Abstract
This paper investigates co-composition, the composition of a predicate and its arguments in which either the predicate, the arguments, or both shift their meaning. We study the implications of this phenomenon for type-theoretic approaches to semantics. We adduce evidence from distributional methods in lexical semantics that co-composition is widespread and then argue that a proper treatment leads to a reconsideration of the basics of type theory for natural language semantics.
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Notes
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E.g., using the cosine measure, which computes the angle between two vectors.
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One of the syntactic features of the word apple might e.g. be eat \(_{\mathrm {dobj}}\), since apple appears as a direct object of the verb eat. Note that these syntactic contexts – also called dependency features – are generally automatically extracted using a dependency-based grammatical parser.
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Asher (2011) argues for this thesis in detail.
- 5.
Some cases are much less obvious, however. Consider capital vs. cultural capital. Cultural does not seem to be subsective, but it gives some sort of modal frame—within the cultural worlds of that frame, X is the capital of the country or...
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Partee (2010) also advocates something like this view, though the details are quite different from those of the approach developed here.
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For a fuller discussion of MTTs view of common nouns as types, see (Chatzikyriakidis and Luo 2016).
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Chatzikyriakidis and Luo (2016) use polymorphic types to fix this problem, in contrast to earlier work in MTT, to which we refer here.
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This is a term that linguists use for “at issue” content in contrast to presupposed content which is backgrounded and functions differently in composition.
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We used singular value decomposition because of its guarantee to provide the best possible fit for the original data given a limited number of dimensions. The top dimensions are thus guaranteed to explain the most variance present in the original data.
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There’s another dimension of variation as well. Change the corpus and you get a different set of types, or a different type for each word.
- 13.
For details on this idea, see Asher et al. (2016).
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Asher, N., Abrusan, M., Van de Cruys, T. (2017). Types, Meanings and Co-composition in Lexical Semantics. In: Chatzikyriakidis, S., Luo, Z. (eds) Modern Perspectives in Type-Theoretical Semantics. Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy, vol 98. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-50422-3_6
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