Interpretational Strategies and Semantic Identities

Interpretational Strategies and Semantic Identities Ioannis Kanellos ENST-Bretagne; DIASC BP 832 29285 Brest Cedex FRANCE Ioannis.Kanellos©enst-bretagneir Victor Hugo Zaldivar-Carrillo ENST-Bretagne; DIASC BP 832 29285 Brest Cedex FRANCE VH.Zaldivar@enst-bretagne.fr Abstract It is not possible to model semantics of natural language unless one can clearly establish the structure of contextual information and how "context" guides the construction of semantic identities of linguistic units. We claim that this cannot be done unless one can overcome the representational locality imposed by extensional formalisms. In this paper we present a formalism aiming at setting up a non-extensional framework allowing the expression of a notion of context. The very notion of identity is revisited and some forms of non-extensional identity are proposed. In the last section we suggest a representation of metaphor understanding that implements a form of interaction between global contextual information and local semantic identities. 1 Introduction One of the most important problems in modeling semantics of Natural Language is undoubtfully the representational locality of the chosen formal features. Formal locality is apparently contradictory to empirical facts; the semantic identity of a linguistic unit—at whatever level it might be—is determined only within global structures. In formal constructions one generally recovers such global structures by more elementary ones, given by locally necessary and sufficient definitional means. Nevertheless, in Natural Language the primacy is rather to the global structures as they are necessary for the definition of the semantic character of the more elementary ones. In interpretational semantics [Rastier, 1987] this last constitutes the major principle. The problem in such an approach is the construction of interpretation strategies. From a structuralistic point of view this turns out to be equivalent to the determination of a specific recurrence of semantic components giving isotopies. An isotopy is a form of logically coherent actualization of a possible co-occurrence of such components. Many different strategies may be operational and thus many interpretational schemata may be possible, corresponding to different senses of the same text. What precisely changes across such strategies is the semantic identity of the relevant linguistic entities insofar as different semic actualizations are selected. Interpretational semantics as a general semantic theory is not yet formalized. The long-term aim of this paper is to provide a plausible approach towards a general formal model. Here we give a glimpse of the formalism by showing how to define a notion of semantic identity and a notion of context so that we shall be able to express semantic identity shifts as effects of interpretational strategies. 2 Formalism The basic representational unit is called a "concept" . Let C be the set of all concepts and define To such that: To =df U Ci ; where every Ci is given by Ci =df n;=, Ci and Ci =df C for every 1< 5_ i� (1) The entities in To, of the form E(n)i =df (ca ,c12� ,cin), are called "vector-concepts" . To is supposed to be extensional. Let us also define the level T1 ("theories" of level 1 in the sense of [Murphy …

Content truncated to 500 words