Bouillon P., Busa F. (eds.) The Language of Word Meaning

Cambridge University Press, 2001. — 404 p.What is the meaning of a word? How can the few hundreds of thousands of words we know be used to construct the many millions of utterances we make and understand in a lifetime? It would appear we need more words than we have available to us, if classical wisdom on this subject is to be believed. The subject, of course, is lexical semantics, and classical wisdom can often be wrong. This field has undergone a radical shift in recent years, in large part because of two developments. First, formal frameworks for word meaning have been developed that greatly simplify the description of lexical classes and their properties. Second, we have at our disposal new compositional techniques that allow us to view word meaning as an integral part of the overall process of semantic interpretation. These and other factors have made the issues relating to "the meaning of a word" some of the most central questions being addressed in the field of linguistics today. In fact, some classic issues have resurfaced with new data and arguments, such as the debate over analyticity and semantic knowledge, as well as the evidence of a distinction (or nondistinction) between lexical and world knowledge.
Waismann (1951) argued for what he called the "open texturedness" of terms. Although he was mainly interested in how the notion applies to the nonexhaustive nature of material object statements and the absence of conclusive verification conditions, there is another sense in which this is an interesting property of language and language use; the infinite variability of reference in language is the direct product of the essential incompleteness of terms and their composition. I would like to adopt this image as a characterization of what generative approaches to lexical and compositional semantics are attempting to model. From this perspective, word meanings are malleable and almost actively take on new shapes and forms in novel contexts of use.
By building a notion of "open texture" directly into word meaning, the formal mechanisms that give rise to sentence meanings will themselves ensure that both analytic and contextual aspects of interpretation are available in the model. In other words, it is the very functional nature of how words are modeled that allows them to exhibit their contextual variance, and with this enables the creative use of language.
This view of word meaning leads to an interesting comparison of two very different philosophical traditions in the study of language, namely, ordinary-language philosophy and analytic semantics. These two schools chose very different linguistic units to analyze and from which to start their theorizing concerning language. The ordinary-language philosophers studied words and the functions of words in usage situations. Analytic semantics, on the other hand, derives from the study of sentences, sentence structures, and their propositional content, what has been called the logical syntax of the language (Carnap, 1932). The apparent incompatibility of these two approaches continues to dog certain philosophers, such as Fodor (1998), and has led to a rather pessimistic lack of concern over matters lexical.
The novelty of the generative lexical approach to language is the way in which these traditions and ideas are synthesized. What generative lexicon shares with ordinary language philosophy is a focus on words and word use. What it shares with analytic semantics is of course a concentration on the formalization of rules and types into a coherent and explicable system. The debt to the generative tradition in linguistics is almost too obvious to state: that meanings are compositional and recursive in nature (Chomsky, 1995). Furthermore, the generative devices available to the semantics are both more flexible than conventional approaches to compositional semantics such as Montague Grammar and more constrained than the view resulting from an arbitrary application of lexical rules.
The chapters in this volume constitute one of the first major collections addressing the synthesis of the issues mentioned above within this new paradigm. From the perspectives of philosophy, linguistics, computational linguistics, and lexicography, the fundamental problems of the creative use of language and the open texture of word sense are confronted. Although the contributors do not all agree with the basic principles of the generativity of lexical senses and composition, they have positioned their arguments in relation to this thesis, which is both useful and informative.
If the study of language is to bring us any closer to understanding concepts and the nature of our thoughts, it will be accomplished only by appreciating the importance of word meaning and the realization that compositional semantics is sensitive to word internal knowledge. It is, therefore, the very open texture of our language that reflects the compositionality of our thought.Introduction: Word Meaning and Creativity
Linguistic Creativity and the LexiconChomsky on the Creative Aspect of Language Use and Its Implications for Lexical Semantic Studies
The Emptiness of the Lexicon: Critical Reflections on J. Pustejovsky's "The Generative Lexicon"
Generativity and Explanation in Semantics: A Reply to Fodor and Lepore
The "Fodor"-FODOR Fallacy Bites Back
The Syntax of Word MeaningType Construction and the Logic of Concepts
Underspecification, Context Selection, and Generativity
Qualia and the Structuring of Verb Meaning
Sense Variation and Lexical Semantics: Generative Operations
Individuation by Partitive Constructions in Spanish
Event Coreference in Causal Discourses
Interfacing the LexiconMetaphor, Creative Understanding, and the Generative Lexicon
Metaphor in Discourse
Syntax and Metonymy
Generative Lexicon Meets Corpus Data: The Case of Nonstandard Word Uses
Building ResourcesGenerative Lexicon and the SIMPLE Model: Developing Semantic Resources for NLP
Lexicography Informs Lexical Semantics: The SIMPLE Experience
Condensed Meaning in EuroWordNet