Jordan Zlatev

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Summarize the main ideas/concepts in the text.

Relate to the discussion of the tradition (and author) in the textbook (Geeraerts)

Analyze examples from another language (e.g. Swedish) using the concepts, categories, distinctions… discussed.

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Cognitive adequacy“a type of meaning description that paid less attention to formalization, but that explicitly opted for a maximalist, encyclopedic, psychologically realist form of semantics, and that thus broke radically with the legacy of structuralism” > Chapter 5, Cognitive Semantics

Formal adequacy“theories that continue the lines set out by structuralism, but that do so with specific attention to concerns issuing from generativist semantics: the demarcation of linguistic knowledge with regard to cognition in the broader sense, and the possibility of formalizing linguistic meaning” (: 121)

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“Neogenerativist” 1.Conceptual Semantics (Jackendoff) 2. Two-level semantics (Bierwisch) 3. Generative Lexicon (Pustejovsky)

“Neostructuralist” 4.WordNet (Miller, Fellbaum) 5. Explanatory Combinatorial Dictionary

(Mel’cuk) 6. Distributional Corpus Analysis

Natural Semantic Metalanguage (Wierzbicka)

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“There is no privileged level of “linguistic semantics” at which specifically linguistic effects of meaning can be separated out from more general cognitive effects such as categorization…” (Jackendoff 1996: 104), (:138)

Words as “interfaces” across modules.

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Conceptual system

Visual/3D format

Body format

Linguisticsystem

Inter-subjective information

Subjective information

Based on Jackendoff (1992: 14)

runV_<PPj>[event GO ([THING]i, [PATH]j)

putV_<NPj> <PPk>[event CAUSE ([THING], [event GO

[THING]j, [PATH]k)7

EVENTGOTHINGPATH

Path-function (TO, FROM, VIA)PLACE

Place-function (IN, ON, ABOVE, BELOW)

THING (Time, Property) STATE

BETHINGPLACE

Place-function (IN, ON, ABOVE, BELOW)THING (Time, Property)

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A strict separation between “conceptual” and “non-conceptual” information

Conceptual primitives and structures: “innate” and “universal”

More subtle differences of meaning, such as different “manner verbs”: run, jog +walk, crawl, fly…? – should be a matter of non-universal “perceptual representations”

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Too universalist: not clear if motion verbs in all languages (Japanese, Mayan languages) have a semantic component (GO), as opposed to a pragmatic, “defeasable” implicature.

ROOM, TRAIN – “primitives”? Information about jogging – purely non-

conceptual? “need criteria to determine what enters into a

conceptual description and what can be relegated to the non-conceptual cognitive modules” (: 141)

(rather) static, with respect to context10

“provides a model for the interaction of word knowledge and world knowledge in actual contexts of use” (:143)

“More explicitly than Jackendoff, the two-level approach deals with meaning variation… accounting for polysemy and semantic flexibility is a major focus in contemporary lexical semantics (: 143).

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university Level 1 (“semantic form”):λx [PURPOSE [x, w] & advanced study [w]]

Level 2 (“conceptual structure):The university offers scholarships.λx [INSTITUTION [x] & PURPOSE [x, w]]The university lies in the centre of the

town.λx [BUILDING [x] & PURPOSE [x, w]]

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“McDonald’s University” – advanced? A counterexample, or just a “creative” use of the term university?

Contextualization requires encyclopedic knowledge (Taylor): why not? (The model does not deny this…) ? Der Palast hat die Frage bereits entschieden.The Palace has already come to a decision on the issue.

