Ph.D. diss.: "Expectations and Linguistic Meaning"

[Simon Winter]

I hope that this dissertation could be of interest for this list. Apologies
for duplicate postings.

Winter, Simon. 1998. Expectations and Linguistic Meaning. Ph.D. thesis.
Lund University, Cognitive Science dept.

Abstracts and full text available at:

http://lucs.fil.lu.se/People/Simon.Winter/Thesis/

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ABSTRACT: What is the relation between the words in language and our
everyday actions? Are linguistic structures dependent on our actions, or
does language function on its own? This thesis deals with the pragmatic
foundations of language and proposes a model of meaning in language that is
based on our expectations about the world and about other people. On this
view, language is seen as composed of three functional layers of
pragmatics, semantics and morpho-syntax, with each layer having a certain
autonomy: semantics captures useful generalizations from the pragmatic
level, and morpho-syntax captures generalizations from the semantic level.
The five papers in the thesis study different aspects of this overarching
model.
  The first paper explores what happens when individual cognitive
structures are shared in language and proposes a model of how names, nouns
and adjectives emerge as different levels of abstraction. Further, some
cognitive prerequisites for referential communication are discussed.
  The second paper proposes a model of how breakdowns in an expert-novice
task trigger discourse on the levels of instructions, coordinations and
labels (words). These levels are correlated with a gradual
conventionalization from pragmatics to semantics.
  The third paper shows how the modal verbs can be modeled in terms of
expectations and social power.
  The fourth paper argues that meaning in language can be traced back to
features of the environment of all living creatures that are inherently
meaningful. Examples of such features are food, mates and shelter. The
space of meaningful features can be extended by categorization: previously
meaningless features gain meaning by association with meaningful features.
  The fifth paper, finally, uses computer simulations to model the
pragmatic process of stabilizing a simple lexicon.

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Simon Winter, Ph.D.

Lund University Cognitive Science
Kungshuset, Lundagård
S-222 22  LUND                Tel:  +46 (0)708 13 23 59
Sweden                        Fax:  +46 (0)46 222 48 17

WWW http://lucs.fil.lu.se/People/Simon.Winter/