How linguistic meaning harmonizes with information through meaning conservation
This paper aims to characterize the relationship between information as defined in the information-theoretic approach and
linguistic meaning by way of formulation of computations over the lexicon of a natural language. Information in its information theoretic
sense is supposed not to be equivalent to linguistic meaning, whereas linguistic meaning has an intrinsic connection to information as far
as the form and structure of the lexicon of a language (in a non-lexicological sense) is concerned. We argue that these two apparently
conflicting aspects of the relationship between information and linguistic meaning can be unified by showing that information conserves
linguistic meaning, only insofar as computations of a certain kind are defined on the symbolic elements of a lexicon. This has consequences
not merely for the nature of lexical learning – natural or artificial or otherwise – but also for the conservation of information in
axiomatic systems.
Article outline
- 1.Introductory background
- 2.Information, linguistic meaning and computation
- 3.Why the lexicon?
- 4.The principle of linguistic meaning conservation
- 5.Implications
- 6.Conclusion
- Acknowledgements
- Notes
-
References
References (37)
Barwise, Jon & Jerry Seligman
1997 Information flow: The logic of distributed systems. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Benthem, Johan van & Maricarmen Martinez
2008 The stories of logic and information. In
Pieter Adriaans &
Johan van Benthem (eds.),
Philosophy of information, vol. 81, 217–280. Amsterdam: Elsevier.
Bloomfield, Leonard
1933 Language. New York: Henry Holt.
Boland, Richard J. Jr. & Kalle Lyytinen
2017 The limits to language in doing system design.
European Journal of Information Systems 26(3). 248–259.
Bowerman, Melissa
1988 The ‘no negative evidence’ problem: How do children avoid constructing an overly general grammar? In
John Hawkins (ed.),
Explaining language universals, 73–101. Oxford: Blackwell.
Bremer, Manuel E.
2003 Do logical truths carry information? Minds and Machines 13(4). 567–575.
Bresnan, Joan
2001 Lexical functional syntax. Oxford: Blackwell.
Carnap, Rudolf & Yehoshua Bar-Hillel
1952 An outline of a theory of semantic information.
Technical Report 247. Research Laboratory of Electronics, MIT.
Clark, Stephen
2015 Vector space models of lexical meaning. In
Shalom Lappin &
Chris Fox (eds.),
Handbook of contemporary semantic theory, 493–522. Oxford: Blackwell.
Erteschik-Shir, Nomi
2007 Information structure: The syntax-discourse interface. New York: Oxford University Press.
Fillmore, Charles
1976 Frame semantics and the nature of language.
Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences: Conference on the Origin and Development of Language and Speech 280(1). 20–32.
Francez, Nissim & Shuly Wintner
2011 Unification grammars. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Goldberg, Adele
2006 Constructions at work: The nature of generalization in language. New York: Oxford University Press.
Goldberg, Adele
2019 Explain me this: Creativity, competition, and the partial productivity of constructions. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Gregory, Howard
2015 Language and logics: An introduction to the logical foundations of language. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Hampton, James A.
2017 Compositionality and concepts. In
James A. Hampton &
Yoad Winter (eds.),
Language, cognition, and mind: Vol. 3. Compositionality and concepts in linguistics and psychology, 95–122. New York: Springer Nature.
Harris, Zellig
1991 A theory of language and information: A mathematical approach. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Hintikka, Jaakko
1973 Logic, language-games and information. New York: Oxford University Press.
Jackendoff, Ray
2002 Foundations of language: Brain, meaning, grammar, evolution. New York: Oxford University Press.
Kamp, Hans & Martin Stokhof
2008 Information in natural language. In
Pieter Adriaans &
Johan van Benthem (eds.),
Philosophy of information, vol. 81, 49–111. Amsterdam: Elsevier.
Lambrecht, Knud
1996 Information structure and sentence form: A theory of topic, focus, and the mental representations of discourse referents. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lyytinen, Kalle
1985 Implications of theories of language for information systems.
MIS Quarterly 9(1). 61–74.
Menzel, Christopher
1999 The objective conception of contexts and its logic.
Minds and Machines 9(1). 29–56.
Mondal, Prakash
2012 Can internalism and externalism be reconciled in a biological epistemology of language? Biosemiotics 5(1). 61–82.
Mondal, Prakash
2018 Lexicon, meaning relations and semantic networks.
The 2nd Workshop on Natural Language for Artificial Intelligence (NL4AI 2018) 21. 40–52.
Newport, Elissa L., Daphne Bavelier & Helen J. Neville
2002 Critical thinking about critical periods: Perspectives on a critical period for language acquisition. In
Emmanuel Dupoux (ed.),
Language, brain and cognitive development, 481–502. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.
Pelletier, Francis J.
2017 Compositionality and concepts – A perspective from formal semantics and philosophy of language. In
James A. Hampton &
Yoad Winter (eds.),
Language, cognition, and mind, vol. 3: Compositionality and concepts in linguistics and psychology, 31–94. New York: Springer Nature.
Pollard, Carl & Sag, Ivan
1994 Head-driven phrase structure grammar. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Pullum, Geoffrey K.
2013 The central question in comparative syntactic metatheory.
Mind and Language 28(4). 492–521.
Pustejovsky, James
1995 The generative lexicon. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.
Pustejovsky, James
2012 Type theory and lexical decomposition. In
James Pustejovsky,
Pierrette Bouillon,
Hitoshi Isahara,
Kyoko Kanzaki &
Chungmin Lee (eds.),
Advances in generative lexicon theory, 9–38. Heidelberg: Springer.
Seuren, Pieter A. M.
2013 From Whorf to Montague: Explorations in the theory of language. New York: Oxford University Press.
Shannon, Claude E. & Warren Weaver
1949 The mathematical theory of communication. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Shieber, Stuart M.
1992 Constraint-based grammar formalisms. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.
Tesnière, Lucien
1959 Eléments de syntaxe structurale. Paris: Klincksieck.
Turney, Peter D. & Patrick Pantel
2010 From frequency to meaning: Vector space models of semantics.
Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research 371. 141–188.
Cited by (2)
Cited by 2 other publications
Reimer, Laura & Eva Smolka
2023.
The wrong horse was bet on: the effects of argument structure versus argument adjacency on the processing of idiomatic sentences.
Frontiers in Psychology 14
Zhou, Jiangping
2023.
Meaning patterns of the NP de VP construction in modern Chinese: approaches of covarying collexeme analysis and hierarchical cluster analysis.
Humanities and Social Sciences Communications 10:1
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 5 july 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.