Workshop
at the 25th annual meeting of the German Linguistics Society
(Deutsche Gesellschaft für Sprachwissenschaft)
in Munich from February 26-28, 2003

  
 

 Ontological Knowledge and Linguistic Coding

  
News

April 17, 2003:
Presentation material of several contributions of the workshop are now available online. Please have a look at the contributors' list below.

March 16, 2003:
The workshop was a big success, thanks to you all! We are now in the process of preparing a collection of papers based on but not restricted to the workshop contributions. If for some reason you have been unable to attend but think you have a significant contribution to make to the topic, please contact the organizers.

 
Call for Papers The relation between nonlinguistic knowledge and linguistic competence is still a most controversially discussed issue. This workshop will focus on a less often addressed aspect of this domain. Ontological knowledge is neither part of linguistic competence nor world knowledge in the sense of knowledge about how the world happens to be, it is rather knowledge that is inherent in the way human cognition tends to conceptualize and categorize the phenomena of this world. It is therefore assumed to constrain considerably the notions of a possible human language in general and of a a possible lexicon in special. This is the working hypothesis of the workshop. Most of the logically possible interpretations for Quine's famous utterance `Gavagai' are ruled out for reasons the workshop aims at elucidating, reasons having to do with the restrictions placed on the form of a linguistic expression by the ontological position of the coded concept, its position in the ontological hierarchies we have analytical knowledge of.

So the central question is: What is the relation between the ontological position of a concept and the structure of the linguistic forms that encode it? Whereas the details of phonological shape seem to be largely arbitrary, this obviously does not hold for the number of syllables or semiotic complexity. Cutting up the sign inventory of a language according to an `expense' or `weight' hierarchy (roughly grammatical morpheme < lexical root < derived stem < composed stem < phrase), it seems that the encoded concepts tend to build a corresponding hierarchy of basicness or elementarity (roughly conceptual primitive < basic level concept < primary derived concept < 2-ary derived concept < n-ary derived concept): Grammatical morphemes (grams) preferably encode very elementary categories, whereas concepts which require at least a phrase to be encoded are in general highly derived.

As a case in point consider the location concept of the interior of a container, minimally coded in English by (one reading of) the monomorphemic preposition in, compared to the corresponding goal-direction concept coded by the bimorphemic preposition into and to the corresponding motion concept coded by the lexical root of the transitive verb with goal objects enter. A simple operation leads to reenter, one step higher in the complexity hierarchy both on the expense and the basicness scale: Output concept and its encoding form are both derived from their input counterparts. But there are mismatches as well: The conceptual operation of causativization has no formal counterpart when it is coded in another reading of the transitive verb root enter (with a different valency where the exponent of the motion is coded by the direct object).

The factual conditions are, of course, highly complex, one reason being the combinatorial possibilities of both the conceptual structures and the encoding means. Accordingly, the principles that constrain their mappings are as yet known only in very rough outline. Existing findings need to be worked out, cf. Givón's (1990) `Less predictable information will be given more coding material', the preference for root-encoding of basic-level categories (Rosch 1978), or what could be called Talmy's (2000) law, which states that roots of motion verbs tend to co-encode, alongside with the superconcept of motion itself, exactly one additional factor such as path, manner, figure etc. Universal preferences are equally interesting as typological differences, and among the corresponding cross-linguistic investigations, cross-modal studies comparing sound and sign languages are especially revealing and welcome.

A focal point will be on eventity ontologies (eventities are events or similar entities), in particular those for location and motion eventities and communicative acts. As these complex themes suggest an interdisciplinary approach, not only linguists are hereby addressed, but also computer scientists, psychologists and philosophers.

In order to keep a common point of reference, we would like to ask each contributor to comment on the sample problem from her or his point of view.

References:
Givón, Talmy (1990): Syntax. vol II. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: Benjamins.
Talmy, Leonard (2000): Toward a Cognitive Semantics. Vol.2: Typology and Process in Concept Structuring. Cambridge, MA, London: MIT Press. Chapter 1: Lexicalization Patterns, 21-146.
Rosch, Eleanor (1978): Principles of Categorization. In: Rosch, Eleanor / Barbara B. Lloyd (eds.) Cognition and Categorization, Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 27-48. 		 
Invited speakers Nicola Guarino
(ISTC-CNR, Padua, Italy) 		Abstract     Presentation (Powerpoint, zipped)
Leonard Talmy
(SUNY at Buffalo, USA) 		Abstract
Contributions John Bateman Abstract     Presentation (Powerpoint)
Marija Maya Brala Abstract     Presentation (Powerpoint)
Alain Cozannet and Johannes Heinecke Abstract
Christiane Fellbaum Abstract
Sandiway Fong and Christiane Fellbaum Abstract     Presentation (PDF)
Daniel Glatz Abstract
Wiltrud Mihatsch Abstract     Presentation (Word)
Adam Pease Abstract     Presentation (Powerpoint)
Stavros Skopeteas Abstract     Presentation (Powerpoint)
Anders Soegaard Abstract     Presentation (HTM)
Achim Stein Abstract
Anne Tamm Abstract
Martin Trautwein Abstract     Presentation (Powerpoint)
Laura Wagner Abstract     Presentation (Powerpoint)
Program THE FINAL PROGRAM CAN BE FOUND HERE.
Organizers Andrea Schalley Dietmar Zaefferer  
  School of Languages, Cultures and Linguistics
University of New England, Australia		 Institut für Theoretische Linguistik
Universität München, Germany 		 
  phone: +61 (0)2 6773-3655 phone: +49 (0)89 2180-2060  
  andrea.schalley@une.edu.au zaefferer@germanistik.uni-muenchen.de
Important dates  extended deadline for abstracts:  September 1, 2002  
   notification of acceptance:  September 10, 2002  
   program announcement:  December 15, 2002  
   workshop:  February 26-28, 2003  

Page last updated by Andrea Schalley, July 17, 2003