Rules and Intentionality in the Generative Lexicon

Pierre Frath
Groupe de recherche sur les fonctionnements discursifs EA 1339 LDL
Université Marc Bloch
Département d’anglais
UFR des Langues Vivantes
22 rue Descartes
67084 Strasbourg CEDEX
France
Email : frath@umb.u-strasbg.fr

Abstract

This paper examines the notions of rules and intentionality in the Generative Lexicon from a point of view based on Wittgenstein, Kripke and Peirce. It argues that rules cannot explain language because any set of rules must be triggered by another in an endless recess and because rules do not have meaning in themselves and require intentionality at every step of their implementation. Furthermore, it is argued that intentionality cannot be an attribute of the lexicon. An alternative view on lexical meaning inspired from Peirce's semiotics is offered in the final sections.

1.	Introduction

The Generative Lexicon (GL) rests on notions which seem so natural that they are hardly ever challenged. For example, it assumes that language and thought can be explained by rules, yet the nature of rules is not discussed. The foundations of a theory necessarily shape our views on the problems under scrutiny and on the data at hand. Therefore, it is at times interesting to question the ontological basis of a theory and see if another hypothesis cannot yield an alternative.  One of the main themes in Pustejosky (2001a) is intentionality  as an element of lexical content. This paper discusses Pustejovsky's views on intentionality and rules from a point of view based on Wittgenstein, Kripke and Peirce and it offers an alternative view on lexical meaning.

