MORE ON UNDERSTANDING UNDERSTANDING UTTERANCES

The question as to how hearers are able to understand correctly utterances containing polysemous words can be clarified by considering what would be involved in providing an automation with a comparable ability to resolve polysemy. It is clear that such an automation would have to be able to analyze...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Ziff, Paul
Format: Report
Language:English
Subjects:
AUTOMATA
ENGLISH LANGUAGE
Linguistics
REASONING
SEMANTICS
VOCABULARY
WORDS(LANGUAGE)
Online Access:Request full text
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Summary:The question as to how hearers are able to understand correctly utterances containing polysemous words can be clarified by considering what would be involved in providing an automation with a comparable ability to resolve polysemy. It is clear that such an automation would have to be able to analyze utterances syntactically and to ascertain whether any of certain standard discourse operators had been applied in the generation of an utterance, e.g., operators corresponding to tropes, nonce usage, etc. But there are a number of other factors that impinge upon the resolution of polysemy. One of these pertains to coherence in discourse, another to matters of general belief. As an approach to dealing with these additional factors, a vectorial analysis of word senses and a new relation of logical implication are proposed. (Author)