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Conceptual versus referential affordance in concept composition

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dc.contributor.author McNally, Louise, 1965-
dc.contributor.author Boleda, Gemma
dc.date.accessioned 2017-08-24T09:02:41Z
dc.date.available 2017-08-24T09:02:41Z
dc.date.issued 2017
dc.identifier.citation McNally L, Boleda G. Conceptual versus referential affordance in concept composition. In: Winter YA, Hampton J (eds.). Compositionality and Concepts in Linguistics and Psychology. Berlin: Springer; 2017, p. 245-67. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-45977-6_10
dc.identifier.uri http://hdl.handle.net/10230/32673
dc.description.abstract One of the defining traits of language is its capacity to mediate between concepts in our mind, which encapsulate generalizations, and the things they refer to in a given communicative act, with all their idiosyncratic properties. This article examines precisely this interplay between conceptual and referential aspects of meaning, and proposes that concept composition (or concept combination, a term more commonly used in Psychology) exploits both: Conceptually afforded composition is at play when a modifier and its head fit as could be expected given the properties of the two concepts involved, whereas in referentially afforded composition the result of the composition depends on specific, independently available properties of the referent. For instance, red box tends to be applied to boxes whose surface is red, but, given the appropriate context, it can also be applied to e.g. a brown box that contains red objects. We support our proposal with data from nominal modification, and explore a way to formally distinguish the two kinds of composition and integrate them into a more general framework for semantic analysis. Along the way, we recover the classically Fregean notion of sense as including conceptual information, and show the potential of distributional semantics, a framework that has become very influential in Cognitive Science and Computational Linguistics, to address research questions from a theoretical linguistic perspective.
dc.description.sponsorship This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No 655577 (LOVe) and from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 715154, AMORE); Spanish MINECO grants FFI2010-15006, FFI2010-09464-E, and FFI2013-41301, as well as an ICREA Academia award to the first author.
dc.format.mimetype application/pdf
dc.language.iso eng
dc.publisher Springer
dc.relation.ispartof Winter YA, Hampton J (eds.). Compositionality and Concepts in Linguistics and Psychology. Berlin: Springer; 2017, p. 245-67. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-45977-6_10
dc.rights This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
dc.rights.uri http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
dc.title Conceptual versus referential affordance in concept composition
dc.type info:eu-repo/semantics/bookPart
dc.subject.keyword Concept combination
dc.subject.keyword Modification
dc.subject.keyword Composition
dc.subject.keyword Reference
dc.subject.keyword Distributional
dc.subject.keyword Semantics
dc.relation.projectID info:eu-repo/grantAgreement/EC/H2020/715154
dc.relation.projectID info:eu-repo/grantAgreement/ES/3PN/FFI2010-15006
dc.relation.projectID info:eu-repo/grantAgreement/ES/3PN/FFI2010-09464-E
dc.relation.projectID info:eu-repo/grantAgreement/ES/1PE/FFI2016-76045-P
dc.relation.projectID info:eu-repo/grantAgreement/EC/H2020/655577
dc.rights.accessRights info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess
dc.type.version info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion

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