Language change – from pragmatic inference (Level 2) to semantic form (Level 1): rather an argument for keeping the levels distinct! This does requires however, more than one entry in the case when the old meaning is preserved. since(temporal) + since (causal), cf. 145

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“the most advanced approach among the formal componential theories…” (: 154)

Targetting “regular polysemy” (Apresjan), “logical polysemy” (Pustejovsky): Building-Institution Count noun – Mass noun Product-Producer Process-Result Contents-Container Telic-Atelic action Emotional state – Expressing emotional state

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Argument structure Event structure Qualia structure (descriptive features)

Formal (“what something is”) Constitutive (“what something consists of”) Telic (“the purpose”) Agentive (“how something came into

being”)

See Figure 4.2 (: 149) and example for novel, (: 155)

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Type matching Accommodation Type coercion

▪ Exploitation (using “dotted types”)▪ Introduction (making a “dotted type”)

See examples, p. 151Extensions Lexical rules: operates upon rules Metaphor Lexical Rule: “semantic type can

be anything”, but preserves qualia structure

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“profit from a broader empirical basis” (: 152)

Overgenerating as with Two-level Semantics? (if not encyclopedic

knowledge is included) Sydney began a novel / a sweater. (TELIC = write)

Undergenerating Waiting for a bus. (other reasons that taking it)

But need the model account for such clearly pragmatic interpretations?

Primitives like “physical object”

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English, and other European languages

Nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbsEach entry:

Synset Definition Example

Synonym sets (synsets): president, chairman, chairwoman, chairperson

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Hyperonyms Hyponyms Meronyms Antonyms (for adjectives, adverbs,

verbs) Entailments

Hyponyms “troponyms”: walk < stride Presupposition: succeed < try Causality: show > see

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No differentiation between different kinds of antonyms

Definitions: “the network information does not completely replace such definitional information” (: 160)

Originally, psychological adequacy, but not anymore: “a machine readable dictionary… not a model of the mental lexicon” (: 160)

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Adding “lexical functions”, e.g. head of (dead-faculty, board-chair, ship-captain…): Cap

Syntagmatic, and not only paradigmatic, differ across languages: question-ask (English) Frage-stellen (German) question-poser (French)See example of Revulsion, 162-163

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Practical Applied mostly to Russian and French Elaborate, but time-consuming (hence

WordNet is preferred for practical lexicography)

Theoretical Again: entries contain an analytic

definition Does not include part-whole relations:

world-knowledge, but Cap?22

“a collection of naturally occurring text, chosen to characterise a state or variety of a language” (Sinclair 1991: 171), (: 167)

Language on the level of parole, not langue

“a radical usage-based, rather than system-based approach” (: 168)

But note: “… of a language” (Sinclair)23

Collocation: “a lexical relation between two or more words which have a tendency to co-occur within a few words of each other in running text” (Stubbs 2002: 24)

“Node” + “collocate” (see Figure 4.3) Colligation: syntactic pattern Semantic preference: b/n the node and “a

set of semantically related words” Semantic/discourse prosody: positive vs.

negative (emotive attitude)

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Popular in cognitive science (quantitative, “objective”)

“the interaction between theoretical lexical semantics… and statistical lexical semantics is still rather restricted”

“the least structuralist of the ‘neostructuralist’ approaches” (: 176)

“Given the problems of demarcation and selection of primitives… distributional corpus analysis has the clear advantage of making contact with the probabilsitic paradigm in computational linguistics” (: 177)

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“primarily a method, not a model” (: 177)

“has not yet reached the stage where it can present a stable set of methodological procedures coupled to specific descriptive questions” (: 178)

“whether all the relevant information that language users have about the reference of words, may be retrieved from a corpus” (: 178)

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Note the biased terminology: models which aimed for distinguishing lexical meaning from general knowledge (“pragmatics 1”) and contextual usage (“pragmatics 2”) where first called “minimal”, then “parsimonious” – and then: “reductionist and exclusionary” (: 176)

Distributional corpus analysis is on other hand works in a “non-reductionist, usage-oriented way” (:177)

One could argue that the latter, especially if “radical”, abolished distinctions (semantics/pragmatics etc), reduces meaning to use, quality to quantity – and is in essence the truly reductionist approach!

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In Chapter 4, Geeraerts shows the problems with conceptual or semantic “primitives” and making clear distinctions b/n lexical meaning and (a) encyclopedia and (b) usage – but does not show

That the search for universal semantic concepts is futile

That semantics/pragmatics distinctions are not necessary – even though “unclear”, and “dynamic”

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