A plea for complex categories in ontologies

Abstract

This paper investigates an issue at the interface between language and ontology. It is argued that the phenomenon of 'inherent polysemy' observed in lexical semantics for nouns such as book or country actually is a deeper phenomenon grounded on specific ontological relations involving the entities referred to. It is shown that this phenomenon emerges not only in language but also in most available ontologies. Beyond the 'dot types' used in some linguistic theories to account for logical polysemy, it is proposed to introduce 'complex categories' in ontologies in order to solve incoherence and inconsistency issues appearing when this phenomenon is not acknowledged and to characterize complex categories on the basis of formal ontology relations.

Polysemy and co-predication

“…Some authors indeed argue that books are mereological compounds or complex entities formed by two entities, a volume and a particular kind of content (Arapinis & Vieu 2015;Gotham 2017). This kind of proposal would answer our question (i) above: when co-predication is possible and when it is not.…”

“…However, this is not a completely satisfactory answer, because we still need to know the rationale for including some complex entities in our ontology (while we exclude many others): why is there a complex entity formed by a volume and some informational content, and not a complex entity formed by a balloon and a group of people? As we will see later on, there are some interesting responses in the literature (see especially, Arapinis & Vieu 2015). Still, there are two pressing problems that affect these kinds of views.…”

“…This is a psychological approach to co-predication, an approach that has been scarcely explored in the literature. The main extant accounts of co-predication come from theoretical semantics (Pustejovsky 1995;Asher 2011;Arapinis & Vieu 2015;Gotham 2017). In this tradition, co-predicative nouns are typed as "dot types", complex types formed by two or more simple types.…”

What words mean and express: semantics and pragmatics of kind terms and verbs

“…On the other hand, it is committed to claiming that the NPs of co-predication sentences stand for what seem to be gerrymandered entities: think of a sentence such as 'Brazil is a large Portuguese-speaking republic that has deep problems associated with inequality and won five Word Championships', where 'Brazil' would stand for an entity formed by a geographical area, a group of people, a political institution, an economic system, and a football team. Some formal ontologists (Arapinis, 2013, Arapinis andVieu, 2015) try to defend that we can indeed conceive of that kind of entity as a proper thing in the world (in the way that we can conceive of a body and a person as a proper thing in the world, i.e. a human being).…”

Polysemy and word meaning: an account of lexical meaning for different kinds of content words

“…(7) Brazil is a large two-century-old Portuguese-speaking country (Arapinis and Vieu, 2015) Frisson (2015) presents a study of how we process what he calls "book" polysemies (e.g., book, manuscript, notice, journal, etc. ), with results that can be plausibly extended to at least all kinds of inherent polysemies.…”