[(Lexical Meaning in Context: A Web of Words)] [Author: Nicholas Asher] published on

by Nicholas Asher

This is a book about the meanings of words and how they can combine to form larger meaningful units, as well as how they can fail to combine when the amalgamation of a predicate and argument would produce what the philosopher Gilbert Ryle called a 'category mistake'. It argues for a theory in which words get assigned both an intension and a type. The book develops a rich system of types and investigates its philosophical and formal implications, for example the abandonment of the classic Church analysis of types that has been used by linguists since Montague. The author integrates fascinating and puzzling observations about lexical meaning into a compositional semantic framework. Adjustments in types are a feature of the compositional process and account for various phenomena including coercion and copredication. This book will be of interest to semanticists, philosophers, logicians and computer scientists alike.

Genres: Linguistics

Unknown Binding

First published March 17, 2011

Reviews

[Kira · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is certainly inspiring to me. I came for the chapter on restricted predication, but stayed for the details of the type system and the other applications he finds for it. The dot-type idea that's been around since Pustejovsky (1995) finally gets (what I understand to be) a good, working implementation. I know that's been in the works since 2006 or so, but the presentation in this book is much nicer. I'm still trying to wrap my head around the model theory for the types in terms of category theory. From where I stand now, the theory developed here casts serious doubt on the "France is a hexagonal republic" objection to truth-conditional semantics. More to appear here, maybe.

[Eric NYOB · Rating 4 out of 5]

Looks seminal. Right or not, many avenues to explore.