation.     

Framing sentences

The sentence frames formed during language production are commonly and rather uncontroversially represented as hierarchical constituent structures. There is less accord about whether the frames are pure structural configurations or limnings of meaning. We examined these alternatives with a sentence priming paradigm in which the primes and targets shared phrase structures and event structures, or only phrase structures. The results of the first and second experiments indicated that event-structure changes had no impact on a reliable tendency to replicate the phrase structures of the primes within sentence targets. The last experiment showed that this tendency could not be attributed to metrical or to closed-class lexical similarities. The implication is that sentence frames are not identifiable with metrical or conceptual information, but are comparatively independent syntactic representations.     

Three Dual Ontologies

In this paper we give an example of intertranslatability between an ontology of individuals (nominalism), an ontology of properties (realism), and an ontology of facts (factualism). We demonstrate that these three ontologies are dual to each other, meaning that each ontology can be translated into, and recaptured from, each of the others. The aim of the enterprise is to raise the possibility that, at least in some settings, there may be no need for considerations of ontological primacy. Whether the world is made up of things, or properties, or facts, may be no more than a matter of how we look at it.     

Predication and cognitive context: Between minimalism and contextualism

In this paper, we suggest a strategy for modelling cognitive context within a truth‐conditional semantics, using Asher's model of predication. This allows us to introduce the notion of type presupposition intended as a lexical constraint to the composition of the truth‐conditional content. More specifically, we suggest that this model of predication produces a notion of truth‐conditional meaning where the cognitive context fixes a set of lexical restrictions and forced modifications. We conclude that this model might offer an intermediate position between Minimalism and Contextualism: an account that provides intuitive truth conditions within a formal semantic theory.     

Communication and Structured Correlation

Philosophers and social scientists have recently turned to Lewis sender–receiver games to provide an account of how lexical terms can acquire meaning through an evolutionary process. However, the evolution of meaning is contingent on both the particular sender–receiver game played and the choice of evolutionary dynamic. In this paper I explore some differences between models that presume an infinitely large and randomly mixed population and models in which a finite number of agents communicate with their neighbors in a social network. My results show that communication with neighbors is more conducive to the evolution of meaning than communication with strangers. Additionally, I show that the behavior of the system is highly dependent on the topological structure of the social network. I argue that a specific class of networks—small world graphs—is especially conducive to the evolution of meaning. This is because small world graphs have a short characteristic path length while still maintaining a high degree of correlation between neighbors. Since many actual social networks, such as friendship networks and nervous systems, are conjectured to be small world structures, these results indicate that these networks are quite hospitable to the efficient evolution of meaning.     

The externalist challenge to conceptual engineering

Unlike conceptual analysis, conceptual engineering does not aim to identify the content that our current concepts do have, but the content which these concepts should have. For this method to show the results that its practitioners typically aim for, being able to change meanings seems to be a crucial presupposition. However, certain branches of semantic externalism raise doubts about whether this presupposition can be met. To the extent that meanings are determined by external factors such as causal histories or microphysical structures, it seems that they cannot be changed intentionally. This paper gives an extended discussion of this ‘externalist challenge’. Pace Herman Cappelen’s recent take on this issue, it argues that the viability of conceptual engineering crucially depends on our ability to bring about meaning change. Furthermore, it argues that, contrary to first appearance, causal theories of reference do allow for a sufficient degree of meaning control. To this purpose, it argues that there is a sense of what is called ‘collective long-range control’, and that popular versions of the causal theory of reference imply that people have this kind of control over meanings.

     

A Case for Nondecomposition in Conceptually Driven Word Retrieval

Theories of lexical access in language use of a productive nature such as speaking, writing, and verbal thinking differ in whether they assume that words are retrieved from memory in a conceptually decomposed or nondecomposed manner. Decomposition has been the received view for centuries, while nondecomposition is mostly not taken very seriously—undeservedly so, as 1 demonstrate in this paper. I review several theoretical objections that have traditionally been raised against nondecomposition and indicate how a nondecompositional approach can cope with them. Furthermore, several theoretical arguments in favor of nondecomposition are given. The issues concern the componential analysis of word meanings, the conceptual primitives, word definitions, the acquisition of word meaning, the conceptual dissection of messages, context dependence of word meaning, decomposition for syntactic encoding, word-to-phrase synonymy, hyperonymy, hyponymy, and the locus of decomposition. In addition, the major computational models of conceptually driven word retrieval proposed during the last few decades are evaluated both informally and by computer simulation. The decompositional models are shown to fail, whereas a specific nondecompositional model is shown to account for the difficulties. It is concluded that there are no evidential grounds for rejecting nondecomposition. On the contrary, for a theory of word retrieval there are, instead, good reasons to prefer nondecomposition to decomposition. Nondecomposition should be given more serious consideration in future work in the field.     

