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Massimo Warglien, Peter Gärdenfors, Matthijs Westera · Theoretical Linguistics · 2012
Conceptual spaces have been developed as a general framework for representing knowledge, including semantics.Already in Gärdenfors (2000, Ch. 5), a semantic analysis of nouns and adjectives was proposed.The theory of conceptual spaces has since then been extended to cover also actions (Gärdenfors 2007) and events (Gärdenfors and Warglien 2012).The main purpose of our article is to show how these models can form a basis for the semantics of verbs.We are grateful to the commentators for their willingness to evaluate and critically discuss our proposal.The general project is positively received by the commentators.We find this encouraging for future work in the area.There are understandably also critical comments about the project.Some of them argue that we promise much more than we deliver.Some comments point out that our model is a tentative sketch that may not stand up to linguistic scrutiny.We agree that much of the analysis is presented too briefly in the article.We have focused on presenting the potential of the model in different areas of verb semantics rather than developing the details.Further aspects of action and event representations have been presented by Gärdenfors (2007), Gärdenfors and Warglien (2012) as well as a general semantics framework in Warglien and Gärdenfors (2012).That said, we agree that there is still a lot to accomplish to flesh out the model into a viable theory of semantics.Let us comment on the motivation for our paper.Our aim is to show that concepts from cognitive science, in particular conceptual spaces, can be used to model lexical semantics, in particular the semantics of verbs.As such, it is an attempt to establish a bridge between cognitive science and linguistics.Our emphasis is on presenting the general model and testing its viability.This entails that we Brought to you by | Universitaetsbibliothek Frankfurt/Main Authenticated | 141.2.