4 - Type Composition Logic

Summary

I have surveyed the main, extant proposals for lexical semantics and have argued that these do not meet the demands for a satisfactory theory of lexical meaning. I propose a new framework here, a context sensitive model of typedriven lexical semantics, that builds on the insights of previous accounts but attempts to remedy their inadequacies.

This framework, the type composition logic, or TCL, assigns to each word stem a type. Some word stems like stone, which are ambiguous between a verbal and a nominal meaning, will have a complex type to represent that ambiguity. Such word stems may not have a distinct logical form until the syntactic environment or a morphological suffix selects for the verbal or nominal sense.

The lexical entries for word stems will take seriously the idea that predicates place type presuppositions on their arguments, presuppositions that must either be satisfied by the types of the arguments or accommodated if the predication is to be semantically well-formed. I will thus distinguish between type presuppositions that predicates place on their arguments and the types that the term arguments introduce as part of the proffered content. When putting terms together in a predication—be it in a standard predication, a nominal or verbal modification, the application of a determiner to a noun phrase, or even semantically rich morphological processes—extra contributions to logical form can arise when there is a type clash between a predicate and one of its arguments and a type presupposition must be accommodated.