Ling 310 The Structure of Meaning, Lecture 3 B.H. Partee, February 27, 2006 p.1 NZ3Adjbetter.doc 1 March 1, 2006 Integrating Lexical Semantics and Formal Semantics. Case Study I: The Dynamics of Adjective Meaning 0. Introduction ..............................................................................................................................................................1 1. Integrating formal semantics, lexical semantics, natural language metaphysics ......................................................1 1.1. Formal semantics in the broader setting of natural language use. ......................................................................1 1.2 Lexical semantics in the Moscow school............................................................................................................2 1.3 Meaning postulates.............................................................................................................................................2 2. Introduction to adjective semantics .......................................................................................................................3 3. Adjective classification.............................................................................................................................................4 3.1. Meaning postulates for classes of adjectives ......................................................................................................4 3.2. Is tall intersective or subsective?. .......................................................................................................................6 4. Conclusions ...........................................................................................................................................................6 References .....................................................................................................................................................................6 Homework #2, Due March 6 .........................................................................................................................................8 0. Introduction Initial working hypothesis: at least one central ingredient of the meaning of a sentence must be a specification of the conditions under which it is true, and therefore one central ingredient of word meanings must be their contribution to the truth-conditions of sentences. One challenge for formal semanticists is to show cognitive scientists that in spite of the nomenclature, and in spite of the anti-psychologism of some of the contributors to the enterprise (Frege, Montague), linguists who are formal semanticists are very much engaged in the investigation of human language competence. Greater attention to lexical semantics and to the integration of lexical and formal semantics are crucial parts of this challenge. One important challenge faced by compositional approaches such as formal semantics is how to account for context-dependent meaning shifts without abandoning compositionality. We argue here that in fact compositionality can be seen as one of the driving forces in context-sensitive meaning shifts. Our case study will be the semantics of different kinds of adjectives. The interplay of context-dependence and intensionality will be illustrated in showing why skillful is intensional but large is not, even though we may consider a large house not to be a large building. In a later lecture we will also take up the puzzles of “privative” adjectives like fake and counterfeit and “redundant” adjectives like real. The perspective we will take is how attention to the semantics of syntactic structure (compositional semantics) sheds light on the word meaning, and how compositional semantics, lexical semantics, and the context of the utterance all interact. One of the broader implications of this perspective is that there should in principle be no conflict between the goals of “formal” and “cognitive” approaches to semantics, although there are of course differences in priorities and in favored forms of argumentation. 1. Integrating formal semantics, lexical semantics, natural language metaphysics 1.1. Formal semantics in the broader setting of natural language use. (1) Model structures: arising from the way humans schematize situations they want to describe. When we view a natural language as a formal language, we simultaneously view the world (or the set of possible worlds) as a model of it. This involves some abstraction andLing 310 The Structure of Meaning, Lecture 3 B.H. Partee, February 27, 2006 p.2 NZ3Adjbetter.doc 2 March 1, 2006 regimentation both of the language and of the world(s), as reflected in the type structure imposed on the language and the ontology of the model structures in which it is interpreted. Ideally, this abstraction should mirror a “real” abstraction which our “language faculty” imposes on the real world, “natural language metaphysics” (Bach 1986) or naivnaja kartina mira ‘naive picture of the world’ (Apresjan 1986). (2) We consider a sentence or a text as a theory describing the model of the situation (model of this theory) (Borschev and Partee 1998) (3) This theory is formed from several sources:  text itself, its sentences are considered as formulas (formal semantics)  meaning postulates corresponding to words of text (lexical semantics)  contextual information (formal pragmatics in Montague’s sense) The interaction of these constituents may be rather complicated. 1.2 Lexical semantics in the Moscow school. • Lexical definitions in the Moscow school1 are modeled as mathematical definitions, giving necessary and sufficient conditions. We believe that the “and sufficient” part is probably too strong, and unrealistic. • It is usually although not essentially assumed that there are some undefined notions, semantic primitives (atoms of meaning). We are neutral but skeptical on this point. • Meanings of other words are described by lexical definitions. Such a definition is a text describing necessary and sufficient conditions, distinguishing presuppositions from entailments. • We represent the meaning of the word as a set of meaning postulates, the theory of this word. This is our version of the Moscow school approach. We believe that meaning postulates can capture linguistically important necessary conditions, without commitment to