2.	Intentionality in the Generative Lexicon

This section discusses Pustejovsky's GL-2001 paper (2001a), which includes a  review of the author's theory of type construction as developed in Pustejovsky (2001b). All the examples in this section are Pustejovsky's. Some of them will be discussed and given an alternative explanation in the following sections. 
According to the author, there is a "basic distinction between natural kinds (such as stick, lion, pebble, water, etc.) and artefacts (such as chair, beer, coffee, etc.)". "The major discriminant that distinguishes [them] is intentionality, and is expressed in relation to the agentive  and telic qualia of an object" (p. 2). But how does this work ? In "a good chair /rock" and "enjoy that chair/rock", the evaluative predicates (good, enjoy) refer to a functional aspect of the objects (chair, rock). This is not a problem with artefacts such as chair: chairs are made by humans for a certain purpose and as such they are endowed with agentive and telic qualia. But what about rock and tiger for example ? A functional judgement on these objects "is only possible when we have reconceptualised the concept to also carry some intention with it. For example if rocks are judged relative to how good they are for climbing on, then the sentences [above] are well-formed enough" (p. 2). Similarly, food stuffs may be divided up into natural kinds (apples) and artefacts (cookies), "but what are the discriminant properties that tell us this is so?" 
Pustejovsky assumes that natural kinds "are generated by type relations involving only the formal and constitutive roles", for example "stick, lion, pebble, water, sky, rock", which can be predicated by "predicates that select for just these natural types", for example die, touch and be under (p. 4). Thus the resulting relations within such predicates are natural types themselves, as in the rabbit died, the rock touches the water and the ants are under the tree. What Pustejovsky means is that such "natural" propositions are purely factual and that they do not involve judgement and intention.  
Yet natural kinds can also be predicated by predicates that involve telic or agentive qualia. For example a hitting stick (a stick for hitting), a throwing stone (a stone for throwing), drinking water (water for drinking) are telic. A carved stick (that was created by carving) and a flaked stone (created by the flaking of a larger rock) are agentive. Pustejovsky call such concepts "semi-intentional" when reference to agentive is made, because "in these examples, the natural type has been transformed or modified from its original state, but not brought into existence by the referenced activity (event). Clearly, real artefactual concepts such as table, knife, and computer are intentionally defined by reference to both agentive and telic" (p. 5).
There are also "functional propositions composed from functional entities and functional predicates, i.e. functional types". In "The beer spoiled", we have a functional predicate (spoil) and a functional argument (beer). Pustejovsky argues that "the judgements expressed by the above propositions entail natural propositions, but go beyond them as they also express judgements of intentional content which natural propositions do not". For example in "The beer fell", a natural proposition, the verb fell selects the natural content of beer, i.e. liquid. In "The beer spoiled", the functional predicate spoil also selects the functional type of beer, i.e. the intentional content it has by virtue of being an artefact. Therefore, "there are two logically distinct components to what is asserted by this sentence: a) some physically tangible event is implicated relative to a quantity of liquid (this is the brute proposition); b) the event is intentionally described as a spoiling, and the liquid is beer (this is the functional proposition)" (p. 7). 
According to Pustejovsky, some verbs, for example enjoy, expect a complement of a specific type, an event for enjoy. In "Mary enjoyed the rock", the complement is not an event. In that case, an operation defined in (Pustejovksy 1995) as "type coercion" sets in, that is "a semantic operation that converts an expression,, to the type expected by a governing function, " (p. 7). In sentences such as "Mary enjoyed the rock", "where the complement is a functional type, the natural component of a functional type can be selected and is itself coerced into the selected type". One can feel a rock, which is a "natural" perceptual experience, i.e., an event, which enjoy can then select (p. 8). Pustejovsky calls such "type changing contexts" "natural coercions". 
In other cases, a natural feature is not at hand for type coercion. For example, in "John began the rock", it is hard "to find a natural interpretation" of rock as an event. In that case, type coercion rests on the selection of "a controlled event description" present in the functional aspect of rock: a rock is something one can climb on. Thus, rock can be coerced into an event by virtue of being a functional object with an intentional telic role (a rock for climbing on).    
In a nutshell, Pustejovsky's argument develops as follows. The lexicon can be divided up into a number of categories of which two are considered in his paper: natural kinds and artefacts. Natural kinds are defined by the constitutive and formal roles. Artefacts are endowed with intentionality, expressed in the agentive and telic qualia. They also have constitutive and formal attributes, as they are subtypes of natural kinds (a chair is made from wood, a climbing rock is a rock, beer is a liquid, etc.). Propositions are made from predicates and arguments. The question is: in expressions such as a good rock, Mary enjoyed the rock, John begins the rock, how are the relevant features selected by the predicate, and, the case arising, how can the arguments be coerced into a certain type expected by the predicate. The answer is: by way of role selection within the qualia and type coercion within the expression. When the natural component of an intentional argument (the constitutive and formal roles) does not yield the expected type (for example an event), than look for it in the functional component (the agentive and telic roles). The overall picture is one of language as a rule-based process where lexical sub-entities (the qualia), among which intentionality, are selected by predicates to constitute well-formed expressions.

3.	Type coercion and rules

We shall argue that rules cannot explain language because any set of rules must be triggered by another in an endless recess and because rules do not have meaning in themselves and require intentionality at every step of their implementation.
The type coercion device is not as straightforward as it seems. Let us consider "Mary enjoyed the rock". On hearing (or uttering) this sentence, according to the GL, the mind first considers rock as a physical object. Then, noticing that there is a problem because enjoy expects an event, it searches the qualia of rock and looks for the possibility of coercing it into an event. The constitutive qualia contains the notion that a rock is something one can feel, i.e. an event. Now type coercion has a grip on the lexical item, and rock can be coerced into an event. When the natural content of the qualia (the formal or the constitutive) does not yield an event the verb can select, as in "John began the rock", the mind searches the intentional qualia (agentive and telic), and finds that a rock is something humans can climb on, i.e. another event. 
Yet, in "Mary enjoyed the rock", Mary could have enjoyed climbing the rock. So, the mind must choose at least between two aspects: the constitutive feel aspect and the telic climb aspect. We clearly need another set of rules to formulate how the context can be examined to resolve possible ambiguity (for example between the feel and the climb interpretations). Generally speaking, type coercion needs a decision at every step of the process: that the physical aspect of a rock should be considered first, that the natural qualia have to be searched before the intentional, etc. Now suppose we have complemented type coercion with all the necessary rules and constituted it into a complete and well-working unit. It would still need to be triggered from the outside ; it would still have to be part of larger set of rules, and so on in an endless recess. 

