Language for God explores the ways language and images influence who we are and how we live. It declares the necessity of language and images for God that are expansive and inclusive of all genders. Lutheran perspectives are used as a compass to offer scriptural, theological, and historical insights to advance the reformation of Christian language.

A pioneer in the field, Christian Metz applies insights of structural linguistics to the language of film. "The semiology of film . . . can be held to date from the publication in 1964 of the famous essay by Christian Metz, 'Le cinema: langue ou langage?'"--Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, Times Literary Supplement "Modern film theory begins with Metz."--Constance Penley, coeditor of Camera Obscura "Any consideration of semiology in relation to the particular field signifying practice of film passes inevitably through a reference (...) to the work of Christian Metz. . . . The first book to be written in this field, [ Film Language ] is important not merely because of this primacy but also because of the issues it raises . . . issues that have become crucial to the contemporary argument."--Stephen Heath, Screen. (shrink)

This volume deals with the connection between thinking-and-speaking and our form of life. All contributions engage with Wittgenstein’s approach to this topic. As a whole, the volume takes a stance against both biological and ethnological interpretations of the notion "form of life" and seeks to promote a broadly logico-linguistic understanding instead. The structure of this book is threefold. Part one focuses on lines of thinking that lead from Wittgenstein’s earlier thought to the concept of form of life in his later (...) work. Contributions to part two examine the concrete philosophical function of this notion as well as the ways in which it differs from cognate concepts. Contributions to part three put Wittgenstein’s notion of form of life in perspective by relating it to phenomenology, ordinary language philosophy and problems in contemporary analytic philosophy. (shrink)

Christian Marazzi's first book: a post-Fordist classic on the roots to economic crises in the contemporary age. Communication as work: we have recently experienced a profound transformation in the processes of production. While the assembly line excluded any form of linguistic productivity, today, there is no production without communication. The new technologies are linguistic machines. This revolution has produced a new kind of worker who is not a specialist but is versatile and infinitely adaptable. If standardized mass production was dominant (...) in the past, today we produce an array of different goods corresponding to specific consumer niches. This is the post-Fordist model described by Christian Marazzi in Capital and Affects. Tracing the development of this new model of labor from Toyota plants in Japan to the most recent innovations, Marazzi's critique goes beyond political economy to encompass issues related to social life, political engagement, democratic institutions, interpersonal relations, and the role of language in liberal democracies. This translation at long last makes Marazzi's first book available to English readers. Capital and Affects stands not only as the foundation to Marazzi's subsequent work, but as foundational work in post-Fordist literature, with an analysis startlingly relevant to today's troubled economic times. This Semiotext edition includes the afterword Marazzi wrote for the 1999 Italian edition. (shrink)

Language Change in the Wake of Empire: Syriac in Its Greco-Roman Context. By Aaron Michael Butts. Linguistic Studies in Ancient West Semitic, vol. 11. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2016. Pp. xvii + 292. $59.50.

Predictive Processing (PP) is an increasingly influential neurocognitive-computational framework. PP research has so far focused predominantly on lower level perceptual, motor, and various psychological phenomena. But PP seems to face a “scale-up challenge”: How can it be extended to conceptual thought, language, and other higher cognitive competencies? Compositionality, arguably a central feature of conceptual thought, cannot easily be accounted for in PP because it is not couched in terms of classical symbol processing. I argue, using the example of (...) class='Hi'>language, that there is no strong reason to think that PP cannot be scaled up to higher cognition. I suggest that the tacitly assumed common-sense conception of language as Generative Grammar (“folk linguistics”) and its notion of composition leads to the scale-up concerns. Fodor’s Language of Thought Hypothesis (LOTH) plays the role of a cognitive computational paradigm for folk linguistics. Therefore, we do not take LOTH as facing problems with higher cognition, at least with regard to compositionality. But PP can plausibly play the role of a cognitive-computational paradigm for an alternative conception of language, namely Construction Grammar. If Construction Grammar is a plausible alternative to folk linguistics, then PP is not in a worse position than LOTH. (shrink)

The irreducibility of language : the history of rhetoric in the age of typewriters -- The failures of empiricism : language, science, and the philosophical tradition -- What is a trope? : the discourse of metaphor and the language of the body -- The nervous systems of modern consciousness : metaphor, physiology, and mind -- Interpretation and life : outlines of an anthropology of knowledge.

