Comments on: Good linguistic semantics textbook?

By: RONALD LOUI

RONALD LOUI — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 04:26:23 +0000

Bob Carpenter, email me — I have a question for you.

BTW, I just wrote something today about how a paper by Rissland and Skalak taught me more about semantics than anything I learned reading philosophy of language…but you guys are talking more about Montague stuff than Hart/Wittgenstein/Austin/Waismann stuff…

By: Linguistic semantics | Keritesorszag

Linguistic semantics | Keritesorszag — Mon, 19 Mar 2012 14:38:59 +0000

[...] Good linguistic semantics textbook? | AI and Social Science …Linguistic semantics is the study of meaning that is used to understand human expression through language. Other forms of semantics include the semantics of … [...]

By: The Performer

The Performer — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 08:06:35 +0000

Good publish you bought right here, I wasn’t actually interested at first till i learn the middle part….good luck on your future posts.

By: brendano

brendano — Mon, 27 Jun 2011 17:24:20 +0000

Hm. I guess the most novel things I’m seeing in this Frawley book are overviews of theories like:

“Nouns tend to encode entities, verbs tend to encode events. Entities tend to be temporally stable, events tend to be temporally brief. Now here’s a bunch of examples and exceptions and refinements to these tendencies.”

I guess this is related to the syntax-semantics interface but it definitely seems different than just “how do I get the abstract syntax tree”. Maybe this is more like philosophy of language? Not really pragmatics though.

By: Bob Carpenter

Bob Carpenter — Mon, 27 Jun 2011 17:04:59 +0000

Much of what gets called “semantics” in linguistics is really just syntax with attention to what linguists like to call “logical form”, but a computer scientist might call an “abstract syntax tree”. Thematic roles basically provide a way of factoring the lexical-syntactic interface, so that if you know something about the meaning of a relation (e.g., who the more active role is), you can figure out how its arguments work (e.g., the most active role becomes the subject and the less active the object). These relations tend to be associative rather than absolute. A good example of this kind of reasoning is Beth Levin’s verb categorization and its attendant coding in something like PropBank. Is it a good idea? I still don’t have a strong opinion.

Alas, I don’t know of a good textbook treatment of any of this.

The other side of the semantic coin is the philosophy of language, which is more about meaning and the relation of language to the world. For this, I’d recommend Martinich’s collection The Philosophy of Language. This includes connections to what is commonly called pragmatics, which is how factors of discourse and context impact meaning. There are some standard books on this, but you might as well just read Strawson and Grice in the Martinich collection.