4.	Wittgenstein on rules

Wittgenstein examined the problem of rules in paragraphs 202 to 242 of his "Philosophical Investigations", where he discusses what "obeying a rule" means. He reaches the conclusion that obeying a rule cannot ultimately be accounted for in terms of justification. To explain why and how I follow a rule, I can produce a certain number of reasons and descriptions, but the moment comes "when I have exhausted the justifications, then I have reached a bedrock, and my spade is turned. Then I am inclined to say: 'This is simply what I do'" (§217). At a certain level, what we do is beyond explanation, it is the product of an existing "I", an intentionality which achieves certain things by virtue of its sheer existence.
Intentionality is also at work inside the application of the rules themselves. For example, let us consider a rule which states that we must continue the series 1 3 5 7 (§226 and following). How do I know the rule applies beyond the examples? How do I know that 7 9 11 are an application of the rule? Is there something that guides me towards a correct and meaningful use of the rule? For Wittgenstein, "when I obey a ruIe, I do not choose. I obey blindly" (§219). "We look to the rule for instruction and do something without appealing to anything for guidance" (§227). What we do when we follow a rule is not ultimately determined by the rule itself. Obeying a rule is something an intentional being does for a reason that is named "a rule", just like greeting someone is something we do for a reason we call "politeness".    
But then how do we know we have correctly obeyed the rule? It is "human agreement [that] decides what is true and what is false" (§241). "It is what human beings say that is true and false; and they agree in the language they use. That is not agreement in opinions but in form of life" (§241). Such a truth is not a logical one produced by the comparison between the proposition and the situation. It is not a relativist social phenomenon either. Wittgenstein does not defend a "community view" on truth, as many have argued. Truth and other words such as love or envy cannot be understood per se. They are points of view on our experience which are available in the language. Such words are what medieval scholastics called "syncategoremes", i.e. related to other signs. They have meaning, but not independently of other utterances: what we characterize with love, envy or truth has to be spelled out. We do not ponder or "choose"; truth is not a matter of "opinions"; we agree or we do not, "blindly", and this explains why there is never general agreement on the truth of anything, however well presented and argued. On hearing "the cat is on the mat", we do not assess the truth of the proposition. We assume it is true, "blindly". If we cannot see the cat, we might ask something like "where is it?" or "which mat?" If we have an inkling that someone is pulling our leg or deliberately trying to mislead us, then we might say something like "it is not true, you are lying". Obeying rules and giving truth values are things we do because they are part of us, a "form of life", and they do not need any other justification. 
It could be argued that consciously obeying a rule is not the same thing as formulating rules in an abstract and logical way (as for example in the GL), that such abstract rules are the "deep" description of whatever "obeying a rule" is. One could argue that being unable to consciously describe what obeying a rule means does not mean that there are no underlying determining procedures which can be described in some abstract way.
Yet algebraic descriptions of rules such as those of the GL are nothing but conscious explanations formulated in a constrained language (mathematical and logical) which ignore the reason why the rule should be applied and the entity for which it has meaning. There is no reason to give such formal descriptions a higher ontological value than other verbal explanations. Mathematics and logic are not the ontological principle of the universe, as was shown by Gödel in 1931. Wittgenstein shared this view. After the publication of his very logicist and positivist "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus", he changed his mind and postulated in his subsequent work a we and an I for whom rules do exist and for whom they have meaning. 
The meaning of a rule is outside the rule itself. It rests with the we and the I. The choice between the climb and the feel aspect of rock cannot be determined by a rule. We have to postulate an intentional entity endowed with consciousness. If we do, then we can break the endless recess of rule description. We can also do without rules completely as we now have a very general cause of usage, i.e. a conscious individual within a community. But then, without rules, how do we use words? 