Does thought depend on language? Primarily as a consequence of the cognitive turn in empirical disciplines like psychology and ethology, many current empirical researchers and empirically minded philosophers tend to answer this question in the negative. This book rejects this mainstream view and develops a philosophical argument in favor of a universal dependence of language on thought. In doing so, it comprises insights of two primary representatives of 20 th century and contemporary philosophy, namely Donald Davidson and Robert (...) Brandom. Barth offers an introduction to the debate concerning the language-dependence of thought and lays the methodological foundation for the subsequent argument in favor of a universal dependence of thought on language, presenting an account and defense of the transcendental method in reference to the writings of Peter F. Strawson. He then offers a transcendental argument in favor of a universal language-dependence of thought, beginning with a reevaluation of a basic idea for an argument originally presented by Donald Davidson. Later, two main objections to the conclusion of this transcendental argument are addressed and rejected using Robert Brandom’s inferentialist and normativist account of thought and language. In the course of doing so, the recent debate on Brandom’s work is addressed extensively, and main objections to Brandom’s work are presented and answered. (shrink)

We prove completeness for some language-theoretic models of the full Lambek calculus and its various fragments. First we consider syntactic concepts and syntactic concepts over regular languages, which provide a complete semantics for the full Lambek calculus \. We present a new semantics we call automata-theoretic, which combines languages and relations via closure operators which are based on automaton transitions. We establish the completeness of this semantics for the full Lambek calculus via an isomorphism theorem for the syntactic concepts (...) lattice of a language and a construction for the universal automaton recognizing the same language. Finally, we use automata-theoretic semantics to prove completeness of relation models of binary relations and finite relation models for the Lambek calculus without and with empty antecedents and \), thus solving a problem left open by Pentus. (shrink)

An updated edition of a groundbreaking work on the global financial crisis from a postfordist perspective. The 2010 English-language edition of Christian Marazzi's The Violence of Financial Capitalism made a groundbreaking work on the global financial crisis available to an expanded readership. This new edition has been updated to reflect recent events, up to and including the G20 summit in July 2010 and the broad consensus to reduce government spending that emerged from it. Marazzi, a leading figure in the (...) European postfordist movement, argues that the processes of financialization are not simply irregularities between the traditional categories of wages, rent, and profit, but rather a new type of accumulation adapted to the processes of social and cognitive production today. The financial crisis, he contends, is a fundamental component of contemporary accumulation and not a classic lack of economic growth. Marazzi shows that individual debt and the management of financial markets are actually techniques for governing the transformations of immaterial labor, general intellect, and social cooperation. The financial crisis has radically undermined the very concept of unilateral and multilateral economico-political hegemony, and Marazzi discusses efforts toward a new geomonetary order that have emerged around the globe in response. Offering a radically new understanding of the current stage of international economics as well as crucial post-Marxist guidance for confronting capitalism in its newest form, The Violence of Financial Capitalism is a valuable addition to the contemporary arsenal of postfordist thought. This edition includes the glossary of the esoteric neolanguage of financial capitalism—”Words in Crisis,” from “AAA” to “toxic asset”—written for the first English-language edition, and offers a new afterword by Marazzi. (shrink)

The four contributions in this special issue on Argumentation Through Languages and Cultures deals with clear cases of such argumentative situations as they develop in different cultures and language groups. One of these papers comes from the Inuit oral culture; three papers from written cultures, Chinese, Muslim and Indian cultures. Among written cultures, the Indian and Muslim cultures have developed sophisticated theories of argument, while the Chinese culture, according to Graham, combined “a sense of rigorous proof with the indifference (...) to logical forms”. (shrink)

Natural scientific psychology grew out of an effort to objectify language. The ultimate effect of its methodological innovations was to distance the reader from a primordial poetic experience of the world and from a cultural heritage whose primary task it was to cultivate that experience. We make use of the poetics and the phenomenological thought of Gaston Bachelard in order to place poetry and literature in a more fruitful relationship to psychology.

The ``doctrinal paradox'' or ``discursive dilemma'' shows that propositionwise majority voting over the judgments held by multiple individuals on some interconnected propositions can lead to inconsistent collective judgments on these propositions. List and Pettit (2002) have proved that this paradox illustrates a more general impossibility theorem showing that there exists no aggregation procedure that generally produces consistent collective judgments and satisfies certain minimal conditions. Although the paradox and the theorem concern the aggregation of judgments rather than preferences, they invite comparison (...) with two established results on the aggregation of preferences: the Condorcet paradox and Arrow's impossibility theorem. We may ask whether the new impossibility theorem is a special case of Arrow's theorem, or whether there are interesting disanalogies between the two results. In this paper, we compare the two theorems, and show that they are not straightforward corollaries of each other. We further suggest that, while the framework of preference aggregation can be mapped into the framework of judgment aggregation, there exists no obvious reverse mapping. Finally, we address one particular minimal condition that is used in both theorems – an independence condition – and suggest that this condition points towards a unifying property underlying both impossibility results. (shrink)

This book examines the epistemic function of perception and the relation between language and conceptual thought, and provides new ways of conceptualizing the Buddhist defense of the reflexivity thesis of consciousness: namely, that each cognitive event is to be understood as involving a pre-reflective implicit awareness of its own occurrence.