Wiping the slate clean: a lexical semantic exploration.

This paper presents a case study in lexical semantic analysis aimed at uncovering syntactically relevant components of verb meaning. Our strategy is to investigate the nature of the lexical knowledge that a speaker of English possesses with respect to certain apparently semantically related verbs: a set of verbs that might as a first approximation be classed as verbs of removal. However, a closer examination of these apparently semantically related verbs reveals that their syntactic properties diverge. An exploration of the patterns of behavior of the verbs suggests that the initial class includes three linguistically significant subclasses. The components of meaning that are relevant to characterizing each subclass are identified by isolating those components of meaning that the members of each subclass share. The conclusion considers the implications of the meaning components identified in this study for a lexical semantic representation.     

The dynamic lexicon in a truth-conditional framework; or how to have Your cake and eat it

A fundamental principle of all truth-conditional approaches to semantics is that the meanings of sentences of natural language can be compositionally specified in terms of truth conditions, where the meanings of the sentences’ parts (words/lexical items) are specified in terms of the contribution they make to such conditions their host sentences possess. Thus, meanings of words fit the meanings of sentences at least to the extent that the stability of what a sentence might mean as specified in a theory is in accord with the stability of what a word might mean as similarly specified. In this paper, I shall be concerned with Ludlow’s (2014) idea that, in fact, there need be no such sympathy between words and sentences. He proposes that we can square what he calls a dynamic lexicon, where word meaning is not stable at all, with a traditional truth-conditional approach of the kind indicated, where sentence meaning is delivered via ‘absolute truth conditions’. I share Ludlow’s aspiration to accommodate dynamic features of word meaning with a truth conditional approach, but not his belief that the marriage is an easy deal. Thus, I shall present a problem for Ludlow’s position and show how resolving this problem leads to an alternative picture of how the meaning of a sentence may be truth-conditionally specified with all relevant dynamic features of the lexicon retained.     

Gestalt compositionality and instruction-based meaning construction

We would like to propose a new model of meaning construction based on language comprehension considered as a dynamic process during which the meaning of each linguistic unit and the global meaning of the sentence are determined simultaneously. This model, which may be called “gestalt compositionality,” is radically opposed to the classic compositional mechanism advocated by linguistic formalism based on the primacy of syntax. The process considers the syntactic structure of an utterance as the product of meaning construction rather than its source. The comprehension of an utterance is consequently directly based on the interaction between the different basic components of this utterance: lexical units, grammatical markers, positional relations between units, and more generally, basic “constructions” in the sense of Construction Grammar. Thus, meaning is really the result of a gestalt compositional process insomuch as the contribution of each basic component depends on the contribution of the other components present in the utterance. We show a first attempt at modeling from French and English examples.     

Parts and boundaries.

Within the framework of Conceptual Semantics, a family of conceptual features and functions is developed that accounts for phenomena in the semantics of noun phrases such as the mass-count distinction, plurality, the partitive construction (a leg of the table), the constitutive construction (a house of wood), the "Universal Packager" (three coffees), and boundary words such as end, edge, and crust. Using the strong formal parallelism between noun phrase semantics and event structure that is a hallmark of the Conceptual Semantics approach, the features and functions of the NP system are applied to a wide range of problems in event structure, for example the analysis of the Vendler classes, the meaning of the progressive, the "imperfective paradox", and "aktionsarten" such as the syntactically unexpressed sense of repetition in The light flashed until dawn. Crucial to the analysis is that these features and functions can be expressed in syntactic structure either by being part of lexical conceptual structure, or by use of a morphological affix, or by being associated with the meaning of a construction such as N of NP or nominal compounding. Alternatively, they may remain unexpressed altogether, being introduced into the conceptual structure of a phrase by "rules of construal". This shows that lexical semantics and phrasal semantics interpenetrate deeply, and that there is no strict one-to-one correspondence between syntactic and semantic structures. In addition, the analysis provides further evidence that natural language semantics must be based on a psychological view of meaning--it must be concerned with how language users are constructed to understand and schematize the world.     

