Names of places

The thesis advanced in this paper is that the proper names of cities or countries inherit the linguistic types of the nouns which denote the basic category of the objects the names refer to. As a result, in the case of the proper names of cities or countries, a reference by those names may select particular aspects of those objects, in the same way that book or newspaper selects the physical or informational aspects of objects in the extension of the nouns. This view is based on Asher’s and Pustejovsky’s conception of dot type semantics

Can minimalism about truth embrace polysemy?

Paul Horwich is aware of the fact that his theory as stated in his works is directly applicable only to a language in which a word, understood as a syntactic type, is connected with exactly one literal meaning. Yet he claims that the theory is expandable to include homonymy and indexicality and thus may be considered as applicable to natural language. My concern in this paper is with yet another kind of ambiguity - systematic polysemy - that assigns multiple meanings to one linguistic type. I want to combine the characteristics of systematic polysemy with the Kaplanian insight that meanings of expressions may be defined by semantic rules which assign content in context and to ask the question if minimalism about truth and meaning is compatible with such rule-based systematic polysemy. I will first explain why the expressions that exhibit rule-based systematic polysemy are difficult to combine with a truth theory that is based on a use theory of meaning before proceeding to argue that indexicals and proper names are such expressions

The polysemy of proper names

Proper names are usually considered devices of singular reference but, when considered as word-types, they also exhibit other kinds of uses. In this paper I intend to show that systematic kinds of uses of proper names considered as word-types can be accounted for by a generalized rule-based conception of systematic polysemy, one which not only postulates a multiplicity of stable senses for an expression, but also a multiplicity of content generating rules, each of which determines potentially different contents in different contexts. In contrast to the currently extant polysemous conceptions of proper names (Leckie in Philos Stud 165:1139-1160, 2013), which only encompass individual and predicative uses, the presented proposal concerns all systematic uses of proper names considered in the literature, i.e., individual, predicative, deferred, descriptive, anaphoric, and bound uses of proper names. The resulting conception accommodates referential intuition about the default individual uses of proper names while also admitting other kinds of uses without generating homonymy. It transpires that proper names are semantically underdetermined and context-sensitive expressions

Situation Semantics

chapter for the volume Introduction to the Philosophy of John Perry, ed. by Raphael van Riel and Albert NewenInternational audienceThis paper is an occasion to go back to Jon Barwise and John Perry's Situations and Attitudes (1983). The aim is to bring to the foreground the main tenets of situation semantics, and to give the reader with a fair sense of the theoretical motivations that were driving the framework, and that continue to be of major significance to Perry's larger philosophical enterprise. I start by rehearsing some of the central aspects of what can be described as the Fregean heritage, which is important in order to understand the context in which situation semantics saw light, and to appreciate the almost revolutionary nature of some of the ideas behind it. After having clarified the background, I turn to one of the main motivations behind situation semantics: the search for an account of meaning that relies upon an account of information, where the latter is crucially driven by the task of explaining how cognitive agents like us are led to act in ways they do, given how they are attuned to their environment

Names of institutions

This paper advances the thesis that the proper names of some institutions, such as the names of universities, heads of state and certain positions or agencies, inherit the linguistic types of the nouns which denote the basic category of the objects that the names refer to, e.g.,"university", "school" or "company". A reference by those names may select particular aspects of institutions, in the same way that "city" or "book" selects the physical, legal or informational aspects of objects in the extension of the nouns. This view is based on Asher’s and Pustejovsky’s conception of dot-type semantics

Word meaning and concept expressed

The concept expressed by the use of a word in a context often diverges from its lexically encoded context-independent meaning: it may be more specific or more general (or a combination of both) than the lexical meaning. Grasping the intended concept involves a pragmatic process of relevance-driven adjustment or modulation of the lexical meaning in interaction with the rest of the utterance and with contextual information. The issue addressed here is the nature of the input to the pragmatic process of meaning adjustment, that is, the nature of the standing (encoded) meaning of the word type. The widespread assumption that lexical meaning is conceptual, hence directly expressible, is challenged and a case made for the merits of an account of word type meaning in non-conceptual terms

On Polysemy: A Philosophical, Psycholinguistic, and Computational Study

Most words in natural languages are polysemous, that is they have related but different meanings in different contexts. These polysemous meanings (senses) are marked by their structuredness, flexibility, productivity, and regularity. Previous theories have focused on some of these features but not all of them together. Thus, I propose a new theory of polysemy, which has two components. First, word meaning is actively modulated by broad contexts in a continuous fashion. Second, clustering arises from contextual modulations of a word and is then entrenched in our long term memory to facilitate future production and processing. Hence, polysemous senses are entrenched clusters in contextual modulation of word meaning and a word is polysemous if and only if it has entrenched clustering in its contextual modulation. I argue that this theory explains all the features of polysemous senses. In order to demonstrate more thoroughly how clusters emerge from meaning modulation during processing and provide evidence for this new theory, I implement the theory by training a recurrent neural network (RNN) that learns distributional information through exposure to a large corpus of English. Clusters of contextually modulated meanings emerge from how the model processes individual words in sentences. This trained model is validated against a human-annotated corpus of polysemy, focusing on the gradedness and flexibility of polysemous sense individuation, a human-annotated corpus of regular polysemy, focusing on the regularity of polysemy, and behavioral findings of offline sense relatedness ratings and online sentence processing. Last, the implication to philosophy of this new theory of polysemy is discussed. I focus on the debate between semantic minimalism and semantic contextualism. I argue that the phenomenon of polysemy poses a severe challenge to semantic minimalism. No solution is foreseeable if the minimalist thesis is kept, and the existence of contextual modulation is denied within the literal truth condition of an utterance

The heterogeneity of procedural meaning

The distinction in relevance theory between two kinds of encoded meaning, conceptual and procedural, has evolved so that more and more components of encoded meaning, both linguistic and non-linguistic, are now taken to be procedural (non-conceptual). I trace these developments and assess the extent to which these diverse elements share properties that distinguish them from concept-expressing words. While the notion of procedural encoding has lost some of its original distinctiveness, it may make sense to think of all encoded meaning as procedural (including the meaning of concept-expressing words), but this necessitates the drawing of new clarifying distinctions among kinds of procedural meaning