The articles in this volume are the outcome of the successful BRIDGE Workshop held in Düsseldorf in 2014. The workshop gathered a number of distinguished researchers from formal semantics and conceptual semantics and aimed to initiate a deeper conversation and collaboration instead of separating the two sides as competing views. The workshop provided a platform to further discuss parallelisms on specific semantic issues on the one hand and on the other hand to confront opposed claims from the two different perspectives. This volume represents a selected number of high-quality papers presented at the workshop featuring various approaches to meaning from linguistics, logic and philosophy of language. This series explores issues of mental representation, linguistic structure and representation, and their interplay. The research presented in this series is grounded in the idea explored in the Collaborative Research Center 'The structure of representations in language, cognition and science' (SFB 991) that there is a universal format for the representation of linguistic and cognitive concepts.

By highlighting relations between experimental and theoretical work, this volume explores new ways of addressing one of the central challenges in the study of language and cognition. The articles bring together work by leading scholars and younger researchers in psychology, linguistics and philosophy. An introductory chapter lays out the background on concept composition, a problem that is stimulating much new research in cognitive science. Researchers in this interdisciplinary domain aim to explain how meanings of complex expressions are derived from simple lexical concepts and to show how these meanings connect to concept representations. Traditionally, much of the work on concept composition has been carried out within separate disciplines, where cognitive psychologists have concentrated on concept representations, and linguists and philosophers have focused on the meaning and use of logical operators. This volume demonstrates an important change in this situation, where convergence points between these three disciplines in cognitive science are emerging and are leading to new findings and theoretical insights. This book is open access under a CC BY license.

This volume brings together a diverse range of scholars to address important philosophical and interdisciplinary questions in the study of language. Linguistics throughout history has been a conduit to the study of the mind, brain, societal structure, literature and history itself. The epistemic and methodological transfer between the sciences and humanities in regards to linguistics has often been documented, but the underlying philosophical issues have not always been adequately addressed. With 15 original and interdisciplinary chapters, this volume therefore tackles vital questions relating to the philosophy, history, and theoretical interplay between the study of language and fields as varied as logic, physics, biology, classical philology and neuroscience. With a four part structure, questions of the mathematical foundations of linguistics, links to the natural sciences, cognitive implications and historical connections, take centre stage throughout the volume. The final chapters present research related to the linguistic connections between history, philosophy and the humanities more broadly. Advancing new avenues of research, this volume is exemplary in its treatment of diachronic and cross-disciplinary interaction, and will be of interest to all scholars interested in the study of language.

This book provides a comprehensive foundation of distributional methods in computational modeling of meaning. It aims to build a common understanding of the theoretical and methodological foundations for students of computational linguistics, natural language processing, computer science, artificial intelligence, and cognitive science.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 11th International Tbilisi Symposium on Logic, Language and Computation, TbiLLC 2015, held in Tbilisi, Georgia, in September 2015. The 18 papers in this book were selected from the invited submissions of full, revised versions of the 37 short papers presented at the conference, and one invited talk. Each paper has passed through a rigorous peer-review process before being accepted for publication. The biennial conference series and the proceedings are representative of the aims of the organizing institutes: to promote the integrated study of logic, information and language. The scientific program consisted of tutorials, invited lectures, contributed talks, and two workshops.

Focusing mainly on classifiers, Numeral Classifiers and Classifier Languages offers a deep investigation of three major classifier languages: Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. This book provides detailed discussions well supported by empirical evidence and corpus analyses. Theoretical hypotheses regarding differences and commonalities between numeral classifier languages and other mainly article languages are tested to seek universals or typological characteristics. The essays collected here from leading scholars in different fields promise to be greatly significant in the field of linguistics for several reasons. First, it targets three representative classifier languages in Asia. It also provides critical clues and suggests solutions to syntactic, semantic, psychological, and philosophical issues about classifier constructions. Finally, it addresses ensuing debates that may arise in the field of linguistics in general and neighboring inter-disciplinary areas. This book should be of great interest to advanced students and scholars of East Asian languages.

This book presents a new approach to semantics based on Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz’s Directival Theory of Meaning (DTM), which in effect reduces semantics of the analysed language to the combination of its syntax and pragmatics. The author argues that the DTM was forgotten because for many years philosophers didn’t have conceptual tools to appreciate its innovative nature, and that the theory was far ahead of its time. The book shows how a redesigned and modernised version of the DTM can deliver a new solution to the problem of defining linguistic meaning and that the theory can be understood as a new type of functional role semantics. The defining feature of the DTM is that it presents meaning as a product of constraints on the usage of words. According to the DTM meaning is not use, but the avoidance of misuse. Readers will see how the DTM was shelved for reasons that we don’t find so dramatic anymore, and how it contains enough original ideas and solutions to warrant developing it into a full-blown contemporary account. It is shown how many of the underlying ideas of the theory have been embraced later by philosophers and treated simply as brute facts about natural languages or even as new philosophical discoveries. Philosophers of language and researchers with an interest in how languages and the mind work will find this book a fascinating read.