In this paper I focus on a recently discussed phenomenon illustrated by sentences containing predicates of taste: the phenomenon of " perspectival plurality " , whereby sentences containing two or more predicates of taste have readings according to which each predicate pertains to a different perspective. This phenomenon has been shown to be problematic for (at least certain versions of) relativism. My main aim is to further the discussion by showing that the phenomenon extends to other perspectival expressions than predicates (...) of taste and by proposing a general solution to the problem raised by it on behalf of the relativist. The core claim of the solution (" multiple indexing ") is that utterances of sentences containing perspectival expressions should be evaluated with respect to (possibly infinite) sequences of perspective parameters. (shrink)

This article introduces a new pragmatic framework for dual character concepts and their expressions, offering an alternative to the received lexical‐semantic view. On the prevalent lexical‐semantic view, expressions such as “philosopher” or “scientist” are construed as lexical polysemes, comprising both a descriptive and a normative dimension. Thereby, this view prioritizes established norms, neglecting normative expressions emerging in specific contexts. In contrast, the pragmatic view integrates pragmatic modulation as a central element in explaining context‐dependent dual character concepts and expressions. This not (...) only accounts for a wider range of phenomena but also addresses several theoretical shortcomings of the lexical view. (shrink)

Regular polysemes are sets of ambiguous words that all share the same relationship between their meanings, such as CHICKEN and LOBSTER both referring to an animal or its meat. To probe how a distributional semantic model, here exemplified by bidirectional encoder representations from transformers (BERT), represents regular polysemy, we analyzed whether its embeddings support answering sense analogy questions similar to “is the mapping between CHICKEN (as an animal) and CHICKEN (as a meat) similar to that which maps between LOBSTER (as (...) an animal) to LOBSTER (as a meat)?” We did so using the LRcos model, which combines a logistic regression classifier of different categories (e.g., animal vs. meat) with a measure of cosine similarity. We found that (a) the model was sensitive to the shared structure within a given regular relationship; (b) the shared structure varies across different regular relationships (e.g., animal/meat vs. location/organization), potentially reflective of a “regularity continuum;” (c) some high-order latent structure is shared across different regular relationships, suggestive of a similar latent structure across different types of relationships; and (d) there is a lack of evidence for the aforementioned effects being explained by meaning overlap. Lastly, we found that both components of the LRcos model made important contributions to accurate responding and that a variation of this method could yield an accuracy boost of 10% in answering sense analogy questions. These findings enrich previous theoretical work on regular polysemy with a computationally explicit theory and methods, and provide evidence for an important organizational principle for the mental lexicon and the broader conceptual knowledge system. (shrink)

I address the problem of the distinction between semantic and conceptual representations from general considerations about how to distinguish a representational kind. I consider three different ways of telling representational kinds apart – in terms of structure, processing and content – and I examine if semantic representations may constitute a distinct kind with respect to each of them. I argue that the best options for semantic representation to be regarded as a distinct representational kind with respect to each of the (...) three criteria conflict with each other, since it appears respectively as an atomic representation, as a sort of procedural rule or as a structured complex. (shrink)

I address the problem of the distinction between semantic and conceptual representations from general considerations about how to distinguish a representational kind. I consider three different ways of telling representational kinds apart – in terms of structure, processing and content – and I examine if semantic representations may constitute a distinct kind with respect to each of them. I argue that the best options for semantic representation to be regarded as a distinct representational kind with respect to each of the (...) three criteria conflict with each other, since it appears respectively as an atomic representation, as a sort of procedural rule or as a structured complex. (shrink)

In this paper I try to show that semantics can explain word-to-world relations and that sentences can have meanings that determine truth-conditions. Critics like Chomsky typically maintain that only speakers denote, i.e., only speakers, by using words in one way or another, represent entities or events in the world. However, according to their view, individual acts of denotations are not explained just by virtue of speakers’ semantic knowledge. Against this view, I will hold that, in the typical cases considered, semantic (...) knowledge can account for the denotational uses of words of individual speakers. (shrink)

I discuss the ubiquity of power law distributions in language organisation (and elsewhere), and argue against Miller’s (The mating mind: How sexual choice shaped the evolution of human nature, William Heinemann, London, 2000) argument that large vocabulary size is a consequence of sexual selection. Instead I argue that power law distributions are evidence that languages are best modelled as dynamical systems but raise some issues for models of iterated language learning.

