Intuitions and Competence in Formal Semantics

Stokhof, Martin

doi:10.4148/biyclc.v6i0.1584

Cited by 7 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 11 publications

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“…Despite the foregoing considerations being prominent in the literature, formal semantics has continued to assume that referents, truth conditions, etc., are core aspects of expression meaning. The main reason for this is the traditional centrality of supposedly 'semantic' intuitions in formal semantics (Bach, 2002), either as the main source of data or as the object of investigation ('semantic competence', for criticism see Stokhof 2011). In particular, formal semantics has attached great importance to intuitions about truth conditions (e.g., "semantics with no treatment of truth conditions is not semantics", Lewis 1972:169), a tenet going back to its roots in formal logic (e.g., Montague 1970 and the earlier work of Frege, Tarski, among others).…”

Section: Limits Of Distributional Semantics: Words Don't Refer Speakmentioning

confidence: 99%

Don’t Blame Distributional Semantics if it can’t do Entailment

Westera¹,

Boleda²

2019

Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Computational Semantics - Long Papers

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Distributional semantics has had enormous empirical success in Computational Linguistics and Cognitive Science in modeling various semantic phenomena, such as semantic similarity, and distributional models are widely used in state-of-the-art Natural Language Processing systems. However, the theoretical status of distributional semantics within a broader theory of language and cognition is still unclear: What does distributional semantics model? Can it be, on its own, a fully adequate model of the meanings of linguistic expressions? The standard answer is that distributional semantics is not fully adequate in this regard, because it falls short on some of the central aspects of formal semantic approaches: truth conditions, entailment, reference, and certain aspects of compositionality. We argue that this standard answer rests on a misconception: These aspects do not belong in a theory of expression meaning, they are instead aspects of speaker meaning, i.e., communicative intentions in a particular context. In a slogan: words do not refer, speakers do. Clearing this up enables us to argue that distributional semantics on its own is an adequate model of expression meaning. Our proposal sheds light on the role of distributional semantics in a broader theory of language and cognition, its relationship to formal semantics, and its place in computational models.

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Section: Limits Of Distributional Semantics: Words Don't Refer Speakmentioning

confidence: 99%

Don’t Blame Distributional Semantics if it can’t do Entailment

Westera¹,

Boleda²

2019

Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Computational Semantics - Long Papers

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“…The idea that linguistic expressions have conventionalized content, whether characterized in terms of some sort of mental representation,22–24 or in terms of correspondence to something in the world,25 is essential for explaining that successful communication is possible at all: without it, it would be difficult to understand how hearers respond as predictably as they do to the same sorts of communicative acts. A notion of conventionalized linguistic meaning is also useful for explaining the fact that speakers clearly have intuitions about acceptable and unacceptable uses of language26; these intuitions arguably reflect knowledge of the relevant conventions. In addition, there is little question that there are important regularities in the morphosyntax of language that allow words and phrases to be reused and combined to express new thoughts.…”

Section: Language‐centered Versus Speaker‐centered Perspectives On Meaningmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…A notion of conventionalized linguistic meaning is also useful for explaining the fact that speakers clearly have intuitions about acceptable and unacceptable uses of language 26 ; these intuitions arguably reflect knowledge of the relevant conventions. In addition, there is little question that there are important regularities in the morphosyntax of language that allow words and phrases to be reused and combined to express new thoughts.…”

Section: Language-centered Versus Speaker-centered Perspectives On Mementioning

confidence: 99%

Semantics and pragmatics

McNally

2013

WIRES Cognitive Science

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“…The idea that linguistic expressions have conventionalized content, whether characterized in terms of some sort of mental representation 22,23,24 , or in terms of correspondence to something in the world 25 , is essential for explaining that successful communication is possible at all: without it, it would be difficult to understand how hearers respond as predictably as they do to the same sorts of communicative acts. A notion of conventionalized linguistic meaning is also useful for explaining the fact that speakers clearly have intuitions about acceptable and unacceptable uses of language 26 ; these intuitions arguably reflect knowledge of the relevant conventions. In addition, there is little question that there are important regularities in the morphosyntax of language that allow words and phrases to be reused and combined to express new thoughts.…”

Section: Language--versus Speaker--centered Perspectives On Meaningmentioning

confidence: 99%

Semantics and Pragmatics

Theory of Questions

2011

Theory of Questions

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The fields of semantics and pragmatics are devoted to the study of conventionalized and context--or use--dependent aspects of natural language meaning, respectively. The complexity of human language as a semiotic system has led to considerable debate about how the semantics/pragmatics distinction should be drawn, if at all. This debate largely reflects contrasting views of meaning as a property of linguistic expressions versus something that speakers do. The fact that both views of meaning are essential to a complete understanding of language has led to a variety of efforts over the last 40 years to develop better integrated and more comprehensive theories of language use and interpretation. The most important advances have included the adaptation of propositional analyses of declarative sentences to interrogative, imperative and exclamative forms; the emergence of dynamic, game theoretic, and multi--dimensional theories of meaning; and the development of various techniques for incorporating context--dependent aspects of content into representations of context--invariant content with the goal of handling phenomena such as vagueness resolution, metaphor, and metonymy.The fields of semantics and pragmatics are devoted to the study of the semiotics of language. The fact that two separate disciplines have developed for this purpose reflects the complexity of human language as a semiotic system, as well as the debate as to how it should be analyzed. This complexity is of at least four types. First, we use language not only to represent information (or thought) to ourselves and convey it to others, but also to act on and interact with others in ways that do not directly have to do with the transmission of information, such as greetings, exclamations or orders 1,2 . Second, language is simultaneously highly systematic and flexible. On the one hand, interlocutors are under strong pressure to be consistent in their use of language to transmit messages; otherwise, communication would be more difficult and less reliable than it is. On the other, they continually innovate in using existing linguistic forms to convey new, and sometimes even radically different, messages via metaphor 3 , irony 4 , and other devices 5 . Third, even if we assume a certain stability in the relation between linguistic form and what is communicated, the immediate context of use is Related Articles Article ID Article title COGSCI--086 Lexical Semantics COGSCI--106 Semantics, Acquisition of COGSCI--201 Discourse Processing

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Intuitions and Competence in Formal Semantics

Cited by 7 publications

References 11 publications

Don’t Blame Distributional Semantics if it can’t do Entailment

Don’t Blame Distributional Semantics if it can’t do Entailment

Semantics and pragmatics

Semantics and Pragmatics

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