Lexical meaning, reference and usage

Pierre Frath
Université Marc Bloch
Groupe de recherche sur les fonctionnements discursifs EA 1339 LDL
Département d’anglais
UFR des Langues Vivantes
22 rue Descartes
67084 Strasbourg CEDEX
France
Email : frath@umb.u-strasbg.fr

Abstract

This paper argues that Pustejovsky's Generative Lexicon (GL) theory is faced with a fundamental difficulty in the following passage:
  "En quoi consistent les expériences de Weinberg? La première, parue dans le numéro du 29 juillet 1999, prouve qu'une enzyme, la télomérase, impliquée dans le vieillissement cellulaire, joue un rôle déterminant dans la cancérisation des cellules. La seconde, divulguée peu après, dans le numéro d'octobre, apporte la confirmation que sans télomérase le cancer est inhibé."
Sciences et Vie, n° 996, sept. 2000 ("Cancer, nouveaux espoirs", p.83).

The use of divulguer (disclose) seems somewhat strange. It seems to imply that the second experiment was a secret, but the first was not and the context does not hint at a difference between the two experiments.  The reader can imagine a reason for the difficulty. Repetition being a major sin in French, the journalist probably did not want to repeat parue (published) in the second sentence and chose divulguée (disclosed) instead. We argue that GL cannot handle such a sentence because it assumes that meaning is a matter of representation and interpretation. Whether an experiment is a secret cannot ultimately be determined by lexical content and generative devices alone. It is a matter of intentional reference. 

We develop a usage-based view of meaning in the final sections of the paper. It has often been remarked that polysemy is an ingrained feature of language. The reason is that lexical items get their meaning from usage, i.e. the referring utterances in which they occur. Therefore lexical meaning is an ever-changing inference. We do not use signs to conjoin and express pre-existing mental representations, we use them to give shape and substance to our thoughts. Speaking is using signs to try and grasp and convey our experience. Sometimes we fail. We know the wrong words were used when we notice a discrepancy between the utterance and the denoted experience, not by a calculation on the content of the lexical items.

Introduction

This paper argues that Pustejovsky's Generative Lexicon (GL) theory is faced with a fundamental difficulty in the following passage:
"En quoi consistent les expériences de Weinberg? La première, parue dans le numéro du 29 juillet 1999, prouve qu'une enzyme, la télomérase, impliquée dans le vieillissement cellulaire, joue un rôle déterminant dans la cancérisation des cellules. La seconde, divulguée peu après, dans le numéro d'octobre, apporte la confirmation que sans télomérase le cancer est inhibé."
Sciences et Vie, n° 996, sept. 2000 ("Cancer, nouveaux espoirs", p.83).

The use of divulguer (disclose / divulge) seems somewhat strange. It implies that the second experiment was a secret. But the first was not, and the context does not hint at a difference between the two experiments.  The reader can imagine a reason for the discrepancy: repetition being a major sin in French, the journalist probably did not want to repeat parue (published) in the second sentence and chose divulguée (disclosed/divulged) instead. He might have used publiée (published) but he did not maybe because of some contingent reason such as deadlines.
We argue that GL cannot handle such a sentence because it assumes that meaning is a matter of representation and interpretation. We shall first give a short summary of GL and then try to analyse the difficulty. In the final sections, we shall give a semiotic reference-based description.

