Online research in philosophy

When referring to the organization of the mental lexicon, the distinction between combinatorial rules and lexical listing for regularly versus irregularly inflected words should be further developed to account for subregular morphological processes. Moreover, the distinction may be more or less appropriate depending on the lexical component under consideration, and it is subject to interplay with other factors that are relevant in determining the representational structure of the lexical system.

In this paper I defend an account of the nature of propositional content according to which the proposition expressed by a declarative sentence is a certain type of action a speaker performs in uttering that sentence. On this view, the semantic contents of proper names turn out to be types of reference acts. By carefully individuating these types, it is possible to provide new solutions to Frege’s puzzles about names in identity- and belief-sentences.

Jerry Fodor ( Concepts: Where cognitive science went wrong . New York: Oxford University Press, 1998 ) famously argued that lexical concepts are unstructured. After examining the advantages and disadvantages of both the classical approach to concepts and Fodor’s conceptual atomism, I argue that some lexical concepts are, in fact, structured. Roughly stated, I argue that structured lexical concepts bear a necessary biconditional entailment relation to their structural constituents. I develop this account of the structure of lexical concepts within the framework of Pavel Tichý’s ( The foundations of Frege’s logic . Berlin, New York: De Gruyter, 1988 ) theory of constructions. I argue that concepts are constructions which can be combined by way of Tichý’s construction-forming operations of composition and closure and an additional operation, simplification , which I propose in section 6. The last of these construction-forming operations plays a central role in my account of lexical concept structure. Stated generally, structured lexical concepts are a result of simplifying their structural constituents.

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.

The use of lexical concepts in Levelt et al.'s model requires further refinement with regard to syntactic factors in lexical choice, the prevention of pleonasm, and the representation of near-synonyms within and across languages.

Jerry Fodor has argued that virtually all lexical concepts are innate. I argue against this position, but not, as other have done, on the grounds that the arguments against lexical decomposition upon which Fodor relies are flawed. Rather, I argue that even if lexical concepts cannot be decomposed, the possession conditions for having lexical concepts are nonetheless not innately satisfied.

In this commentary I discuss the role of types of knowledge and conceptual structures in lexical representation, revealing the explanatory potential of frame-based knowledge. Although frame-based lexical semantics is not alien to the theoretical model outlined in Jackendoff's conceptual semantics, testing its relevance to the analysis of the lexical evidence presented in his book has been left out of consideration.

Speakers retrieve words to use them in sentences. Errors in incorporating words into sentential frames are revealing with respect to the lexical units as well as the lexical retrieval mechanism; hence they constrain theories of lexical access. We present a reanalysis of a corpus of spontaneously occurring lexical exchange errors that highlights the contact points between lexical and sentential processes.

We propose a record type theoretical account of cases of copredication which have motivated the introduction of dot types in the Generative Lexicon (Asher and Pustejovsky, 2005). We will suggest that using record types gives us a simple and intuitive account of dot types and also makes a connection between copredication and the use of hypothetical contexts in a record type theoretic analysis of dynamic generalized quantifiers. We propose a view of lexical innovation which draws both on Pustejovsky’s original work on the Generative Lexicon (Pustejovsky, 1995) and the notion of resource present in the Grammatical Framework (Ranta, forthcoming).

Type-logical semantics studies linguistic meaning with the help of the theory of types. The latter originated with Russell as an answer to the paradoxes, but has the additional virtue that it is very close to ordinary language. In fact, type theory is so much more similar to language than predicate logic is, that adopting it as a vehicle of representation can overcome the mismatches between grammatical form and predicate logical form that were observed by Frege and Russell. The grammatical forms of ordinary language sentences consequently may be taken to be much less misleading than logicians in the first half of the 20th century often thought them to be. This was realized by Richard Montague, who used the theory of types to translate fragments of ordinary language into a logical language. Semantics is commonly divided into lexical semantics, which studies the meaning of words, and compositional semantics, which studies the way in which complex phrases obtain a meaning from their constituents. The strength of type-logical semantics lies with the latter, but type-logical theories can be combined with many competing hypotheses about lexical meaning, provided these hypotheses are expressed using the language of type theory.