What is the simplest semantics imaginable?
András Kornai
In From fieldwork to linguistic theory: A tribute to Dan Everett,
2024
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We claim that three binary relations, 0, 1, and 2, are both necessary and sufficient
for formal semantics: 1 and 2 are the well-known subject of" andobject of"
relations, and 0 corresponds to the subsumption or is a" relationship well
known from knowledge representation. We describe how these can be used to
compositionally assign a semantic representation built from primitives
(morphemes, semantic atoms) and how the system can be related to the
computationalword vector" semantics which is surprisingly effective even
though it appears to employ no grammatical rules or constraints.
Citation
@InCollection{Kornai:2024,
title = {What is the simplest semantics imaginable?},
author = {Andr\'as Kornai},
editor = {Edward Gibson and Moshe Poliak},
booktitle = {From fieldwork to linguistic theory: A tribute to {D}an {E}verett},
publisher = {Language Science Press},
year = {2024},
url = {https://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/434},
pages = {247--259}
}