Cognitive Modeling and Verbal Semantics: A Representational Framework Based on UML

Abstract

To date, rigorous approaches to the representation of verbal semantics, and lexical semantics in general, have not put much effort into achieving cognitive adequacy for their frameworks. This book sets out to take a major step in this direction. It develops a representational framework for verbal semantics that is formal and intuitive at the same time. This means in effect proposing a framework that is in principle computer processable on the one hand, and yet on the other hand whose representations reflect the wealth and flexibility of natural language in an intuitively plausible way and in accordance with our current knowledge about natural language. A new decompositional framework for the modeling and description of verbal semantics is proposed, the Unified Eventity Representation (UER). The development of the framework is based on results from linguistics, psychology, and computer science. In particular, the UER framework adopts and adapts the current lingua franca for the design of object-orientated systems in computer science, the Unified Modeling Language (UML). In contrast to other formal approaches to lexical semantics, it is neither logical nor functional in nature, but uses a third paradigm found in programming languages: object-orientation is introduced as a new paradigm to linguistic semantics. Thereby, a new route to the formal treatment of verbal semantics is opened up.