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Where Words Get their Meaning
Cognitive processing and distributional modelling of word meaning in first and second language
Words are not just labels for conceptual categories. Words construct conceptual categories, frame situations and influence behavior. Where do they get their meaning?
This book describes how words acquire their meaning. The author argues that mechanisms based on associations, pattern detection, and feature matching processes explain how words acquire their meaning from experience and from language alike. Such mechanisms are summarized by the distributional hypothesis, a computational theory of meaning originally applied to word occurrences only, and hereby extended to extra-linguistic contexts.
By arguing in favor of the cognitive foundations of the distributional hypothesis, which suggests that words that appear in similar contexts have similar meaning, this book offers a theoretical account for word meaning construction and extension in first and second language that bridges empirical findings from cognitive and computer sciences. Plain language and illustrations accompany the text, making this book accessible to a multidisciplinary academic audience.
This book describes how words acquire their meaning. The author argues that mechanisms based on associations, pattern detection, and feature matching processes explain how words acquire their meaning from experience and from language alike. Such mechanisms are summarized by the distributional hypothesis, a computational theory of meaning originally applied to word occurrences only, and hereby extended to extra-linguistic contexts.
By arguing in favor of the cognitive foundations of the distributional hypothesis, which suggests that words that appear in similar contexts have similar meaning, this book offers a theoretical account for word meaning construction and extension in first and second language that bridges empirical findings from cognitive and computer sciences. Plain language and illustrations accompany the text, making this book accessible to a multidisciplinary academic audience.
[Converging Evidence in Language and Communication Research, 23] 2020. xi, 208 pp.
Publishing status: Available
Published online on 20 October 2020
Published online on 20 October 2020
© John Benjamins
Table of Contents
- Acknowledgements | pp. xi–11
- Chapter 1. Word power | pp. 1–10
- Part 1. Word meaning construction and representation in the human mind
- Chapter 2. Word meaning mental representation | pp. 13–31
- Chapter 3. Word meaning extension: Deriving new meanings from old ones | pp. 33–53
- Chapter 4. The bilingual mind and the bilingual mental lexicon | pp. 55–74
- Part 2. Word meaning construction and representation in the artificial mind
- Chapter 5. Distributional models and word embeddings | pp. 77–96
- Chapter 6. Evaluating distributional models | pp. 97–115
- Chapter 7. Distributional models beyond language | pp. 117–132
- Part 3. Converging evidence in language and communication research
- Chapter 8. Where words get their meaning | pp. 135–148
- Chapter 9. The cognitive foundations of the distributional hypothesis | pp. 149–167
- Chapter 10. Conclusions and outlook | pp. 169–184
- References | pp. 185–206
- Index | pp. 207–208
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