1	The Generative Lexicon

The gist of GL is that lexical items can be represented by their internal structure. Pustejovsky lists four levels of semantic representation: the argument structure, the event structure, the qualia structure and the lexical inheritance structure. In GL words carry semantic parameters and the interpretation of the sentence is arrived at by the matching of the parameters, sometimes helped by generative devices such as type coercion. Make a table is well-formed because a semantic structure describing table would presumably mention that it is an artefact; eat a table is not because it would probably not be mentioned that a table can be food. Sometimes the matching process does not run smoothly, as in Mary began a book. In that case, GL makes use of a generative device to sort out the problem. Begin normally expects an event as an argument, according to Pustejovsky. Since book is not an event, the type coercion device steps in to "coerce" book into an event, provided the qualia roles allow for the possibility, which is the case (Pustejovsky 1993, Pustejovsky 1995).
Compositional semantics assumes that complex meaning is arrived at by the organisation of low-level semantic features into higher-level structures. Low-level features may be shared by lexical items and form a system. See for example Pottier's famous classification of seats (Pottier 1964) and Greimas's system of spatial adjectives (Greimas 1986). Yet positing semantic units prompts questions about their nature (are they linguistic, conceptual, perceptual entities?), their number and the way they interact. Pustejovsky bypasses these problems by introducing an intermediate level, the four structures, which contain an open-ended list of semantic elements. The intermediate level is governed by generative processes. Therefore lexical meaning is not strictly dependant on the semantic units the structures contain, which may be loosely specified. When specification is needed it can be introduced very easily. This feature makes GL a very attractive theory indeed, especially for computational linguists.

2	Analysis of divulguer une expérience

We used a concordancer on a corpus of 161 literary works in French (45 MB), some translated from other languages. We found ten occurrences of different forms of divulguer with the following objects:
- récit (story)
- choses qu'on leur dira (things they will be told)
- traité (treaty)
- maladie hideuse (hideous disease)
- découverte (discovery)
- défauts et vices (faults and vices) 
- crime (two occurrences)
- secret (two occurrences)

We understand that the discovery, the disease, the crime, the story, etc. were hidden, secret entities before they were disclosed. The question is, where does the secrecy feature (SF) originate? GL considers that meaning is pre-existing, that it is carried by the lexical item itself and selected by the verb with possibly the help of a generative device such as type coercion. So GL has to allocate the SF beforehand. Crime, hideous disease, faults and vices, discovery and experiment could conceivably be considered as potential secrets per se and GL could decide to allocate them the SF. But what about story, things and treaty? They certainly do not possess an a priori SF. Since GL is not too specific about semantic content, it could be decided to add the secrecy feature when needed. But where is the border between semantic slot-filling and uncontrolled ad hoc problem-fixing?
As for disclose an experiment, let us suppose that it has actually been decided whether the qualia of experiment do or do not contain the secrecy feature. If they do, then GL considers the Sciences et Vie sentence as well-formed when it is not. If they do not, then the interpreting cannot take place and GL rejects the sentence, but not for the right reasons: an experiment could indeed be secret. GL could of course claim that divulguer only needs to match some general hypernymic feature in the qualia such as <abstract concept> or <human action>. But this would only make matters worse because sentences with divulguer <abstract concept> would then all be mechanically well formed. The type coercion device would be of no help either: there are no internal criteria to decide whether or not experiment should be coerced into a secret. GL cannot handle such sentences because the success or the failure of the interpreting  process (i.e. whether the qualia contain the secrecy feature or not) cannot determine the well-formedness of the sentence.
Let us consider publish a story. We do not understand that the story was secret. It could be argued that the story was unknown before it was published and that it was therefore also sort of secret, only in a different way. It could be argued that secrecy is not a discrete feature but a continuous one. Objects are more or less secret: story is endowed with a low level of secrecy while crime has a high level. But then, everything would have to be more or less secret, and to pre-empt any further objections, the theory would also have to admit that everything is everything (wet, hard, soft, costly, etc.) to various degrees. Such a theory would of course be desperately useless and anyway it is not clear how a theory could handle continuous values any easier than discrete ones. 
Publish does not put the onus on the SF whereas disclose does. On the other hand publish specifies the means of making the story known (having it printed). It seems that the verb is able to allocate meaning to the object. Using experiment  (or story, or treaty, etc) as an object of disclose/divulge turns it into a secret. Disclose actually allocates meaning (the SF) to experiment, and it does so on a lexical level, not on a contextual level. Disclose an experiment is perfectly acceptable out of context and experiment does not need an a priori secrecy feature for the phrase to be well-formed. This allocating power is a very general feature of verbs. In we eat a table, I disclose an experiment or she begins a novel, table is allocated a food meaning, experiment a secrecy meaning and novel the possibility of being begun. Yet meaning allocation is tentative. It might fit with the pre-constructed stereotypical meaning of the object, as in make a table, or it might not, as in *the audience began the concert. It might fit with what we know of the context, if for example Hansel and Gretel eat the table, or it might not, as in divulguer une expérience in the Sciences et Vie passage.
Let us have a closer look at this allocating power of verbs. We have used a concordancer to study the verb begin in a 5MB corpus of English literary texts which has  produced about 500 occurrences of begin. They can be divided up into 4 types: A, B1, B2 and C (Frath 2001a).

