Norms, tolerance, lexical change, and context- dependence of meaning

Bartsch, Renate

doi:10.1016/0378-2166(84)90029-8

Cited by 41 publications

(10 citation statements)

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“…Lexical ambiguity—the phenomenon of a single word having multiple, distinguishable, senses—is pervasive in language: No language has been found to lack ambiguity at the word level (e.g., Youn et al, 2016), and within a language, large numbers of words are found to be ambiguous (e.g., Klein & Murphy, 2001). Indeed, lexical ambiguity is suggested to be a necessary property of language, as a way to efficiently express a large number of concepts with a small, finite lexicon (e.g., Bartsch, 1984; Piantadosi, Tily, & Gibson, 2012; Ramiro, Srinivasan, Malt, & Xu, 2018; Schaff, 1964). As such, lexical ambiguity is a central concern for the cognitive science of language, and the nature of the representations that support the encoding and processing of multiple senses of a word is key to understanding this phenomenon 1…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Probing Lexical Ambiguity: Word Vectors Encode Number and Relatedness of Senses

2021

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Lexical ambiguity-the phenomenon of a single word having multiple, distinguishable senses -is pervasive in language. Both the degree of ambiguity of a word (roughly, its number of senses) and the relatedness of those senses have been found to have widespread effects on language acquisition and processing. Recently, distributional approaches to semantics, in which a word's meaning is determined by its contexts, have led to successful research quantifying the degree of ambiguity, but these measures have not distinguished between the ambiguity of words with multiple related senses versus multiple unrelated meanings. In this work, we present the first assessment of whether distributional meaning representations can capture the ambiguity structure of a word, including both the number and relatedness of senses. On a very large sample of English words, we find that some, but not all, distributional semantic representations that we test exhibit detectable differences between sets of monosemes (unambiguous words; N = 964), polysemes (with multiple related senses; N = 4,096), and homonyms (with multiple unrelated senses; N = 355). Our findings begin to answer open questions from earlier work regarding whether distributional semantic representations of words, which successfully capture various semantic relationships, also reflect fine-grained aspects of meaning structure that influence human behavior. Our findings emphasize the importance of measuring whether proposed lexical representations capture such distinctions: In addition to standard benchmarks that test the similarity structure of distributional semantic models, we need to also consider whether they have cognitively plausible ambiguity structure.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Probing Lexical Ambiguity: Word Vectors Encode Number and Relatedness of Senses

2021

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“…If vagueness and context‐dependence of meanings were not part of the meanings of words, language would be a less efficient means of communication […]. (Bartsch , 1984 , p. 372) Bartsch claims that vagueness and context‐dependence of meaning make language more efficient by facilitating semantic change. Gradual change in meaning allows us to adjust our language efficiently in a changing and complex world.…”

Section: Nine Arguments For the Value Of Vaguenessmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…If vagueness and context‐dependence of meanings were not part of the meanings of words, language would be a less efficient means of communication […]. (Bartsch , 1984 , p. 372)…”

Section: Nine Arguments For the Value Of Vaguenessmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Bartsch actually attributes the possibility of change to polysemy and other forms of context relativity, explicitly denying any role of vagueness in the philosophical sense:

Vagueness due to gradualness does, to my knowledge, not play a role in semantic change, while vagueness due to contextual indeterminateness of a relative term can give rise to metonymic relationships in the structure of meaning […]. (Bartsch , 1984 , p. 374) Whereas it could still be possible that vagueness plays some role, other properties of language are clearly efficient to facilitate long‐term adaptability — as, for instance, the figurative use of words and their context relativity. We can metaphorically use a term consistently in the same way until its metaphorical meaning becomes part of the lexical meaning of the then polysemous term.…”

Section: Nine Arguments For the Value Of Vaguenessmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Vagueness due to gradualness does, to my knowledge, not play a role in semantic change, while vagueness due to contextual indeterminateness of a relative term can give rise to metonymic relationships in the structure of meaning […]. (Bartsch , 1984 , p. 374)…”

Section: Nine Arguments For the Value Of Vaguenessmentioning

confidence: 99%

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What Is the Value of Vagueness?

Lanius

2021

Theoria

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Classically, vagueness has been considered something bad. It leads to the Sorites paradox, borderline cases, and the (apparent) violation of the logical principle of bivalence. Nevertheless, there have always been scholars claiming that vagueness is also valuable. Many have pointed out that we could not communicate as successfully or efficiently as we do if we would not use vague language. Indeed, we often use vague terms when we could have used more precise ones instead. Many scholars (implicitly or explicitly) assume that we do so because their vagueness has a positive function. But how and in what sense can vagueness be said to have a function or value? This paper is an attempt to give an answer to this question. After clarifying the concepts of vagueness and value, it examines nine arguments for the value of vagueness, which have been discussed in the literature. The (negative) result of this examination is, however, that there is not much reason to believe that vagueness has a value or positive function at all because none of the arguments is conclusive. A tenth argument that has not been discussed so far seems most promising but rests on a solely strategic notion of function.

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The problem of lexical innovation

Armstrong¹

2016

Linguist and Philos

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developed a powerful argument against the claim that linguistic conventions provide any explanatory purchase on an account of linguistic meaning and communication. This argument, as I shall develop it, turns on cases of what I call lexical innovation: cases in which a speaker uses a sentence containing a novel expression-meaning pair, but nevertheless successfully communicates her intended meaning to her audience. I will argue that cases of lexical innovation motivate a dynamic conception of linguistic conventions according to which background linguistic conventions may be rapidly expanded to incorporate new word meanings or shifted to revise the meanings of words already in circulation. I argue that this dynamic account of conventions both resolves the problem raised by cases of lexical innovation and that it does so in a way that is preferable to those who-like Davidsondeny important explanatory roles for linguistic conventions.

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Norms, tolerance, lexical change, and context- dependence of meaning

Cited by 41 publications

References 3 publications

Probing Lexical Ambiguity: Word Vectors Encode Number and Relatedness of Senses

Probing Lexical Ambiguity: Word Vectors Encode Number and Relatedness of Senses

What Is the Value of Vagueness?

The problem of lexical innovation

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