Forms of meaning, meaning of forms

Abstract

If work in psychology has clearly brought to light that`conceptual exibility' exists in the categorization of objects, which led to re-questioning the traditional conception of categorization which considers rigid and discontinuous categories, it is not the case in linguistics and psycholinguistics. We propose, through highlighting the role of analogy in the categorization of verbs, to defend the idea of semantic¯exibility which constitutes a linguistic counterpart to psychologists' advances on categorization. Accordingly, it is shown that the production of`metaphoric' verbal utterances by adults and more particularly by 2/3-year-old children re¯ects analogical categorization of verbs which makes it possible to argue in favour of a computationa l model of the role of analogy in the semantic network of the verb lexicon.

A Mathematical Model of Historical Semantics and the Grouping of Word Meanings into Concepts

“…Our mathematical model of historical semantics provides a very plausible explanation for this general rule. Various mathematical models of the evolution of networks have been proposed in recent years which explain other statistical phenomena in linguistics, such as the small-worlds property of semantic nets (Gaume et al 2002). It is worth pointing out that Price's (1976) classical model for the number of journal articles with s citations is mathematically identical to our predicted value of N s if we set α = 1.…”

Hierarchy in Lexical Organisation of Natural Languages

“…It can also be a more general semantic proximity relation, mixing syntagmatic and paradigmatic dimensions, as is the case when two words are linked if one appears in the definition of the other in a given general dictionary (cf. Gaume et al, 2002).…”

“…This measure, that he called proxemy (Gaume 2002(Gaume , 2003(Gaume , 2004, is well suited for small world graphs because it relies on the structural properties of the graph. We know that somehow two nodes are never far from one another in a small world graph, since the characteristic path length is small.…”

Word sense disambiguation using a dictionary for sense similarity measure

“…It is a stochastic method for the study of so-called hierarchical small-world graphs (Gaume et al, 2002) (see also the next section). The idea is to see a graph as a Markov chain whose states are the graph nodes and whose transitions are its edges, with equal probabilities.…”