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Lecture 4. Formal Semantics and the Lexicon: Introduction to Issues and History, and a Case Study of Adjectives

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Lecture 4. Formal Semantics and the Lexicon: Introduction to Issues and History, and a Case Study of Adjectives Formal Semantics and Lexical Semantics, Lecture 4 Barbara H. Partee, MGU, March 28, 2013 Lecture 4. Formal Semantics and the Lexicon: Introduction to Issues and History, and a Case Study of Adjectives 1. The Lexicon in Model-theoretic Semantics. .................................................................................................... 1 1.1. Introduction and historical overview ............................................................................................................. 1 1.2. Language-World-Models. Natural language metaphysics. ........................................................................... 3 1.3. Meaning postulates. History and examples. ................................................................................................. 4 1.3.1. Meaning postulates - history. .............................................................................................................. 4 1.3.2. Meaning postulates - examples. ........................................................................................................... 5 2. Differences between lexical and compositional semantics ................................................................................. 6 2.1. Is the “semantics of syntax” autonomous? .................................................................................................... 6 2.2. How much lexical semantics does formal semantics “need”? ...................................................................... 7 3. What does formal semantics have to offer to lexical semantics? ..................................................................... 8 3.1. An early proposal for synthesizing formal and lexical semantics by Borschev and Partee .......................... 8 3.2 A more general answer, and examples ........................................................................................................... 8 4. Case study: adjective semantics ....................................................................................................................... 9 4.1. Introduction to adjective semantics ........................................................................................................... 9 4.2. Adjective classification .............................................................................................................................. 10 4.2.1. The Intersection Hypothesis. ................................................................................................................ 10 4.2.2. Nonintersective Adjectives.. ................................................................................................................ 11 4.2.3. Nonsubsective Adjectives.. .................................................................................................................. 11 4.2.4. Adjectives as Functions. Meaning postulates for adjective classes. .................................................... 11 4.3. Puzzle: Is tall intersective or subsective?. ................................................................................................... 13 Homework #2: See separate page, online on the course website. .......................................................................... 13 References .............................................................................................................................................................. 13 Reading: Partee, Barbara. 1995. Lexical semantics and compositionality. In An Invitation to Cognitive Science (Second Edition). Volume 1: Language, eds. Lila Gleitman and Mark Liberman, 311-360. Cambridge: MIT Press. http://semanticsarchive.net/Archive/jhjMGYwM/. (Barker 2003) Lexical semantics. Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science, Macmillan. (Harley 2006) Chapter 6, Lexical Semantics, from her book English Words: A Linguistic Introduction. Optional reading Dowty, David (1979) Word Meaning and Montague Grammar, Dordrecht: D.Reidel. for Chapters 6 and 8: https://udrive.oit.umass.edu/partee/Semantics_Readings/Dowty1979LexSemExcerpt.pdf . Partee, Barbara H. 2010. Privative adjectives: subsective plus coercion. In Presuppositions and Discourse: Essays offered to Hans Kamp, eds. Rainer Bäuerle, Uwe Reyle and Thomas Ede Zimmermann, 273-285. Bingley, UK: Emerald Group Publishing. http://people.umass.edu/partee/docs/ParteeInPressKampFest.pdf. Kamp, Hans, and Partee, Barbara. 1995. Prototype theory and compositionality. Cognition 57:129-191. http://bhpartee.narod.ru/kamp-partee95.pdf 1. The Lexicon in Model-theoretic Semantics. 1.1. Introduction and historical overview In logical languages like the predicate calculus (PC), the analogue of a “lexicon” is the interpretation function I that assigns a value in a model to each constant; it tells us that j denotes John, that loves denotes a certain set of ordered pairs of individuals, etc. These are extensional interpretations. In a richer intensional logic, the constants will be assigned interpretations that are intensions, functions from possible worlds to extensions – those are closer to ‘meanings’, because in order to know the intension of a word, you would have to be able to say what it applies to, given all the facts of some possible world. 1 3/28/2013 5:36 AM Formal Semantics and Lexical Semantics, Lecture 4 Barbara H. Partee, MGU, March 28, 2013 It was (Wittgenstein 1922) who said, “To know the meaning of a sentence is to know what is the case if it is true.” From this starting point, formal semanticists take the basic meaning of a lexical item to be its contribution to the truth conditions of sentences it may occur in. Formal semanticists, like logicians, don’t usually try to capture the complete meanings of lexical items, but concentrate on parts most relevant to compositionality issues. One early and influential approach was with the use of meaning postulates (Carnap 1952), which we discuss below. Montague: Only “logical words” were fully analyzed. Other lexical items were treated as logical constants. (See Lecture 3.) Some aspects of their meanings were captured via meaning postulates (though he didn’t use that term), such as the equivalence of seek and try to find. David Dowty (1979) made the first important contributions of formal semantics to the study of lexical semantics. Dowty concentrated on the issue of word-formation rules, and the puzzle of their “semi-productivity”, the fact that although there are both morphological and semantic generalizations that can be expressed by rules, they do not apply as regularly as syntactic rules do. Consider English breakable, washable, erasable – their form and meaning is connected in a regular way to break, wash, erase. But comfortable does not mean “able to be comforted”, and livable does not mean “able to be lived”. Comfortable long ago took on a meaning of its own and does not seem related to that general rule at all any more. Livable is “close”, meaning something like ‘able to be lived in comfortably’. Even washable generally has a meaning more specific than “able to be washed”; it means something like “able to be washed without any damage”. You certainly can wash a sweater that’s labelled “not washable”; you just will be very unhappy with the result. Dowty argued that the big difference between semi-productive word-formation rules and compositional syntactic and semantic rules is that the fully productive compositional rules are part of the grammar, whereas the word-formation rules are ways of “extending” the grammar. The rules may look almost identical in form, but their relation to the grammar is very different. On Dowty’s account, the semi-productive rules give the most likely meaning for a newly formed word; subsequent lexicalization can involve shifts in that meaning. Examples of lexical rules: deriving intransitive read from transitive read; inchoative verb open from adjective open; causative open from intransitive open. Dowty (1978, 1982) also helped to open up the argument of whether passive should be treated by a syntactic transformation or a lexical rule (or perhaps something in between, a “phrasal rule”, as argued by Bach (1980)). We will study Dowty’s work, and subsequent developments of it, making the semantics explicit, in Lecture 6. Problems of how much to put in the lexicon – this affects all approaches, not just formal semantics. Lexicon vs. encyclopedia. For computational linguistics, maybe ‘more is better’; for theoretical linguistics, the challenge is to find criteria for distinguishing. Hans Kamp’s work puts more into the ‘grammar’ than many others; see, for instance, (Kamp and Rossdeutscher 1994) and commentary on it in the same issue of Theoretical Linguistics, also (Kamp and Rossdeutscher 2005). Most theoretical linguists, including both formal and non- formal semanticists, focus on identifying those aspects of lexical meaning that (a) interact in 2 3/28/2013 5:36 AM Formal Semantics and Lexical Semantics, Lecture 4 Barbara H. Partee, MGU, March 28, 2013 systematic ways with syntax and/or compositional semantics, and (b) occur systematically in sizable subsets of lexical items within or across languages, and do not attempt to analyze the idiosyncratic parts of individual lexical meanings. Prototype theory (Rosch 1978) challenged the idea that the referent of a predicate is a set of entities; Rosch emphasized the vagueness of extensions, and argued that for many terms (bird, chair), meaning should be thought of in terms of ‘degree of resemblance to a prototype’. (Smith and Osherson 1984) argued that prototype theory could not provide
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