Jordan Zlatev
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Summarize the main ideas/concepts in the
text.
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Relate to the discussion of the tradition (and
author) in the textbook (Geeraerts)
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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
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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)
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“Neostructuralist”
 4.WordNet (Miller, Fellbaum)
 5. Explanatory Combinatorial Dictionary (Mel’cuk)
 6. Distributional Corpus Analysis
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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)
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Words as “interfaces” across modules.
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Conceptual
system
Linguistic
system
Visual/
3D format
Intersubjective
information
Body
format
Subjective
information
Based on Jackendoff (1992: 14)
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run
V
_<PPj>
[event GO ([THING]i, [PATH]j)
put
V
_<NPj> <PPk>
[event CAUSE ([THING], [event GO [THING]j,
[PATH]k)
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EVENT
GO
THING
PATH
Path-function (TO, FROM, VIA)
PLACE
Place-function (IN, ON, ABOVE, BELOW)
THING (Time, Property)
STATE
BE
THING
PLACE
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 nonuniversal “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 context
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“provides a model for the interaction of word
knowledge and world knowledge in actual
contexts of use” (:143)
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“More explicitly than Jackendoff, the twolevel 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. 151
Extensions
 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)
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Undergenerating
 Waiting for a bus. (other reasons that taking it)
But need the model account for such clearly
pragmatic interpretations?
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Primitives like “physical object”
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English, and other European languages
Nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs
Each entry:
 Synset
 Definition
 Example
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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 (deadfaculty, 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: worldknowledge, but Cap?
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“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 systembased approach” (: 168)
But note: “… of a language” (Sinclair)
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Collocation: “a lexical relation between two
or more words which have a tendency to cooccur 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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