Concepts in the Lexicon

The meaning of a sentence is derived from the meanings of its individual words together with its syntactic structure and surrounding context. The interactions of those elements raise important issues for any theory of understanding:

• Multiple word senses. Each word form may have several different parts of speech and many different meanings.

• Syntactic ambiguity. The grammar may permit more than one parsing with no clear guidelines for attaching modifiers and grouping words into phrases.

• Implicit relationships. The relation between a modifier and the word it modifies may not be specified by an explicit word, affix, or syntactic structure.

• Context dependencies. Words in distant parts of a sentence or larger discourse may have implications that are not signaled by the syntax.

This chapter starts with examples that illustrate the semantic patterns that must be represented in the lexicon. It then shows how the canonical graphs, which represent the patterns associated with concept types, interact with syntactic and pragmatic information to determine the meaning of sentences in context, resolve ambiguities, and represent metaphor, metonymy, and anaphora.

For an overview of material that will be incorporated in this chapter, see the papers by Sowa in the reference section.

Go back to Introduction, to Part I: Problems and Issues, or to Part II: Representations.

Send comments to John F. Sowa.

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