The interplay of content and context is observable in a moment to moment manner as propositional content unfolds. The current contribution illustrates this through data from real-time language comprehension indicating that propositional content is not computed in isolation but relies in important ways on context during every step of the computation of meaning. The relevant notion of context that we have to adopt includes all aspects of possible worlds and draws on a variety of knowledge representations, which in a first (...) processing phase serve to generate expectations for upcoming words. In a second phase, the discourse representation is assessed and if necessary updated by means of inferential reasoning and enrichment to reflect the speaker’s intended meaning. (shrink)

Copredication is the phenomenon whereby two or more predicates seem to require that their argument denotes different things. The denotation of words that copredicate has been broadly discussed. In this paper, I investigate the metaphysics behind this question. Thus, mereological theories of dot objects claim that these nouns denote complex entities; Asher (Lexical meaning in context, Cambridge University Press, 2011, https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511793936) thinks that they denote bare particulars; and the Activation Package Theory contends that they stand for multiple denotations. According to (...) the Activation Package Theory, copredicative nouns stand for complex knowledge structures that offer a range of multiple potential denotations. In this paper, I claim that the Activation Package Theory contributes to solve some of the metaphysical questions that arise from copredication. (shrink)

Cognitive Science, Volume 46, Issue 5, May 2022.

We define an order independent version of default unification on typed feature structures. The operation is one where default information in a feature structure typed with a more specific type, will override default information in a feature structure typed with a more general type, where specificity is defined by the subtyping relation in the type hierarchy. The operation is also able to handle feature structures where reentrancies are default. We provide a formal semantics, prove order independence and demonstrate the utility (...) of this version of default unification in several linguistic applications. First, we show how it can be used to define multiple orthogonal default inheritance in the lexicon in a fully declarative fashion. Secondly, we show how default lexical specifications (introduced via default lexical inheritance) can be made to usefully persist beyond the lexicon and interact with syntagmatic rules. Finally, we outline how persistent default unification might underpin default feature propagation principles and a more restrictive and constraint-based approach to lexical rules. (shrink)

Verbs such as enjoy in the student enjoyed the book exhibit logical metonymy: enjoy is interpreted as enjoy reading. Theoreticalwork [Computational Linguistics 17 (4) (1991) 409; The Generative Lexicon, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1995] predicts that this interpretation can be influenced by intra‐sentential context, e.g., by the subject of enjoy. In this article, we test this prediction using a completion experiment and find that the interpretation of a metonymic verb is influenced by the semantic role of its subject. We present (...) a Bayesian model that accounts for the interpretation of logical metonymy and achieves a good fit on our experimental data. We show that the parameters of the model can be estimated from completion data or from corpus data. (shrink)

The thesis advanced in this paper is that the proper names of cities or countries inherit the linguistic types of the nouns which denote the basic category of the objects the names refer to. As a result, in the case of the proper names of cities or countries, a reference by those names may select particular aspects of those objects, in the same way that book or newspaper selects the physical or informational aspects of objects in the extension of the (...) nouns. This view is based on Asher’s and Pustejovsky’s conception of dot type semantics. (shrink)

Proper names are usually considered devices of singular reference but, when considered as word-types, they also exhibit other kinds of uses. In this paper I intend to show that systematic kinds of uses of proper names considered as word-types can be accounted for by a generalized rule-based conception of systematic polysemy, one which not only postulates a multiplicity of stable senses for an expression, but also a multiplicity of content generating rules, each of which determines potentially different contents in different (...) contexts. In contrast to the currently extant polysemous conceptions of proper names (Leckie in Philos Stud 165:1139–1160, 2013), which only encompass individual and predicative uses, the presented proposal concerns all systematic uses of proper names considered in the literature, i.e., individual, predicative, deferred, descriptive, anaphoric, and bound uses of proper names. The resulting conception accommodates referential intuition about the default individual uses of proper names while also admitting other kinds of uses without generating homonymy. It transpires that proper names are semantically underdetermined and context-sensitive expressions. (shrink)

This paper presents the hypothesis that the representational repertoire underpinning our ability to process the lexical items of a natural language can be modeled as a system of mental files. To start, I clarify the basic phenomena that an account of lexical knowledge should be able to elucidate. Then, I propose to evaluate whether the mental files theory can be brought to bear on an account of the representational format of lexical knowledge by modeling mental words as recognitional files.

