Lexical Meaning in Context A Web of Words [Hardcover]

This book is an innovative, formal framework for studying the meanings of words and how their meanings combine.What is a word? In some sense the answer is obvious: words are things dictionaries try to define. This book offers an innovative formal framework for investigating the meanings of words, how word meanings compose together to form sentence meanings and how discourse context can affect the compositional process.What is a word? In some sense the answer is obvious: words are things dictionaries try to define. This book offers an innovative formal framework for investigating the meanings of words, how word meanings compose together to form sentence meanings and how discourse context can affect the compositional process.This is a book about the meanings of words and how they can combine to form larger meaningful units, as well as how they can fail to combine when the amalgamation of a predicate and argument would produce what the philosopher Gilbert Ryle called a 'category mistake'. It argues for a theory in which words get assigned both an intension and a type. The book develops a rich system of types and investigates its philosophical and formal implications, for example the abandonment of the classic Church analysis of types that has been used by linguists since Montague. The author integrates fascinating and puzzling observations about lexical meaning into a compositional semantic framework. Adjustments in types are a feature of the compositional process and account for various phenomena including coercion and copredication. This book will be of interest to semanticists, philosophers, logicians and computer scientists alike.Preface; Part I. Foundations: 1. Lexical meaning and predication; 2. Types and lexical meaning; 3. Previous theories of prediction; Part II. Theory: 4. Type composition logic; 5. The complex type; 6. Type presuppositions in TCL; Part III. Development: 7. Restricted predication; 8. Rethinking coercion; 9. Other coercions; 10. Syntax and typl“&