•	A type is an infinitive/gerund construction, which makes up for about 73% of occurrences:
1) I began to twitch all over. 
2) Alice  began measuring the ground.
•	B1 type is an elliptic construction, which makes up for about 10% of occurrences:
3)`Didn't you know THAT?' cried another Daisy, and here they all began shouting together [...]. `Silence, every one of you!' cried the Tigerlily [...].`Never mind!' Alice said in a soothing tone, and stooping down to the daisies, who were just beginning again, she whispered, `If you don't hold your tongues, I'll pick you!'
•	B2 is an ergative construction, which makes up for another 10% of occurrences:
4) the drums began 
•	C is a nominal construction, which makes up for about 7% of occurrences:
5) Captain Mayhew began a dark story concerning Moby Dick
There are only two occurrences of non-procedural objects (in C) or subjects (in B2).
6) he began "The House of the Seven Gables" (N. Hawthorne)
7) It's hard to say where one ends and another begins [buildings]

A first observation is that begin + N(physical object) and begin + V can hardly be studied as if they were on an equal footing, one of them being statistically non-existent. So why do we accept she began an apple as well-formed? The literature offers three sorts of explanations: i) the recovery of an elided process (eating? drawing?), ii) the recovery of an abstract process in the context (Godard & Jaillez 1993) which can take such or such a value according to the context, and iii) the selection of a metonymic feature which can provide an argument for type coercion (GL).
Yet, the evidence shows that B2 and C constructions do not necessitate the mental recovery of a process. It is either pleonastic (telling in 5?), unnecessary (beating in 4?) or outright impossible (7). As for 6, what matters is that Hawthorne began the novel, not that he began writing it. We know he is an author, and we know "The House of The Seven Gables" is one of his books. We do not need to recover writing, any more than we need to recover  Hawthorne as the referent of he. Understanding is not slot-filling. Hawthorne began writing a novel does not bring us any closer to explaining he began a novel, because we would still have to explain Hawthorne, begin, write, and so on, with no end in sight. Our conclusion is that begin, just like any other verb, affects its object directly. It is an ingrained feature of verbs to allocate tentative meaning to objects (or subjects in ergative structures), in this case the possibility of being begun. There is no need for type coercion. Tentative meaning is accepted, rejected or corrected according to our understanding of the pragmatic situation, according to reference.  
Whether an experiment is a secret (or a table food, or whether a novel can be begun) cannot ultimately be determined by lexical content and generative devices. The semantic relevance of utterances is more a matter of intentional reference than of matching the representations of lexical items.

3	A semiotic view of language

Compositional semantics ultimately fails because it assumes that meaning is a matter of matching lexical items according to rules and semantic content. Cognitivism believes that lexical meaning is conceptual and that matching words amounts to matching concepts (or representations) or vice versa, that linking concepts (or representations) produces sentences. See for example Fauconnier's mental spaces (Fauconnier 1984) and the blending paradigm (Fauconnier & Turner 1996, Turner & Fauconnier 1995) where blending explains language on both linguistic and conceptual levels. Yet the problem remains: what is the point of matching (or blending) concepts? We do not mechanically run processes in our brains. We speak to intentionally refer to objects of our experience, both external ones, such as this computer in front of me or the falling leaves I can see through the window, and internal ones, such as pleasure or sorrow. Both these types of objects are public, the external ones in the sense that their existence for us is culturally and linguistically determined by our community; the internal ones in the sense developed by Wittgenstein in his famous "private language argument" (Philosophical Investigations, §247 and following). The gist of the argument is that without a public language we would not be able to recognise the similarities between sensations because we would lack external criteria. I would feel something at the death of a relative for example but would not be able to distinguish it from some other feeling occurring at some other occasion. We know when something is red when we have learned the usage of red. Sorrow is the public name of a feeling whose usage I have learned and which helps me recognise and name (categorise) some inner state when it occurs. We sometimes have a sensation (say a pain) for which we have no name. We know we have felt it before but we are unable to say when and why.
We live in a world of physico-cultural objects loosely linked to the lexicon. Meaning cannot be satisfactorily accounted for by the matching of linguistic and conceptual entities. Intentional reference has to be introduced. C. S. Peirce has put forward a tryadic theory of language which considers that a sign referring to an object can be developed into an interpreting sign in reference to some aspects of the object, and so on endlessly. There is always something to be said about objects because they are never fully and totally given. Objects are opaque and we try to delineate them through language.