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. (shrink)

The paper argues that natural language quantification, as expressed by determiner phrases, is not polysemous. The foil for this claim is Hofweber, who contends that natural language quantification is polysemous between a domain reading and an inferential reading. The thesis is intended to support a more general division between externalist and internalist positions in semantics. The paper, to the contrary, argues that there is no linguistic evidence for polysemous quantification, and Hofweber’s proposal proves to be non-compositional. Further, an approach at (...) least consistent with internalism is available independent of an inferential reading, for natural language quantification can be read as ontologically neutral, which removes the rationale for the polysemy hypothesis. The paper remains neutral on so-called heavyweight vs. lightweight construals of quantification, which are not claims about natural language semantics. (shrink)

The idea that conventionalized general knowledge – sometimes referred to as a frame – guides the perception and interpretation of the world around us has long permeated various branches of cognitive science, including psychology, linguistics, and artificial intelligence. In this paper we provide experimental evidence suggesting that frames also play a role in explaining certain long-distance dependency phenomena, as originally proposed by Deane. We focus on a constraint that restricts the extraction of an NP from another NP, called subextraction, which (...) Deane claims is ultimately a framing effect. In Experiment 1 we provide evidence showing that referents are extractable to the degree that they are deemed important for the proposition expressed by the utterance. This suggests that the world knowledge that the main verb evokes plays a key role in establishing which referents are extractable. In Experiment 2 we offer evidence suggesting that the acceptability of deep subextractions is correlated with the overall plausibility of the proposition, suggesting that complex structures can evoke complex frames as well, if sufficiently frequent and semantically coherent, and therefore more easily license deeper subextractions. (shrink)

Polysemy, understood as instances of a single linguistic expression having multiple related senses, is not a homogenous phenomenon. There are regular (apparently, rule‐based) cases and irregular (resemblance‐based) cases, which have different processing profiles. Although a primary source of polysemy is pragmatic inference, at least some cases become conventionalised and linguistically encoded. Three main issues are discussed: (a) the key differences between regular and irregular cases and the role, if any, of a “core meaning”; (b) the distinction between pragmatic polysemy and (...) semantic polysemy; and (c) the role of syntactic meaning in both generating and constraining polysemy. (shrink)

In this paper, we address several puzzles concerning speech acts, particularly indirect speech acts. We show how a formal semantictheory of discourse interpretation can be used to define speech acts and to avoid murky issues concerning the metaphysics of action. We provide a formally precise definition of indirect speech acts, including the subclass of so-called conventionalized indirect speech acts. This analysis draws heavily on parallels between phenomena at the speech act level and the lexical level. First, we argue that, just (...) as co-predication shows that some words can behave linguistically as if they're `simultaneously' of incompatible semantic types, certain speech acts behave this way too. Secondly, as Horn and Bayer (1984) and others have suggested, both the lexicon and speech acts are subject to a principle of blocking or "preemption by synonymy": Conventionalized indirect speech acts can block their `paraphrases' from being interpreted as indirect speech acts, even if this interpretation is calculable from Gricean-style principles. We provide a formal model of this blocking, and compare it with existing accounts of lexical blocking. (shrink)

There is an ongoing debate about the meaning of lexical words, i.e., words that contribute with content to the meaning of sentences. This debate has coincided with a renewal in the study of polysemy, which has taken place in the psycholinguistics camp mainly. There is already a fruitful interbreeding between two lines of research: the theoretical study of lexical word meaning, on the one hand, and the models of polysemy psycholinguists present, on the other. In this paper I aim at (...) deepening on this ongoing interbreeding, examine what is said about polysemy, particularly in the psycholinguistics literature, and then show how what we seem to know about the representation and storage of polysemous senses affects the models that we have about lexical word meaning. (shrink)

Traditional approaches tend to regard figuration (and by extension, deference in general) as an essentially marked or playful use of language, which is associated with a pronounced stylistic effect. For linguistic purposes, however, there is no reason for assigning a special place to deferred uses that are stylistically notable — the sorts of usages that people sometimes qualify with a phrase like "figuratively speaking." There is no important linguistic difference between using redcoat to refer to a British soldier and using (...) suit to refer to a corporate executive (as in "A couple of suits stopped by to talk about the new products"). What creates the stylistic effect of the latter is not the mechanism that generates it, but the marked background assumptions that license it — here, the playful presupposition that.. (shrink)