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Semantics without semantic content
Author(s) -
Harris Daniel W.
Publication year - 2022
Publication title -
mind and language
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.905
H-Index - 68
eISSN - 1468-0017
pISSN - 0268-1064
DOI - 10.1111/mila.12290
Subject(s) - computer science , defeasible estate , semantics (computer science) , context (archaeology) , pragmatics , interface (matter) , principle of compositionality , sentence , constraint (computer aided design) , natural language processing , cognitive science , artificial intelligence , linguistics , programming language , psychology , mathematics , philosophy , paleontology , bubble , maximum bubble pressure method , parallel computing , biology , geometry
I argue that semantics is the study of the proprietary database of a centrally inaccessible and informationally encapsulated input–output system. This system's role is to encode and decode partial and defeasible evidence of what speakers are saying. Since information about nonlinguistic context is therefore outside the purview of semantic processing, a sentence's semantic value is not its content but a partial and defeasible constraint on what it can be used to say. I show how to translate this thesis into a detailed compositional‐semantic theory based on the influential framework of Heim and Kratzer. This approach situates semantics within an independently motivated account of human cognitive architecture and reveals the semantics–pragmatics interface to be grounded in the underlying interface between modular and central systems.