Why Compositionality Won't Go Away: Reflections on Horwich's 'Deflationary' Theory

Paul Horwich argues for a 'deflationary'account of compositionality, according to which, '. . . the compositionality of meaning imposes no constraint at all on how the meaning properties of words are constituted'. We have arrived at a tentative diagnosis, which is that Horwich fails to enforce several distinctions that turn out to be crucial. For example, sometimes he puts his main conclusion in the way we just quoted but sometimes, even on the following page, he puts it like this: 'understanding one of oneÕs own complex expressions (non-idiomatically) is, by definition, nothing over and above understanding its parts and knowing how they are combined'. We propose, in what follows, to consider how Horwich's deflationary account of compositionality fares if the distinction between theories of meaning and theories of understanding is properly attended to. Here's how we think it all turns out:
– Horwich is right to claim that compositionality is neutral with respect to the metaphysics of understanding expressions when 'understanding' refers to a (merely) dispositional state; but not when it refers to an occurrent state.
– Horwich is right strictu dictu to claim that compositionality is neutral with respect to the character of lexical meanings, but only strictu dictu.
– Compositionality taken, together with other constraints that semantic theories are required to satisfy, reduces the options in the theory of lexical meaning to a bare minimum.
The first part of the paper is about compositionality and understanding, the second part is about compositionality and lexical meaning.     

Designing the human stress ontology: A formal framework to capture and represent knowledge about human stress

A large number of papers have been published on the topic of human stress. There is a need to organise this knowledge under a unifying framework, linking and analysing it in mutual combinations so that new knowledge can emerge. Ontology is an enriched conceptual model for representing domain knowledge. An ontology can be designed to provide a framework for knowledge about human stress. This agreed knowledge model will facilitate knowledge sharing and communications. Additionally, ontologies are machine‐readable and can enable automated programs such as data mining to intelligently access and analyse information. The purpose of this paper is to discuss and explain some of the common stress‐related terms, their definitions, classifications and possible interrelations between them. A top‐layer of the human stress ontology (HSO) model is presented, which will continue to evolve as more research contributions and knowledge become available. It is believed that this framework can be used to build powerful tools to assist researchers and therapists in evaluating stress and facilitating their communication in both research and clinical spaces.     

What Compositionality Still Can Do

Proponents of deflationism about meaning often claim that the principle of compositionality, when properly understood, places no constraint whatsoever on the nature of lexical meaning. This deflationary thesis admits of both strong and weak readings. On the strong reading, the principle does not rule out any theory of lexical meaning either alone or in conjunction with other independently plausible semantic assumptions. On the weak reading, the principle alone does not rule out any such theory. I argue that, though weak deflationism about compositionality has better initial prospects than strong, neither version of the thesis is credible. In particular, weak deflationism cannot be maintained in conformity with the deflationist commitment to explaining facts about phrase meanings in compositional terms, that is, by appeal to facts about the lexicon.     

Repeated text in unrelated passages: Repetition versus meaning selection effects

Despite previous findings, Klin, Ralano, and Weingartner (2007) found transfer benefits across unrelated passages. After processing an ambiguous phrase in Story A that was biased toward its sarcastic meaning, readers were more likely to interpret the identical phrase in Story B as sarcastic, even though it contained no disambiguating information. In the present experiments, we found both repetition effects (a benefit for the lexical items) and meaning selection effects (a benefit for the selected meaning of the phrase) with short delays between Stories A and B; with longer delays, only repetition effects were found. Whereas decreasing the elaboration of the phrase eliminated both effects, moving the disambiguating context from before to after the phrase eliminated meaning selection effects only. We conclude that meaning selection effects, which are based on conceptual overlap, are more sensitive to context changes and less robust than repetition effects, which are based on both perceptual and conceptual overlap.     

Elicited imitation in lexical development: Evidence from a study of temporal reference

This study examined the use of elicited imitation in investigating lexical development within a semantic domain. For this purpose the acquisition of reference to sequence and simultaneity by 3–5 year old children was examined. Three factors were proposed to account for the order in which lexical items within a semantic field are acquired: restrictedness of a lexical item, congruence with perceptual strategies, and conceptual simplicity. A significantly greater number of correct responses was found in sentences describing sequential events than in simultaneous events. Furthermore, imitations of sentences referring to simultaneity were more degraded than imitations of sentences referring to sequence. The children seemed to begin acquiring reference to temporally related events by learning about words describing serially ordered events. A three stage developmental model is proposed to account for the results.Some of the data reported here are drawn from the author's doctoral dissertation from the Department of Linguistics, State University of New York, Buffalo, 1974.