In this paper I will introduce a practical explication for the notion of expertise. At first, I motivate this attempt by taking a look on recent debates which display great disagreement about whether and how to define expertise in the first place. After that I will introduce the methodology of practical explications in the spirit of Edward Craig’s Knowledge and the state of nature along with some conditions of adequacy taken from ordinary and scientific language. This eventually culminates in (...) the respective explication of expertise according to which this term essentially refers to a certain kind of service-relation. This is why expertise should be considered as a predominantly social kind. This article will end up with a discussion of advantages and prima facie plausible objections against my account of expertise. (shrink)

In _An Introduction to Kant’s Aesthetics_, Christian Wenzel discusses and demystifies Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment, guiding the reader each step of the way and placing key points of discussion in the context of Kant’s other work. Explains difficult concepts in plain language, using numerous examples and a helpful glossary. Proceeds in the same order as Kant’s text for ease of reference and comprehension. Includes an illuminating foreword by Henry E. Allison. Offers twenty-six further-reading sections, commenting briefly (...) on books and articles from the English, German, and French, that are relevant for each topic Provides an extensive bibliography and a chapter summarizing Kant's main points. (shrink)

Predictive processing, an increasingly popular paradigm in cognitive sciences, has focused primarily on giving accounts of perception, motor control and a host of psychological phenomena, including consciousness. But higher cognitive processes, like conceptual thought, language, and logic, have received only limited attention to date and PP still stands disconnected from a huge body of research in those areas. In this thesis, I aim to address this gap and I attempt to go some way towards developing and defending a cognitive-computational (...) approach to higher cognition within the predictive processing paradigm. To test its explanatory potential, I apply it to a range of linguistic and conceptual phenomena. I proceed in three steps. First, I lay out an account of concepts and suggest how concepts are represented, how they can be context-sensitively processed, and how the apparent diversity of formats arise. Secondly, I propose how paradigmatic higher cognitive competencies, like language and logical reasoning, could fit into the PP picture. Thirdly, I apply the PP account of concepts and language to a range of linguistic-conceptual phenomena as test cases, namely: metaphor, the semantic paradox (specifically the Liar Paradox) and copredication. Finally, I discuss some challenges and objections to the PP framework as applied to higher cognition and in general. (shrink)

The classic programme of conceptual engineering (Cappelen, Herman. 2018. Fixing Language: An Essay on Conceptual Engineering. Oxford: Oxford University Press; Eklund, Matti. 2021. “Conceptual Engineering.” In The Routledge Handbook of Social and Political Philosophy of Language, edited by Justin Khoo, and Rachel Sterken, 15–30. London: Routledge) envisages a two-stage ameliorating process. First, we assess ‘F’ and determine what the term should express. Second, we bring it about that ‘F’ expresses what it should express. The second stage gives rise (...) to a practical challenge: the implementation challenge. Engineering advocates need to explain by what means they can implement specific conceptual changes in the natural language shared by a community – a feat Herman Cappelen (2018. Fixing Language: An Essay on Conceptual Engineering. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020; “Conceptual Engineering: The Master Argument.” In Conceptual Engineering and Conceptual Ethics, edited by Alexis Burgess, Herman Cappelen, and David Plunkett, 132–151. Oxford: Oxford University Press) argues to be beyond our understanding and control both on an externalist and on an internalist meta-semantics. I devise a new answer to the implementation challenge. Enlisting the influential theory of social norms by Cristina Bicchieri, I argue that engineering social norms in Bicchieri’s technical sense amounts to an effective, specific, and feasible means to implement specific conceptual change, at least on internalist premises. I also argue that Bicchieri’s social norms are an essential addition to the more familiar conventions and moral norms when it comes to conceptual engineering. (shrink)

