Abstract
The conceptual graph formalism in essence just specifies the form of representation. No real claim is made about the content of representation, although there is a preference for the cases underlying syntactic relations. These cases are taken from Fillmore's Case Theory that basically enforces a one-to-one correspondence between syntactic structure and conceptual primitives. But the conceptual graph of a sentence need not be similar to its syntactic structure.
In this paper we will investigate a theory of conceptual structure that is in principle, unrestricted by syntax. Jackendoff proposes Conceptual Semantics that is assumed to give a primitive deep-level semantics. The concepts and relations are based on their support for encoding visual (or other sensory) units, as well as on a preference for syntactic occurrance.
As has been remarked before, the Conceptual Semantics structures can be easily formulated as Conceptual Graphs. The result of this translation is a set of concept and relation types together with their canonical graphs. This canonical basis should be viewed as a Conceptual Semantics ontology for Conceptual Graphs.
The claim that the analyses are at a deep and primitive level is taken to mean that any commonality in meaning of words must be shown by a common underlying conceptual graph. Moreover the types used may not have any commonality themselves, and the preference for grammaticality may be violated in order to achieve primitiveness. A consequence of this is that the traditional thematic roles and cases are not primitives of the ontology, but rather relational notions that should be defined in terms of conceptual substructures.
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© 1993 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Willems, M. (1993). A conceptual semantics ontology for conceptual graphs. In: Mineau, G.W., Moulin, B., Sowa, J.F. (eds) Conceptual Graphs for Knowledge Representation. ICCS 1993. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 699. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-56979-0_17
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-56979-0_17
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