5.	Saul Kripke on rules

This question was examined by Saul Kripke in his 1982 book "Wittgenstein. On rules and private language", in which he discusses paragraphs 202 to 242 of the "Philosophical Investigations". He thinks that this passage poses a very profound and intractable problem of philosophical scepticism: we are irretrievably unable to be sure of the truth of our knowledge and of our use of the language. "There can be no such thing as meaning anything by any word. Each new application we make is a leap in the dark; any present intention could be interpreted so as to accord with anything we may choose to do" (Kripke 1982:55). This is unbearable for Kripke, but he reaches no alternative solution at the end of the book. It is an inescapable conclusion.
Why this should be unbearable is deeply ingrained in our culture. One of the reasons is a widely-held belief in a Platonic Truth considered as our yardstick for truth and falsehood, according to which the truth value of "the cat is on the mat" is determined in reference to an ethereal Truth which incarnates in the proposition if some conditions are fulfilled. Such an explanation can only be satisfying as long as we do not worry about the nature of such a Truth. For Wittgenstein, the truth value of a proposition is "a form of life", as we saw in section 4. This means that truth cannot be meaningfully explained by a metaphysical, Platonic, third person entity, which amounts to grounding it in some non corporeal reason given by God or Nature, of which we know nothing. Then why not admit, as Searle would argue (1999: 42-43), that its only reality is in the first person of the singular and of the plural. When we love, feel sadness or envy, obey a rule, think that such a proposition is true, we do so because that is the way we are, and these states of our being do not need a Platonic explanation any more than breathing or digesting do.  
And neither does our use of language. Kripke's feeling is that without rules, our use of words would be "a leap in the dark". This can only be because he postulates some General Law which is in charge of matching the World, Thought and Language, i.e. a Platonic Logic. He feels that lexical items must somehow be able to relate in a way that fits the situation within a well-formed sentence. Well-formedness is then determined by linguistic rules, and the correspondence to the situation by the fulfilment of truth conditions. In effect, this is a view of language as a process which accompanies language-independent thought and which could possibly fail to do so properly. If the matching does go awry, then some mechanism steps in and corrects the relations within the sentence. For example, for John to be able to begin a rock, we must postulate a device that first notices the type discrepancy and then tries to fix it. But why should this be so? Is there a monitor in charge of checking everything we say or hear and triggering correcting mechanisms? Is language based on an ontological paranoia? Are sentences kinds of possibly defective shadows that accompany thought? 

6.	Lexical meaning and intentionality

In his "Méditations métaphysiques", Descartes formulates a theory where God gives man the means to discover the Laws of Nature by observation and with the help of mathematics and logic. From a Cartesian point of view, knowledge consists in relating the world to an essence of existing laws and abstract entities. If the truth of such laws and entities is a human "form of life", then there is no certain non-human knowledge and this explains Kripke's "leap in the dark" concern. But there is an alternative. Suppose that instead of postulating an array of abstract metaphysical entities, we simply accept the existence of the universe and of life (after all, this is not too outlandish a hypothesis). Then we can also accept intentionality as an attribute of life. As biochemist Jacques Monod (1970) said: "Les êtres vivants se distinguent de toutes les autres structures de tous les systèmes présents dans l'Univers par la téléonomie. Cette notion implique l'idée d'une activité orientée, cohérente et constructive".
If we accept this view, the immediate consequence for a theory of lexical meaning is that it can do without intentionality. Whatever intentionality an utterance has does not originate in words but in the conscious individual and what he intends to say. If Mary says that John began the rock, we naturally assume that Mary intended to mean something that we can understand. And we can. But then, Kripke would ask, could Mary just use any words to mean what she meant? If there are no rules, how can we know that by "John began the rock" she did not actually mean "Mark painted a door"? In other words, his question is: "Is there such a thing as lexical meaning?" 
Kripke regrets that, if Wittgenstein is right, "there can be no such thing as meaning anything by any word. Each new application we make is a leap in the dark; any present intention could be interpreted so as to accord with anything we may choose to do". The key word in that passage is "choose". But we do not choose the meaning of words. Whatever meaning a word has for me, it has gained from usage by us. And if usage changes, so does meaning. Diachronic shifts of meaning are a very common feature of languages. For example, holocaust originally meant "a sacrificial offering that is consumed entirely by flames" (American Heritage Dictionary, 1975). It was used in reference to offerings made to God in the Genesis by the ancient Jews. Holocaust then came to mean any widespread destruction, disasters and catastrophes. After the world-wide screening of an American series, "Holocaust", about the genocide of the Jews at the hand of the Nazis, it took yet another meaning, which is in total contradiction with its original meaning. In what way can the slaughter of an entire people be considered as an offering? To what God? For what purpose? In France, where the original meaning of holocauste is still somewhat alive, some Jewish associations have advocated the use of shoah, catastrophe in Hebrew, instead of holocauste, as for example in Claude Lanzman's film, "Shoah". These lexical changes have taken place unnoticed except by a few specialists in Biblical matters. The current genocide meaning of holocaust was not chosen by speakers; it has been produced by our collective use. Our use of words is not "a leap in the dark". 
So there is lexical meaning after all, but it cannot be understood in terms of content. If lexical meaning were a content, why should it change? And how? The meaning of holocaust changed because it came to denote another object of our experience. Signs do not have content: they are pointers to objects and to other signs.  