This article extends the definition of sensationalism to print media by arguing that language intensifiers may be an aspect of sensationalism. In addition, this paper investigates if an indirect effect can be established by which sensationalistic message features influence news reception through the perception of sensationalism. Two between-subjects experiments show that sensationalistic message features like intensifiers increase perceived language intensity. In experiment 1, intensifiers had a negative effect on news article appreciation, which was not influenced by PLI. Experiment (...) 2 revealed positive indirect effects of intensifiers through PLI on newsworthiness and news article appreciation. (shrink)

This paper is a reflexion on the computability of natural language semantics. It does not contain a new model or new results in the formal semantics of natural language: it is rather a computational analysis, in the context for type-logical grammars, of the logical models and algorithms currently used in natural language semantics, defined as a function from a grammatical sentence to a set of logical formulas—because a statement can be ambiguous, it can correspond to multiple formulas, (...) one for each reading. We argue that as long as we do not explicitly compute the interpretation in terms of possible world models, one can compute the semantic representation of a given statement, including aspects of lexical meaning. This is a very generic process, so the results are, at least in principle, widely applicable. We also discuss the algorithmic complexity of this process. (shrink)

Most discussions frame the Liar Paradox as a formal logical-linguistic puzzle. Attempts to resolve the paradox have focused very little so far on aspects of cognitive psychology and processing, because semantic and cognitive-psychological issues are generally assumed to be disjunct. I provide a motivation and carry out a cognitive-computational treatment of the liar paradox based on a cognitive-computational model of language and conceptual knowledge within the Predictive Processing framework. I suggest that the paradox arises as a failure of synchronization (...) between two ways of generating the liar situation in two different PP sub-models, one corresponding to language processing and the other to the processing of meaning and world-knowledge. In this way, I put forward the claim that the liar sentence is meaningless but has an air of meaningfulness. I address the possible objection that the proposal violates the Principle of Unrestricted Compositionality, which purportedly regulates the conceptual competence of thinkers. (shrink)

Previous research has shown that language comprehenders resolve reference quickly and incrementally, but not much is known about the neural processes and representations that are involved. Studies of visual short-term memory suggest that access to the representation of an item from a previously seen display is associated with a negative evoked potential at posterior electrodes contralateral to the spatial location of that item in the display. In this paper we demonstrate that resolving the reference of a noun phrase in (...) a recently seen visual display is associated with an event-related potential that is analogous to this effect. Our design was adapted from the visual world paradigm: in each trial, participants saw a display containing three simple objects, followed by a question about the objects, such as Was the pink fish next to a boat?, presented word by word. Questions differed in whether the color adjective allowed the reader to identify the referent of the noun phrase or not (i.e., whether one or more objects of the named color were present). Consistent with our hypothesis, we observed that reference resolution by the adjective was associated with a negative evoked potential at posterior electrodes contralateral to spatial location of the referent, starting approximately 333 ms after the onset of the adjective. The fact that the laterality of the effect depended upon the location of the referent within the display suggests that reference resolution in visual domains involves, at some level, a modality-specific representation. In addition, the effect gives us an estimate of the time course of processing from perception of the written word to the point at which its meaning is brought into correspondence with the referential domain. (shrink)

The following interview was conducted by Christian Diehm in the home of Arne Naess near Oslo, Norway, in December of 2001. At eighty-nine years of age, Naess was preparing for the English-language release of his latest book, Life’s Philosophy. We are pleased to provide a transcript of a large part of the conversations that spanned two afternoon dialogues.

Most discussions frame the Liar Paradox as a formal logical-linguistic puzzle. Attempts to resolve the paradox have focused very little so far on aspects of cognitive psychology and processing, because semantic and cognitive-psychological issues are generally assumed to be disjunct. I provide a motivation and carry out a cognitive-computational treatment of the liar paradox based on a model of language and conceptual knowledge within thePredictive Processing(PP) framework. I suggest that the paradox arises as a failure of synchronization between two (...) ways of generating the liar situation in two different (idealized) PP sub-models, one corresponding to language processing and the other to the processing of meaning and world-knowledge. In this way, I put forward the claim that the liar sentence is meaningless but has an air of meaningfulness. I address the possible objection that the proposal violates thePrinciple of Unrestricted Compositionality, which purportedly regulates the conceptual competence of thinkers. (shrink)