4	Meaning, polysemy and usage

One way to learn a language is to sit  in a classroom with a teacher who provides controlled and graded utterances along with methodology, grammatical explanations and lists of lexical items. Yet in some situations, people have no other options than to learn a foreign tongue by just listening and inferring meaning from the situation, with occasional help from native-speakers. This means they are at first confronted with flows of meaningless and continuous linguistic noise. After some time they begin to recognise sequences within the flow. Some of these sequences (named "denominations" by some authors) refer synthetically for example nouns and adjectives. When learners manage to attribute meaning to those sequences they can use them as strongholds to try and conquer the rest of the language.
It can therefore be assumed that the meaning of the whole (the utterance), in that situation, is not a function of the parts. Rather it is the parts which are totally determined by the whole. In (Searle 1999) the author considers that "the illocutionary act is the unit of meaning in communication", an illocutionary act being "the minimal complete unit of linguistic communication. Whenever we talk or write to each other we are performing illocutionary acts" (pp. 136-137). If this point of view is correct word meaning is constructed from usage. Words are given their meaning along with their linguistic environment by the larger utterances where they occur in relation to pragmatic situations. Thus lexical meaning is an ever-changing inference.
Most words are polysemous because we use them to denote different objects (for example financial operation and mathematical operation). We also use them to denote metonymical aspects of one object as in the bank is very nice (bank = personnel) v. the bank was flooded (bank = building). These aspects of polysemy have been extensively studied in the literature. See for example Langacker's active zones (Langacker1984), Cruse's facets (Cruse 1995, 2001), Kleiber's integrated metonymy (Kleiber 1994, 1999), and the Generative Lexicon.
A semiotic usage-based view of language considers linguistic activity  as the construction of a complex sign (an utterance) from usage-shaped mostly ambiguous signs (denominations) which come with their lexical environments and may point to various elements of our experience. If words were not ambiguous each object would have to be named separately. Even supposing words did refer to a single object (say piano), denominations would still be pointing to a complex whole of which one aspect or the other would have to be selected by metonymy (the sound, as in I can hear the piano, the piece of furniture, as in We polished the piano, etc.).
In an utterance, the speaker "trims" the meanings of words by "grinding" them into one another, by taking advantage of their mutual influence in relationship to the pragmatic situation. When he constructs an utterance, he concomitantly constructs what he is actually thinking and wishes to convey. Utterance precision is made possible by the components' very lack of  precision. If this were not the case, if the components were all unambiguous, the possibility of linguistic expression would be dependant on the ontological existence of genetic or real-world building blocks (primes) exhaustively covering all concepts and/or real-world elements. But words being ambiguous they are bottomless reservoirs of meaning capable of endlessly feeding our desire to grasp our experience and convey it through utterances.
The full theoretical acceptance of lexical ambiguity is the logical alternative to untenable ontological hypotheses about semantic universals. If the lexicon is considered as traces of the messiness of the real-world and of the complexity of human interaction then it is only reasonable to accept that indeterminacy is the stuff of which the lexicon is made. Yet we are sometimes able to disentangle ourselves from the confusion by the careful association of messy words within well structured utterances. 