7.	Peirce and lexical meaning 

Now let us try to delineate lexical meaning. There are alternatives to componential lexical semantics. For example, Rumanian-born linguist Eugenio Coseriu argues that "In themselves, primary lexemes correspond to unitary intuitions and they are in no way produced by the putting together of given distinctive semantic features. They show distinctive semantic features because they are in opposition with other lexemes; distinctive semantic features exist by virtue of these oppositions, it is not the other way round" (Coseriu 2001: 364, our translation).  
C. S. Peirce (1978) has developed a triadic semiotics based on three types of signs: some signs, similar to Coseriu's "primary lexemes correspond[ing] to unitary intuitions", and which Peirce calls representamen (for example boat) refer to objects (for example the object boat) in a global and opaque way, and they can be expanded into complex signs (for example "this boat only takes passengers"), which he calls interpretants. The object itself is also a sign because it could not exist for us if it were not meaningful. Meaningless objects go unnoticed most of the time. When a child asks his parents what these bright dots in the night sky are, he learns that they have a name, star. He then knows that they have a social existence, and that his community has presumably produced utterances of all sorts (songs, poems, books, research papers, etc.) which constitute our collective knowledge on stars. If his interest in stars is confirmed, he may ask other questions and he will discover, for example, that some of them are not stars at all (some are planets, some are galaxies, etc.), that they are very hot, etc. In Peirce's terminology, the representamen is the name (star) of the object (the bright dots) and the interpretants are the body of discursive knowledge we collectively have on stars. If the child asks a question about some object for which no name is at hand, the parents will probably say something like "what are you talking about?". The child then learns that this object does not have a social existence, at least known to his parents, and that therefore there is no available body of interpretants, no knowledge on it, and he will possibly lose interest and forget the object altogether. In fact, the reader can check for himself that it is very difficult to become aware of an object for which there is no name. It sometimes happens when a scientist discovers some new phenomenon. The first thing he then does is give it a name. If he does not, the object cannot be communicated to others, it cannot become a sign for them, and no interpretants can be constructed on it. In effect, such an unnamed object has no existence for us.
8.	Lexical meaning, reference and categories