Most discussions frame the Liar Paradox as a formal logical-linguistic puzzle. Attempts to resolve the paradox have focused very little so far on aspects of cognitive psychology and processing, because semantic and cognitive-psychological issues are generally assumed to be disjunct. I provide a motivation and carry out a cognitive-computational treatment of the liar paradox based on a model of language and conceptual knowledge within the Predictive Processing framework. I suggest that the paradox arises as a failure of synchronization between (...) two ways of generating the liar situation in two different PP sub-models, one corresponding to language processing and the other to the processing of meaning and world-knowledge. In this way, I put forward the claim that the liar sentence is meaningless but has an air of meaningfulness. I address the possible objection that the proposal violates the Principle of Unrestricted Compositionality, which purportedly regulates the conceptual competence of thinkers. (shrink)

Many different methodological approaches have been proposed to infer the presence of consciousness in non-human systems. In this paper, a version of the theory-heavy approach is defended. Theory-heavy approaches rely heavily on considerations from theories of consciousness to make inferences about non-human consciousness. Recently, the theory-heavy approach has been critiqued in the form of Birch's (Noûs, 56(1): 133-153, 2022) dilemma of demandingness and Shevlin's (Mind & Language, 36(2): 297-314, 2021) specificity problem. However, both challenges implicitly assume an inapt characterization (...) of the theory-heavy approach. I argue that an alternative characterization of the approach, what I call a credence-based theory-heavy approach, avoids these challenges. Theorists can generate interpretations of their theory, at different levels of generality, and operationalize these into theory-informed markers. These theory-informed are assigned a likelihood and are used to assess the probability that a target system is conscious. In providing this characterization, and mapping out the possible ways in which a credence-based theory-heavy approach can be fleshed out, the aim is to situate the theory-heavy approach as a more compelling approach than it is currently being perceived as. Our attention, then, needs to towards remaining challenges such as the consensus problem and the problem of calibrating the likelihoods associated with theory-informed markers. I also explore methodological pluralism and assess how the credence-based theory-heavy approach can benefit from other methodological approaches. (shrink)

I first argue that there are many true claims of the form: Φ-ing would be morally required, if anything is. I then explain why the following conditional-type is true: If φ-ing would be morally required, if anything is, then anything is actually morally required. These results allow us to construct valid proofs for the existence of some substantive moral facts—proofs that some particular acts really are morally required. Most importantly, none of my argumentation presupposes any substantive moral claim; I use (...) only plausible claims that most moral skeptics and error theorists can and do accept. The final section diagnoses why my arguments work. Here, I offer an explanation for the supervenience of the moral on the non-moral that may help those worried that the strategy is a sophisticated trick. I conclude by considering two objections. In replying to these objections, I explain why the strategy may allow us to demonstrate more than “obvious” moral truths, and why it may also address a stronger version of error theory, according to which, moral truths are not possible. (shrink)

The goal of this chapter is to offer the first detailed critical assessments of the CAPS model from a philosophical perspective. I will argue for the following claim: using technical language, the CAPS model re-describes and finds supporting evidence for basic platitudes of commonsense folk psychology.

Tension is a major issue in the analysis of argumentative discourse in ordinary language. Tension is an operator showing that the speaker is highly involved in her speech, and wants to share her commitments, that is, wants to persuade her audience. This paper proposes a case study of an extremely tense and controversial argument with strong anti-Semitic undertones. The following sections examine the main components of tension: radicalization of arguments; exclamations; rhetorical questions; emotions. Tension is interpreted as a verdictive (...) operator resisting refutation. (shrink)

Anselm of Canterbury’s so-called ontological proofs in the Proslogion have puzzled philosophers for centuries. The famous description “something / that than which nothing greater can be conceived” is part and parcel of his argument. Most commentators have interpreted this description as a definition of God. We argue that this view, which we refer to as “definitionism”, is a misrepresentation. In addition to textual evidence, the key point of our argument is that taking the putative definition as what Anselm intended it (...) to be – namely a description of a content of faith – allows getting a clear view of the discursive status and argumentative structure of Proslogion 2–4, as well as making sense of an often neglected part of the argument. (shrink)

Theory‐of‐mind (ToM) is an integral part of social cognition, but how it develops remains a critical question. There is evidence that children can gain insight into ToM through experience, including language training and explanatory interactions. But this still leaves open the question of how children gain these insights—what processes drive this learning? We propose that analogical comparison is a key mechanism in the development of ToM. In Experiment 1, children were shown true‐ and false‐belief scenarios and prompted to engage (...) in multiple comparisons (e.g., belief vs. world). In Experiments 2a, 2b, and 3, children saw a series of true‐ and false‐belief events, varying in order and in their alignability. Across these experiments, we found that providing support for comparing true‐ and false‐belief scenarios led to increased performance on false‐belief tests. These findings show that analogical comparison can support ToM learning. (shrink)

