Semantics, Components, Rapprochement

Michael L. Johnson
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Michael L. Johnson: University of Kansas

Chapter 18 in Mind, Language, Machine, 1988, pp 99-106 from Palgrave Macmillan

Abstract: Abstract What are the principal considerations in developing a model of semantic processing? According to Manfred Bierwisch, ‘The semantic analysis of a given language must explain how the sentences of this language are understood, interpreted, and related to states, processes, and objects in the universe.’ A problematic order, to be sure. None the less, if ‘analysis’ is changed to model, then this imperative is exactly the one to which the modeller must respond. The fundamental question of semantic analysis or modelling is, for Bierwisch, ‘What is the meaning of a sentence S of the language L?’ In attempting to answer that question, one necessarily deals with another: how is that sentence meaningful in that language? Of course, context is critical because one must interpret sentence S in terms of ‘its semantic relations to other expressions’ in that language. Furthermore, one must know ‘not only the meaning of its lexical elements, but also how they interrelate’ — which interrelation, of course, ‘depends on the syntactic structure of the sentence’. Thus a semantic theory — or model must ‘make reference to the syntactic structure in a precise way’; ‘systematically represent the meaning of… lexical elements’; ‘show how the structure of the meanings of words and the syntactic relations interact, in order to constitute the interpretation of sentences’; and ‘indicate how these interpretations are related to things spoken [or written] about’.1

Date: 1988
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DOI: 10.1007/978-1-349-19404-9_18

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