Date: 05-Oct-2004 From: Julia Ulrich <julia.ulrichdegruyter.com> Subject: Cognitive Modeling and Verbal Semantics: Schalley
Title: Cognitive Modeling and Verbal Semantics
Subtitle: A Representational Framework Based on UML
Series Title: Trends in Linguistics. Studies and Monographs 154
Author: Andrea C. Schalley, University of New England, Australia
Hardback: ISBN: 3110179512 Pages: xviii, 446 Price: Europe EURO 98.00
Abstract:
This book presents a unique approach to the semantics of verbs. It develops
and specifies a decompositional representation framework for verbal
semantics that is based on the Unified Modeling Language (UML), the
graphical lingua franca for the design and modeling of object-oriented
systems in computer science. The new framework combines formal precision
with conceptual flexibility and allows the representation of very
complicated details of verbal meaning, using a mixture of graphical
elements as well as linearized constructs. Thereby, it offers a solution
for different semantic problems such as context-dependency and polysemy.
The latter, for instance, is demonstrated in one of the two well-elaborated
applications of the framework within this book, the investigation of the
polysemy of German setzen.
Besides the formal specification of the framework, the book comprises a
cognitive interpretation of important modeling elements, discusses general
issues connected with the framework such as dynamic and static aspects of
verbal meanings, questions of granularity, and general constraints applying
to verbal semantics. Moreover, first steps towards a compositional
semantics are undertaken, and a new verb classification based on this
graphical approach is proposed.
Since the framework is graphical in nature, the book contains many
annotated figures, and the framework's modeling elements are illustrated by
example diagrams. Not only scholars working in the field of linguistics, in
particular in semantics, will find this book illuminating because of its
new graphical approach, but also researchers of cognitive science,
computational linguistics and computer science in general will surely
appreciate it.
Andrea C. Schalley is Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of New England,
Australia.
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