The Language of Word Meaning

by Federica Busa, Pierrette Bouillon

Overview

This volume is a collection of original contributions that address the problem of words and their meaning. This represents a still difficult and controversial area within various disciplines: linguistics, philosophy, and artificial intelligence. Although all of these disciplines have to tackle the issue, so far there is no overarching methodology agreed upon by researchers. The aim of the volume is to provide answers based on empirical linguistics methods that are relevant across all the disciplines and provide a bridge among researchers looking at word meaning from different angles.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521080149
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	09/08/2008
Series:	Studies in Natural Language Processing
Pages:	408
Product dimensions:	5.98(w) x 9.02(h) x 0.91(d)

Table of Contents

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.

Editorial Reviews

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

From the Publisher