We assume that objects have names. Conversely, we assume that any given name refers to an object. This double pre-supposition is known as "existential supposition" in continental linguistics (see for example Kleiber 1994, 2001) and it has roots in the "suppositio" of medieval Scholasticism. The name and the object are linked by a philogenetical relation. A new name that we learn in connection with a new object is at first only a pointer to that object for us. It is an empty shell which fills up as we hear and produce interpretants on the object. This means that the word is not the name of a pre-existing concept but a sign pointing to an object which can be the focus of other more complex signs. Language is the flesh of knowledge and thought, not the form of concepts and representations.  
When we first get acquainted with a new object and its name, we do not suppose that it is the only object with such a name. We suppose that there is a whole array of other objects that we can also name so for reasons of resemblance, either direct or metaphorical. This particular rock is not an instance of a Platonic rock category, determined by checklists of real-world and/or mental features. It is an object I want to name rock either because I can see a resemblance with other objects we have named rock in the past (as in John climbed the rock) or because I wish to establish it metaphorically (as in John is a rock). My present use of rock is thus linked to all my past uses. Such categories are linguistic and they lump together all the objects we refer to by means of a particular name, however metaphorical. Real-world object-based categories are constructed over and above those linguistic categories by the production of interpretants on the objects. For example, these bright dots in the night sky are stars (a linguistic category) when we first get acquainted with them. If we take a better look, we may want to create other categories for the dots that move (planets), or the ones that are in fact a huge number of very distant ones (galaxies), etc. 
Platonic categories are in fact interpretants. They are a body of discursive knowledge about the objects that we structure according to our aims. And so is lexical meaning, when for example we want to write a dictionary entry, or explain a word to someone, or make formal descriptions such as those of the GL for machine implementation. Such interpretants are not a cause of usage, but a consequence. We can resort to them to justify and explain our usage when needed; they are not an ontological cause. The cause lies in our collective and individual desire to name and communicate our experience.  
There are no natural kinds and artefacts of which apples and cookies would respectively be members. In their natural state, apples are the size of cherries and barely edible. The apples we buy at the supermarket are the result of centuries of careful selection by gardeners; as for cookies, they are made from natural stuff. So categorising them into natural kinds or artefacts is something we do for particular purposes, for example in an attempt to explain our linguistic activity. It is not an attribute they have per se. Even rocks are not a natural kind. Rock is the name we give to a heterogeneous array of objects, and this process of lumping things together is rather arbitrary. Why for example give the same name, rock, to a cliff and to a rock small enough to be thrown, while smaller rocks are pebbles or gravel? Trying to figure out a Platonic rock category of which rock would be the name seems quite hopeless. There is no such thing as a rock per se; there are only human points of view on our experience, and these points of view are buried in the language. Similarly, a proposition such as "the ants are under the tree" is not more natural than "the beer spoiled". Both sentences pre-suppose a human intentionality to say such things using socially existing words denoting socially existing objects within a socially existing framework of knowledge. We would say "the ants spoiled" if we used them as food, and then we would presumably grow them in ant farms just as we grow apples in orchards and make beer in breweries. Again, lexical meaning cannot be understood in terms of content (concepts and representations), but in terms of reference.   

