35.1410, Confs: Workshop: Polysemy, Concepts and Representation
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LINGUIST List: Vol-35-1410. Tue May 07 2024. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.
Subject: 35.1410, Confs: Workshop: Polysemy, Concepts and Representation
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================================================================
Date: 04-May-2024
From: Nicholas Allott [n.e.allott at ilos.uio.no]
Subject: Workshop: Polysemy, Concepts and Representation
Workshop: Polysemy, Concepts and Representation
Date: 22-May-2024 - 23-May-2024
Location: Seminarrom 4, Sophus Bugges hus, Blindern campus, University
of Oslo, Norway
Contact: Nicholas Allott
Contact Email: n.e.allott at ilos.uio.no
Meeting URL: https://www.hf.uio.no/ifikk/english/research/news-and-eve
nts/events/conferences/2024/workshop-polysemy-concepts-and-representat
ion.html
Linguistic Field(s): Philosophy of Language; Pragmatics; Semantics
Meeting Description:
Invited speakers
Professor Robyn Carston, University College London
Professor John Collins, University of East Anglia
Dr. Michelle Liu, lecturer, Monash University
Professor Georges Rey, University of Maryland, College Park
Organizers/speakers
Dr. Nicholas Allott, senior lecturer, ILOS, University of Oslo
Professor Terje Lohndal, NTNU & UiT The Arctic University of Norway
Dr. Ingrid Lossius Falkum, associate professor, IFIKK & ILN,
University of Oslo
Description
Word meaning is one of the least well-understood areas of language.
There is general (but not universal) agreement that nearly every
lexical/conceptual word is polysemous, that is, that words typically
have multiple related senses.
This raises many difficult questions (Falkum & Vicente 2015). What is
the lexical representation of a polysemous word? Does it encode all
the different senses that it can be used to express? If so, how does
this differ from homonymy (which is both intuitively and
experimentally distinct)? Or are the different senses somehow created
from an underlying lexical representation that does not correspond to
any of the senses? If so more questions arise: what is the format of
the lexical representation? Are there core semantic features that are
deployed in all (or all literal) uses of a word? (Rey 2014; Allott &
Textor 2017; Rey 2022; but see Allott & Textor 2022 for
counter-arguments.) What is the role of context in enabling the
speaker to express and the hearer to reconstruct a more specific sense
(Falkum, 2015)?
There is some evidence from experimental data that the meanings stored
in the mental lexicon are rather schematic: in particular, they seem
to be neutral between the different senses of polysemous words
(Frisson 2015). Anti-lexicalist views in morphology typically also
postulate thin semantics: e.g. in Borer’s influential framework, the
mental lexicon contains not words but roots, and these have no meaning
and no syntactic category; the latter is instead a property of
structures into which roots are inserted (Borer 2013; Alexiadou &
Lohndal 2017; Lohndal 2020). In recent publications Carston has argued
that this framework provides the right foundation for theories of
lexical pragmatics and polysemy including cross-categorial cases
(Carston 2019, 2021, 2023).
A related recent development is the systematic exploration of cases
where two apparently incompatible senses are co-predicated, as in
“Lunch was delicious, but lasted all afternoon” (Chomsky 2000; Collins
2017; Ortega-Andrés & Vicente, 2019). Theoretically-diverse attempts
have been made to explain the data (e.g. Gotham 2022; Liu 2022;
Ortega-Andrés 2022) or to explain them away (Brody & Feiman 2023;
Collins, draft). Could polysemy be illusory?
Hosted by IFIKK and the Centre for Philosophy and the Sciences,
University of Oslo
Invited speakers
Professor Robyn Carston, University College London
Professor John Collins, University of East Anglia
Dr. Michelle Liu, lecturer, Monash University
Professor Georges Rey, University of Maryland, College Park
Organizers/speakers
Dr. Nicholas Allott, senior lecturer, ILOS, University of Oslo
Professor Terje Lohndal, NTNU & UiT The Arctic University of Norway
Dr. Ingrid Lossius Falkum, associate professor, IFIKK & ILN,
University of Oslo
Description
Word meaning is one of the least well-understood areas of language.
There is general (but not universal) agreement that nearly every
lexical/conceptual word is polysemous, that is, that words typically
have multiple related senses.
This raises many difficult questions (Falkum & Vicente 2015). What is
the lexical representation of a polysemous word? Does it encode all
the different senses that it can be used to express? If so, how does
this differ from homonymy (which is both intuitively and
experimentally distinct)? Or are the different senses somehow created
from an underlying lexical representation that does not correspond to
any of the senses? If so more questions arise: what is the format of
the lexical representation? Are there core semantic features that are
deployed in all (or all literal) uses of a word? (Rey 2014; Allott &
Textor 2017; Rey 2022; but see Allott & Textor 2022 for
counter-arguments.) What is the role of context in enabling the
speaker to express and the hearer to reconstruct a more specific sense
(Falkum, 2015)?
There is some evidence from experimental data that the meanings stored
in the mental lexicon are rather schematic: in particular, they seem
to be neutral between the different senses of polysemous words
(Frisson 2015). Anti-lexicalist views in morphology typically also
postulate thin semantics: e.g. in Borer’s influential framework, the
mental lexicon contains not words but roots, and these have no meaning
and no syntactic category; the latter is instead a property of
structures into which roots are inserted (Borer 2013; Alexiadou &
Lohndal 2017; Lohndal 2020). In recent publications Carston has argued
that this framework provides the right foundation for theories of
lexical pragmatics and polysemy including cross-categorial cases
(Carston 2019, 2021, 2023).
A related recent development is the systematic exploration of cases
where two apparently incompatible senses are co-predicated, as in
“Lunch was delicious, but lasted all afternoon” (Chomsky 2000; Collins
2017; Ortega-Andrés & Vicente, 2019). Theoretically-diverse attempts
have been made to explain the data (e.g. Gotham 2022; Liu 2022;
Ortega-Andrés 2022) or to explain them away (Brody & Feiman 2023;
Collins, draft). Could polysemy be illusory?
Hosted by IFIKK and the Centre for Philosophy and the Sciences,
University of Oslo
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