The goal of this paper is to present a particular type of lexicon, elaborated within a formal theory of natural language called Meaning-Text Theory (MTT). This theory puts strong emphasis on the development of highly structured lexica. Computational linguistics does of course recognize the importance of the lexicon in language processing. However, MTT probably goes further in this direction tha...

I discuss the issue of meaning, and the definition of “meaning” in music. I propose that it is a mistake to import the linguistic notion of semantics into a musical context on the grounds that musical communication serves a different function and is of a different nature from linguistic communication, and that there is no evidence to support the suggestion that the two should function in a stro...

Meanings of basic expressions can be enriched by considering what the speaker could have said, but chose not to, that is, the alternatives. We report three experiments testing whether there is a single enrichment procedure that stretches across diverse linguistic phenomena. Participants were primed to understand either the basic meaning or the enriched meaning of a sentence. We found that the e...

We examine decision makers ’ use of tacit linguistic intuitions and explicit linguistic knowledge for brand name translations from English to Chinese. We present a market study, which reveals that managers intuitively use linguistic sound and meaning characteristics, that is, which sounds and meanings best fi t for the Chinese translation of the English names. A subsequent experiment shows that...

Language and concepts are intimately linked, but how do they interact? In the study reported here, we probed the relation between conceptual and linguistic processing at the earliest processing stages. We presented observers with sequences of visual scenes lasting 200 or 250 ms per picture. Results showed that observers understood and remembered the scenes' abstract gist and, therefore, their c...

The proper role of intonation in utterance interpretation should be assessed in terms of the way that intonation interacts with other linguistic phenomena, notably with syntactic form and with grammatically encoded meaning, whether conceptual meaning of a compositional nature or procedural meaning that constrains the way in which an addressee will perform deductive inferences over conceptual re...

Linguistic meaning is determined by use. But given the fact that any given expression can be used in a variety of ways, this claim marks where metasemantic inquiry begins rather than where it ends. It sets an agenda for the metasemantic project: to distinguish in a principled and explanatory way those uses that determine linguistic meaning from those that do not. The prevailing view (along with...

Most people working on linguistic meaning or communication assume that semantics and pragmatics are distinct domains, yet there is still little consensus on how the distinction is to be drawn. The position defended in this paper is that the semantics/pragmatics distinction holds between (context-invariant) encoded linguistic meaning and speaker meaning. Two other ‘minimalist’ positions on seman...

A popular tradition of studying semantic representation has been driven by the assumption that word meaning can be learned from the linguistic environment, despite ample evidence suggesting that language is grounded in perception and action. In this paper we present a comparative study of models that represent word meaning based on linguistic and perceptual data. Linguistic information is appro...

Some of the meaning of a discourse is encoded in its linguistic forms. Thls is the truth-conditional meaning of the propositions those forms express and entail. Some of the meaning is suggested (or 'implicated', as Grice would say) by the fact that the encooer expresses just those propositions in just those linguistic forms in just the given contexts [2]. The first klnd of meaning is usually la...