PLM 2005 ABSTRACTS VAULT
see http://elex.amu.edu.pl/ifa/plm
for further details
The present paper is an attempt to set relative boundaries to the meaning of fuzzy concepts such as scalar adjectives. For the purposes of the present investigation, three adjectives hot, warm and cold were studied on the basis of the BNC corpus data. The paper refutes the ‘fixed meaning’ assumption and argues that meaning is not inherent in individual words, as the framework of corpus linguistics allows us to see.
Studies of the meaning of vague language and fuzzy concepts
have been based for a long time on the ‘fixed meaning’ assumption. The cornerstone
of such an approach is the belief that every word has an inherent stable meaning
(thus it should be possible to solve sorites paradoxes and to say how many grains
make up a heap). Due to the ‘fixed meaning’ assumption, such phenomena as vagueness
and fuzziness were and sometimes are still stigmatised and treated as an unwanted
feature of language.
The present paper argues that fuzzy concepts cannot be analysed in isolation
dis-carding their linguistic and situational context, which was done in both
two-valued and multi-valued logic as well as in many linguistic and philosophical
investigations. The meaning of fuzzy adjectives, as the present analysis demonstrates,
is context dependent to a very large extent. When detached from context, such
adjectives become vague. In other words, they are vague only at the level of
individual words. In addition, as our data show, in order to understand fuzzy
concepts, we have to rely on our world knowledge.
Corpus linguistics, which studies collocation as the basic unit of meaning, offers a suitable methodological and theoretical framework to see how context resolves fuzziness, since corpus linguistics asserts that words do not normally constitute independent selections and thus their meanings are not independent either. The present corpus-based investigation provides evidence that words and phrases have shared meanings. That is, the meaning of fuzzy adjectives most frequently depends on the noun that it collocates with. Thus it is argued that indeterminacy does exist in language, but it is solved as soon as words are put into context. This leads to the rejection of the approach to word meaning in terms of classical meaning components that are expected to be inherent in every word.