The Language of Word Meaning

This collection of contributions addresses the problem of words and their meaning.

Federica Busa (Edited by), Pierrette Bouillon (Edited by)

9780521080149, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 8 September 2008

408 pages, 41 b/w illus. 9 tables
22.9 x 15.2 x 2.3 cm, 0.3 kg

Review of the hardback: 'Editors Bouillon and Busa deserve high praise for their selection of a wide range of divergent views on this subject, some of which are antithetical to their own beliefs … This book … provides a thorough and even-handed account of the enigmatic question of world meaning. Moreover, it offers some reasonable ways to address this topic.' Journal of Literary Semantics

This volume is a collection of original contributions from outstanding scholars in linguistics, philosophy and computational linguistics exploring the relation between word meaning and human linguistic creativity. The papers present different aspects surrounding the question of what is word meaning, a problem that has been the centre of heated debate in all those disciplines that directly or indirectly are concerned with the study of language and of human cognition. The discussions are centred around a view of the mental lexicon, as outlined in the Generative Lexicon theory (Pustejovsky, 1995), which proposes a unified model for defining word meaning. The individual contributors present their evidence for a generative approach as well as critical perspectives, which provides for a volume where word meaning is not viewed only from a particular angle or from a particular concern, but from a wide variety of topics, each introduced and explained by the editors.

1. Preface James Pustejovsky
2. Introduction: word meaning and creativity Pierrette Bouillon and Federica Busa
Part I. Linguistic Creativity and the Lexicon: 3. Introduction Federica Busa and Pierrette Bouillon
4. Chomsky on the creative aspect of language use and its implications for lexical semantic studies James McGilvray
5. The emptiness of the lexicon: critical reflections on J. Pustejovsky's 'The Generative Lexicon' Jerry A. Fodor and Ernie Lepore
6. Generativity and explanation in semantics: a reply to Fodor and Lepore James Pustejovsky
7. The 'Fodor'-FODOR fallacy bites back Yorick Wilks
Part II. The Syntax of Word Meaning: 8. Introduction Federica Busa and Pierrette Bouillon
9. Type construction and the logic of concepts James Pustejovsky
10. Underspecification, context selection and generativity Jacques Jayez
11. Qualia and the structuring of verb meaning Pierrette Bouillon and Federica Busa
12. Sense variation and lexical semantics generative operations Patrick Saint-Dizier
13. Individuation by partitive constructions in Spanish Salvador Climent
14. Event co-reference in causal discourses Laurence Danlos
Part III. Interfacing the Lexicon: 15. Introduction Federica Busa and Pierrette Bouillon
16. Metaphor, creative understanding and the generative lexicon Julius M. Moravcsik
17. Metaphor in discourse Nicholas Asher and Alex Lascarides
18. Syntax and metonymy Jerry Hobbs
19. Generative lexicon meets corpus data: the case of non-standard word uses Adam Kilgarriff
Part IV. Building Resources: 20. Introduction Federica Busa and Pierrette Bouillon
21. Generative lexicon and the SIMPLE model: developing semantic resources for NLP Federica Busa, Nicoletta Calzolari and Alessando Lenci
22. Lexicography informs lexical semantics: the SIMPLE experience Nilda Ruimy, Elisabetta Gola and Monica Monachini
23. Condensed meaning in EuroWordNet Piek Vossen.

Subject Areas: Computer science [UY], Computational linguistics [CFX]