Piñango Maria M
Department of Linguistics and Interdepartmental Neuroscience Program, Yale University, New Haven, CT, United States.
Front Artif Intell. 2023 Jun 19;6:1025293. doi: 10.3389/frai.2023.1025293. eCollection 2023.
I explore the hypothesis that the experience of meaning discreteness when we think about the "meaning" of a word is a "communicative" illusion. The illusion is created by processing-contextual constraints that impose disambiguation on the semantic input making salient a specific interpretation within a conceptual space that is otherwise continuous. It is this salience that we experience as discreteness. The understanding of word meaning as non-discrete raises the question of what is context; what are the mechanisms of constraint that it imposes and what is the nature of the conceptual space with which pronunciations (i.e., visual/oral signs) associate themselves. I address these questions by leveraging an algebraic continuous system for word meaning that is itself constrained by two fundamental parameters: control-asymmetry and connectedness. I evaluate this model by meeting two challenges to word meaning discreteness (1) cases where the same pronunciation is associated with multiple senses that are nonetheless interdependent, e.g., English "smoke," and (2) cases where the same pronunciation is associated with a family of meanings, minimally distinct from each other organized as a "cline," e.g., English "have." These cases are not marginal-they are ubiquitous in languages across the world. Any model that captures them is accounting for the meaning system for language. At the heart of the argumentation is the demonstration of how the parameterized space naturally organizes these kinds of cases without appeal for further categorization or segmentation of any kind. From this, I conclude that discreteness in word meaning is epiphenomenal: it is the experience of salience produced by contextual constraints. And that this is possible because, by and large, every time that we become consciously aware of the conceptual structure associated with a pronunciation, i.e., its meaning, we do so under real-time processing conditions which are biased toward producing a specific interpretation in reference to a specific situation in the world. Supporting it is a parameterized space that gives rise to lexico-conceptual representations: generalized algebraic structures necessary for the identification, processing, and encoding of an individual's understanding of the world.
当我们思考一个词的“意义”时，意义离散的体验是一种“交际”错觉。这种错觉是由处理语境限制造成的，这些限制对语义输入进行消歧，使概念空间中原本连续的特定解释变得突出。正是这种突出性，我们将其体验为离散性。将词义理解为非离散的观点引发了这样一些问题：什么是语境；它施加的限制机制是什么；以及发音（即视觉/口头符号）与之关联的概念空间的本质是什么。我通过利用一个用于词义的代数连续系统来解决这些问题，该系统本身受到两个基本参数的约束：控制不对称性和连通性。我通过应对词义离散性的两个挑战来评估这个模型：（1）同一个发音与多个相互依存的意义相关联的情况，例如英语中的“smoke”；（2）同一个发音与一系列意义相关联的情况，这些意义彼此之间的差异极小，组织成一个“渐变群”，例如英语中的“have”。这些情况并非边缘情况——它们在世界上的各种语言中普遍存在。任何能够捕捉到这些情况的模型都在解释语言的意义系统。论证的核心在于展示参数化空间如何自然地组织这些情况，而无需诉诸任何进一步的分类或分割。由此，我得出结论：词义的离散性是一种副现象：它是语境限制产生的突出性体验。之所以会这样，是因为大体上，每次我们有意识地意识到与一个发音相关联的概念结构，即它的意义时，我们都是在实时处理条件下这样做的，这些条件倾向于针对世界上的特定情况产生特定的解释。支持这一点的是一个参数化空间，它产生词汇概念表征：这是识别、处理和编码个人对世界的理解所必需的广义代数结构。
