Saussurean and Chomskyan “conduit” views of meaning in communication, dominant in much of expert and lay linguistic semantics, presuppose a simple, closed and linear system in which outcomes can be predicted and explained in terms of finite sets of rules. Summarizing critical traditions of scholarship, notably those driven by Bateson’s view of systems infused with more recent linguistic-anthrop...

It is a common view that radical contextualism about linguistic meaning is incompatible with a compositional explanation of linguistic comprehension. Recently, some philosophers of language have proposed theories of ‘pragmatic’ compositionality challenging this assumption. This paper takes a close look at a prominent proposal of this kind due to François Recanati. The objective is to give a pla...

A person who knows a word knows much more than its meaning and pronunciation. The contexts in which a word can be used to express a particular meaning are a critical component of word knowledge. The ability to exploit context in order to determine meaning and resolve potential ambiguities is not a uniquely linguistic ability, but it is dramatically illustrated in the ease with which native spea...

There is an argument (first presented by Fitch), which tries to show by formal means that the anti-realistic thesis that every truth might possibly be known, is equivalent to the unacceptable thesis that every truth actually is known (at some time in the past, present or future). First, the argument is presented and some proposals for the solution of Fitch’s Paradox are briefly discussed. Then,...

Whether computational algorithms such as latent semantic analysis (LSA) can both extract meaning from language and advance theories of human cognition has become a topic of debate in cognitive science, whereby accounts of symbolic cognition and embodied cognition are often contrasted. Albeit for different reasons, in both accounts the importance of statistical regularities in linguistic surface...

In this paper, we propose a formal representation of the meaning of sentences involving conceptual metaphors in the context of the research line of Computing with Words and Perceptions. Conceptual metaphors are mappings between conceptual domains that are common in everyday natural language usage. They are not just a matter of lexico-grammar stratum but of representation and processing in the s...

This paper presents a question generation system based on the approach of semantic rewriting. State-of-the-art deep linguistic parsing and generation tools are employed to map natural language sentences into their meaning representations in the form of Minimal Recursion Semantics (mrs) and vice versa. By carefully operating on the semantic structures, we obtain a principled way of generating qu...

This work aims to present an approach for the retrieval of bilingual Spanish-English information based on EuroWordNet and basing itself on another linguistic source such as SemCor, the latter used to calculate the translation probability in words that share same meaning in EuroWordNet. It is, therefore, about evaluating the linguistic aid SemCor, of long-standing tradition in IR tasks, in a bil...

Syntax is the cognitive capacity of human beings that allows us to connect linguistic meaning with linguistic form. The study of syntax is a huge field that has generated a great deal of empirical and theoretical work over the decades. This article outlines why understanding our syntactic capacity is important to cognitive science in general and why the data of syntactic research is to be taken...

A particular meaning can be realized by morphosyntactically distinct expressions across languages. One of the challenges for cross-linguistic research is to account for convergence in meaning in light of morphosyntactic variation. This paper examines cross-linguistic variation in the distribution and interpretation of tense in temporal adjunct clauses (TACs, e.g. English John crossed the street...