Representing the Lexicon: Identifying Meaning in Use via Overspecification
Henk Zeevat, Scott Grimm, Lotte Hogeweg, Sander Lestrade, E. Allyn Smith · 2021
Lexical Specification and Meaning in Use: Traditional Views on the LexiconTraditionally, the lexicon is the list of words of a language or communication system.From a biological perspective, the lexica of human languages are special with respect to animal communication systems because they can be freely extended, both by the creation of new (lexical) forms and by the extension of the meaning of these words.Notwithstanding this extensibility, the construction of dictionaries as fixed lists of words with their meanings pays off for the purposes of language education, reliable communication and translation.Computational models of language largely share this view, as it seems initially reasonable to think that such a lexicon could be part of what characterizes the human ability to code thoughts into linguistic expressions and to recover thoughts from such expressions.What is needed for conventional dictionaries-in the tradition started by such eminent scholars as Samuel Johnson and Jacob Grimm-is precision with respect to the characterization of the word senses described.Such a task would be * We wish to express our thanks to audiences at Szklarska Poreba, the Workshop Bridging Formal and Conceptual Semantics, and Formal Semantics Meets Cognitive Semantics as well as to Katrin Erk, to Louise McNally and, especially, to an anonymous reviewer of these proceedings for many useful comments, more, in fact, than we could integrate into this preliminary report.In addition, Lotte Hogeweg and Sander Lestrade would like to thank the the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) for their financial support.All errors are our own.Authors after the first author are listed in alphabetical order.