Cet article porte sur l'utilisation contextuelle de créole et du français à l'île de la Réunion dans l'Océan Indien. Il montre comment les enjeux situationnels induisent automatiquement l'utilisation de telle ou telle langue pour communiquer. Il souligne également que l'association commune entre langue et culture n'est pas toujours valable. Ceci est particulièrement évident avec l'exemple des personnes d'origine tamoule vivant dans l'île qui, si elles ont une ascendance endogame, véhiculent un système de valeurs très proche de leurs congénères en Inde (...) du sud, même si elles ne pratiquent plus la langue tamoule.This paper addresses the contextual use of Creole and French in the French multicultural Réunion Island in the Indian Ocean. It shows how situational stakes automatically result in the usage of a particular language to communicate. The paper also stresses that the common association between language and culture is not always accurate. This is particularly obvious when studying the example of those people originally from Tamil Nadu living on the Island who, although they have an endogamous descent, have a value system close to that of their peers in South India although they no longer speak the Tamil language. (shrink)

In this paper I will introduce a practical explication for the notion of expertise. At first, I motivate this attempt by taking a look on recent debates which display great disagreement about whether and how to define expertise in the first place. After that I will introduce the methodology of practical explications in the spirit of Edward Craig’s Knowledge and the state of nature along with some conditions of adequacy taken from ordinary and scientific language. This eventually culminates in (...) the respective explication of expertise according to which this term essentially refers to a certain kind of service-relation. This is why expertise should be considered as a predominantly social kind. This article will end up with a discussion of advantages and prima facie plausible objections against my account of expertise. (shrink)

Main description: The volume brings together papers on new developments in the theory of writing systems, above all from the perspectives of linguistics, philosophy, media theory and language education.The papers in the volume reflect on ...

L'essai est d'abord une introduction à la lecture des Recherches philosophiques de Wittgenstein (écrites entre 1936 et 1950), Recherches qui se réclament de l'ordinaire du langage et de la vie, élaborent une philosophie des " jeux de langage " inscrits dans les " formes de vie ", pratiquent l'analyse critique des emplois différenciés, circonstanciés et pertinents des mots. L'essai examine aussi la transformation de la pensée de Wittgenstein : la critique de la métaphysique effectuée antérieurement par le Tractatus logico-philosophicus (publié (...) en 1921) au nom de la rigueur du calcul des propositions est à la fois prolongée et retournée contre le logicisme de ce traité : la proposition n'est qu'un " jeu de langage " parmi d'autres. L'essai insiste enfin sur l'actualité et la fécondité d'une pensée attentive avec rigueur et lucidité au langage de la vie réelle et à la diversité de ses aspects. (shrink)

This is a short introduction to a special issue of the Journal on Logic, Language and Information, dealing with "recent advances in logical and algebraic approaches to computational linguistics".

After a quick overview of the field of study known as “Lexical Semantics”, where we advocate the need of accessing additional information besides syntax and Montague-style semantics at the lexical level in order to complete the full analysis of an utterance, we summarize the current formulations of a well-known theory of that field. We then propose and justify our own model of the Generative Lexicon Theory, based upon a variation of classical compositional semantics, and outline its formalization. Additionally, we discuss (...) the theoretical place of informational, knowledge-related data supposed to exist within the lexicon as well as within discourse and other linguistic constructs. The formalization of the structure of natural language utterances around a surface form (phenogrammatics), a deep structure (tectogrammatics) and the meaning thereof as a logical form (semantics) has developed from the original theories of Curry and Montague to form coherent, type-driven models. Most of these new theories rely upon variations of the compositional analysis of the sentence: from pheno to tectogrammatics, and then to semantics. Our contribution to this work aims at giving such a model a means to overcome the problems posed by polysemous lexical units during the semantical analysis of the tectogrammatical form. Building upon an assumed “deep structure”, we formalize parts of Pustejovsky’s Generative Lexicon Theory, linguistically motivated in Pustejovsky (The generative lexicon, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1995), in a pre-processing of the semantics of the sentence. The mechanisms of Lexical Semantics we propose are an additional layer of classical Montague compositional semantics, and, as such, integrate smoothly within such an analysis; we proceed by converting the lexical data to modifiers of the logical form. This treatment of Lexical Semantics furthermore induces us to think that some sort of non-evident background knowledge of the common use of words is necessary to perform a correct semantic analysis of an utterance. This “commonsense metaphysics” would therefore not be strictly confined to pragmatics, as is often assumed. (shrink)