Lexical Meaning and Conceptual Representation
Peter Bosch · 1992
This note sketches a proposal for a general distinction between conceptual representation and semantic representation on the level of items and discusses some of the theoretical implications of this distinction. Lexical meaning of natural language expressions is formulated in terms of sets of inferences from lexical sentences, i.e. minimal environments for the occurrence of a expression. These inference sets are different, ex hypothesi, for all expressions (entailing the assumption that there is no such thing as synonymy between items). The relevant inference sets that serve as meaning representations do not comprise more inferences than is required in order to keep the representation of one lexial item distinct from all others, and they are monotonic in the sense that they are not revisable. Inference sets are considered as models for concepts, and accordingly meanings, at least formally, are concepts. Not every word meaning though corresponds to a natural concept. More often a word meaning will determine a class of concepts, each of which contains the inference set of the super-concepts as a subset. The additional inferences are contributed by the linguistic environment (in the simplest case via compositional semantics and the meaning of other words), by the discourse context, or by background knowledge.