Compositionality and Concepts—A Perspective from Formal Semantics and Philosophy of Language

112

If a theory of concept composition aspires to psychological plausibility, it may first need to address several preliminary issues associated with naturally occurring human concepts: content variability, multiple representational forms, and pragmatic constraints. Not only do these issues constitute a significant challenge for explaining individual concepts, they pose an even more formidable challenge for explaining concept compositions. How do concepts combine as their content changes, as different representational forms become active, and as pragmatic constraints shape processing? Arguably, concepts are most ubiquitous and important in compositions, relative to when they occur in isolation. Furthermore, entering into compositions may play central roles in producing the changes in content, form, and pragmatic relevance observed for individual concepts. Developing a theory of concept composition that embraces and illuminates these issues would not only constitute a significant contribution to the study of concepts, it would provide insight into the nature of human cognition.The human ability to construct and combine concepts is prolific. On the one hand, people acquire tens of thousands of concepts for diverse categories of settings, agents, objects, actions, mental states, bodily states, properties, relations, and so forth. On the other, people combine these concepts to construct infinite numbers of more complex concepts, as the open-ended phrases, sentences, and texts that humans produce effortlessly and ubiquitously illustrate. Major changes in the brain, the emergence of language, and new capacities for social cognition all probably played central roles in the evolution of these impressive conceptual abilities (e.g.,

Section: Content Variabilitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Content Variabilitymentioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Cognitively Plausible Theories of Concept Composition

Barsalou

2017

112

“…We use DRT because (1) the notion of discourse referent is crucial for implementing referentially afforded composition, and (2) the most recent research on compositional distributional semantics has not yet been able to show how such 16 Some of the basic discussion in this section concerning the integration of distributional semantics and formal semantics is drawn from McNally (2017); however, the application to DRT is new here, as is the idea of referentially-afforded composition. See Garrette et al (2011) for a different approach to combining distributional semantics and Discourse Representation Theory, and see Pelletier (2017), for extensive discussion of "two-tiered" semantic theories, of which he takes this proposal to be an example. models can provide effective analyses of referential grounding or discourse dynamics (Bernardi et al 2015;Sadrzadeh and Purver 2015).…”

Section: A Mixed Model For Two Types Of Semantic Compositionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Conceptual Versus Referential Affordance in Concept Composition

McNally

Boleda

2017

One of the defining traits of language is its capacity to mediate between concepts in our mind, which encapsulate generalizations, and the things they refer to in a given communicative act, with all their idiosyncratic properties. This article examines precisely this interplay between conceptual and referential aspects of meaning, and proposes that concept composition (or concept combination, a term more commonly used in Psychology) exploits both: Conceptually afforded composition is at play when a modifier and its head fit as could be expected given the properties of the two concepts involved, whereas in referentially afforded composition the result of the composition depends on specific, independently available properties of the referent. For instance, red box tends to be applied to boxes whose surface is red, but, given the appropriate context, it can also be applied to e.g. a brown box that contains red objects. We support our proposal with data from nominal modification, and explore a way to formally distinguish the two kinds of composition and integrate them into a more general framework for semantic analysis. Along the way, we recover the classically Fregean notion of sense as including conceptual information, and show the potential of distributional semantics, a framework that has become very influential in Cognitive Science and Computational Linguistics, to address research questions from a theoretical linguistic perspective.

“…This is where notions of compositionality from formal semantics become important. As we move on to more complex quantificational structures, temporal and spatial expressions, anaphoric items etc., we increasingly need to rely on structural analyses and symbolic principles to explain the close interactions between form and meaning (Pelletier, 2017).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Critical Typicality: Truth Judgements and Compositionality with Plurals and Other Gradable Concepts

Winter

2017

Compositional semantic frameworks often compute the extension of a complex expression directly from the extensions of its parts. However, much work in cognitive psychology has shown important challenges for compositional methods. For instance, Hampton (J Exp Psychol Learn Mem Cognit 14(1): 12-32, 1988b) showed that speakers may let the complex nominal sports that are games include chess as one of its instances, without admitting chess in the extension of sports. Similarly, Lee (2017) experimentally supports the common intuition that instances of red hair are not necessarily categorized as red. This paper reviews further results about plural quantifiers, showing similar challenges for compositionality. It is proposed that typicality effects play a systematic role in compositional interpretation and the determination of truth-values. For instance, the "overextension" effect in the red hair example is predicted by the fact that focal red is an atypical hair color. Similarly, in the plural sentence the men are walking and writing, the availability of the split reading ("some men are walking and some men are writing") increases due to the atypicality of doing both activities at the same time (Poortman, 2017). Further, in reciprocal sentences like the three men are pinching each other, the number of pinching acts may be three. This is related to the atypicality of situations where every man pinches two other men at the same time, as required by a strong interpretation of each other. The paper gives a uniform account of truth-value judgements on these different constructions, based on the identification of conflicts between typical preferences.