5	Descriptions rather than representations

So what is the role of a semantic theory if it is not to explain meaning by representations? If lexical meaning is the messy trace of human experience, it follows that it is not a construct from universal low-level semantic units. Whatever subsuming element there are, linking for example the usages of financial and mathematical operations, are abstracted from usage, they are not the conditions of usage (Frath 2001b). Wittgenstein compares lexical meaning to a bedside lamp: we are unable to determine exactly where the light orb stops. Some meaning is central, some is peripheral, some is on the verges, some is definitely not part of the lexical item at all, but the limits are fluctuating in time (meaning changes diachronically) and in space (words may not have the same meaning according to where they are used). Therefore semantics should concentrate on the description of the lexicon. Representations can then be constructed from descriptions according to practical objectives. 
Let us now go back to the divulguer/divulge/disclose problem. We examined the contexts of disclose and divulge in the afore mentioned 5 MB corpus of English literary texts. We found nine occurrences of divulge: six times with the word secret as an object, twice with knowledge and once with affection. In a novel by Isaac Bashevis Singer, we found an additional occurrence of divulge, this time with fear. As for disclose, the corpus produced 22 occurrences. Seventeen of them concern the disclosure of some hidden visible entity such as in It opened before them, and disclosed a long, bare, melancholy room. The five other occurrences concern secrets (three times), the name of a person, and the identity of a person.
Divulge and disclose are close enough, but not synonymical. The hidden visible entity meaning is not present in either divulge or divulguer. One cannot divulge a room. In French, *la porte s'ouvrit et divulgua une chambre is impossible. The proper word would be dévoiler or révéler. Divulge seems therefore closer to divulguer than disclose. On the other hand, it is hardly possible to divulge an experiment, whereas divulguer une expérience is correct. 
Divulge/disclose means divulge/disclose a secret. When secret is used with disclose or divulge, it necessarily refers to aspects of some other entity in the context, such as the currents of the seas in "For the secrets of the currents in the seas have never yet been divulged, even to the most erudite research"
When secret is not used, divulge / disclose allocate the SF directly to their objects, as in divulge my fear or disclose an experiment. The difference between divulge and disclose lies in the type of objects which can be disclosed or divulged: hidden visible objects, complex human acts (experiment), names and identities for disclose; mental states (knowledge, affection, fears) for divulge (and also information and names although there are none in the corpus). Why these differences? Probably because such pairs of semantically close words tend to be used in different contexts, which affects their meaning (see for example liberty and freedom, begin and commence, border and frontier). Lexical diversification is probably a condition for complex thought and expressive discourse. In George Orwell's 1984, Big Brother introduces Newspeak, an ever-shrinking language, to try and reduce the people's ability to think. 
Of course the evidence at hand is partial and provisional: a larger corpus might reveal other types of objects. Yet such descriptions could be useful in domains such as automatic knowledge acquisition from texts or man-machine interface.

Conclusion

We argued that GL cannot handle verb+object sequences (and probably other types too) because it assumes that the well-formedness of such a sequence is a matter of matching semantic features. We showed that well-formedness depends on reference, i.e. on whether what is said accurately refers to the speaker's pragmatic intention. This is so because verbs are able to tentatively allocate meaning to their objects, sometimes by selecting a preconstructed semantic feature (make a table), sometimes not (eat a table). GL is able to describe phrases such as make a table or disclose an experiment quite well, but even so, whether an experiment is a secret is not determined by the semantic links between the verb and the noun. What matters is whether the phrase fits the situation or not. Corpora are the repository of usage and can be used for usage-based semantic descriptions. Once such corpus-based descriptions are at hand they can be transcribed into symbolic representations for specific uses. They could for example help GL solve the problem posed by the under-specification of the qualia, which could then easily be geared towards specific applications. The notion that the mind and the computer are both representational devices would have to be abandoned because the syntactical matching of symbols cannot explain meaning, as Searle shows in his "Chinese Room Argument" (Searle 1980). We do not use signs to conjoin and express pre-existing mental representations, we use them to give shape and substance to our thoughts. Speaking is using signs to try and grasp and convey our experience. Sometimes we fail. We know the wrong words were used when we notice a discrepancy between the utterance and the denoted experience, not by a calculation on the content of the lexical items. Yet we can analyse and describe lexical content to a certain extent, and feed the results into machines for some limited, non-demiurgic, technological purposes. 

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