October 2013
Intermediate to advanced
518 pages
16h 20m
English
Dedre Gentner, University of Illinois
Ilene M. France, Carnegie-Mellon University
This chapter investigates the combinatorial semantics of nouns and verbs in sentences: specifically, the phenomenon of meaning adjustment under semantic strain. The first issue in semantic adjustment is the locus of change. It presents the verb mutability hypothesis—the semantic structures conveyed by verbs and other predicate terms are more likely to be altered to fit the context than the semantic structures conveyed by object-reference terms. The meaning adjustment initiated in response to a mismatch with context is nevertheless characterized ...
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