9.	Conclusion: usage, observation and corpora

Our use of words is not "a leap in the dark". It is determined neither by rules nor by content, but by our desire to fathom our common experience and speak about the meaningful objects words denote. It is also determined by their local grammar. Words do not come isolated. They are given in context with a variety of collocations and colligations which constrain their usage, as has been shown by corpus linguists such as Sinclair (1987), Hoey (1991), Gledhill (2000), etc. Kilgarriff (2001) has argued that the GL is unable in most cases to account for the 'non-standard' uses of words as found in corpus data. By 'non-standard' he means the senses that do not match dictionary meanings. This is so, according to him, because interpretation draws on knowledge which is only available at the collocational level, not at the lexical level. The  meaning of a sentence is thus not the product of isolated words, but of larger units. 
We do not normally utter sentences such as "John began the rock". In fact, it has been shown in Frath (2002) that such begin-sentences with non-procedural complements actually do not occur in large corpora. The only example in more than 500 occurrences of begin is "the soldiers' cemetery begun in the village of Rahic a year ago contains 370 graves today". It has also been shown that we do not need to recover a process in the context, as is evident from the example. What matters here is that the cemetery was begun, not that the village people had begun building (?) it, and that it is now quite full. The speaker refers to two states of the cemetery, last year and now. Similarly, if Mary says that John began the rock, we would expect a further state, for example, and then he got stuck. There is no need for a type coercion device here. All is needed is the speaker's intention to link two different states using words within the boundaries of their reference: for something which comes first, we use begin. The procedural aspect is not an attribute of cemetery or of a hidden process, it is the result of an intention embedded in the whole sentence.
The reader might quite rightly point out that there are in effect non procedural words like rock and cemetery which we cannot normally use with begin. This is a very general problem that we also find in sentences like "the ants spoiled" and "they ate the table". There are constraints on usage, but where do they originate? Can they be explained in terms of concepts and representations, which beg in turn to be explained until one postulates a bedrock of hypothetical universals and metaphysical rules? Or do we simply accept that constraints are in facts habits determined by usage, which like all habits can be changed when the need arises. In that case, the linguist's agenda is observation and description of usage, which has become very easy thanks to the availability of a plethora of electronic corpora. Yet, if corpus linguistics is very good at the description of usage, it is often weak on explanation. That is why we advocate a data-driven theoretical study of language, freed of metaphysics. After all, observation has helped medicine come a long way since the days of Molière, who mocked the physicians of his time when they explained the effect of opium by its "dormitive virtue".

References

Coseriu, Eugenio (2001): L'homme et son langage. Peeters, Louvain-Paris.
Frath, Pierre (2003) : "Metaphor, Polysemy and Usage", in Phraseological Units. Basic Concepts and their Application. David Allerton, Nadja Nesselhauf and Paul Skandera, eds. Basel: Schwabe (forthcoming).
Frath, Pierre (2002): "Etude du verbe 'commencer' en contexte", Journal of French Language Studies, 12.2 (2002), pp 177-188, Cambridge University Press.
Frath, Pierre (2001): "Lexical Meaning, Reference and Usage", Proceedings of the First International Workshop on Generative Approaches to the Lexicon, Pierrette Bouillon and Kyoko Kanzaki, eds., University of Geneva, April 26-28, 2001.
Gledhill, Christopher (2000): Collocations in Science Writing. Gunter Narr Verlag, Tübingen.
Hoey, Michael (1991): Patterns of Lexis in Text. OUP.
Kilgarriff Adam (2001): "Generative lexicon meets corpus data: the case of non-standard word uses". In The Language of Word Meaning , edited by Pierrette Bouillon and Frederica Busa, Cambridge University Press, pp 312-328.
Kleiber, Georges (1994): Nominales. Essais de sémantique référentielle. Armand Colin, Paris.
Kleiber, Georges (2001) : "Remarques sur la dénomination", in Cahiers de praxématique, 36, 2001, 21-41.
Kripke, Saul (1982): Wittgenstein. On Rules and Private Language. Basil Blackwell, Oxford.
Monod, Jacques (1970): Le hasard et la nécessité. Seuil, Paris.
Peirce, Charles Sanders(1978): Écrits sur le signe. Textes rassemblés, traduits et commentés par Gérard Deledalle. Seuil, Paris.
Pustejosky, James (2001a): "The Challenge of Generative Lexicon: Semantics as the Interface". Proceedings of the First International Workshop on Generative Approaches to the Lexicon. Pierrette Bouillon and Kyoko Kanzaki, eds., University of Geneva, April 26-28, 2001.
Pustejosvky, James (2001b): "Type Construction and the Logics of Concepts", in P. Bouillon and F. Busa (eds.). The Syntax of Word Meaning, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Pustejovsky, James (1995): The Generative Lexicon, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Searle, John Ronald (1999): Mind, Language and Society. Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London.
Searle, John Ronald. (1980): "Minds, Brains and Programs". Behavioral and Brain Sciences 3 (3): 417-457.
Sinclair, John (1987): Looking up: An Account of the COBUILD Project in Lexical Computing. John Sinclair, ed. Collins Cobuild.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1963): Philosophical Investigations. Basil Blackwell, Oxford