Context in Content Composition

International audienceFor a long while, lexical semantics developed independently from formal semantics. Apart from a few, daring forays into the formal world (e.g., [Dowty, 1979]), lexical semanticists worked largely in isolation from formal semanticists, who were focused on sentential or discourse meaning. To make the point in a somewhat charicatural fashion, lexical semanticists investigated argument structure, verbal diathesis (shifts in meaning due to shifts in argument structure), polysemy, and meaning decomposition all within various “cognitive” systems lacking rigour and a tie to model theoretic semantics; mean-while, formal semanticists paid little attention to matters of lexical meaning for open class terms like ordinary nouns and verbs—the meaning of a word x was typically rendered as x′. Valuable work was done in both areas but there was something of a missed opportunity in which neither camp profited from the insights of the other