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Review of "The language of word meaning" by Pierrette Bouillon and Federica Busa, Cambridge University Press (Studies in natural language processing, edited by Branimir Boguraev), 2001

The papers collected in The Language of Word Meaning resemble nothing so much as a holiday celebration in a large, heterogeneous family, with echoes of old feuds, marginally relevant contributions from distant relatives, and fresh stories from recent friends. Although the feuds are entertaining (opening the festivities as Section I, “Linguistic Creativity and the Lexicon”), and the outsider perspectives insightful, from a computational-linguistic perspective many of the most valuable contributions come from guests who have traveled far, and with other companions, before finding common ground at this gathering. The volume’s title conceals the specificity of its subject: a toast and roast of Generative Lexicon theory (henceforth GL), originally proposed by James Pustejovsky (henceforth JP) (Pustejovsky 1993, 1995, inter alia), who contributed two chapters and the preface. The editors also contribute a joint article, and Busa is coauthor in a second. Others, certainly, would be included in a general discussion on “the language of word meaning.” Indeed (with rare and sometimes confusing exceptions) the discussion assumes GL as the “semantic vocabulary” (p. xv) and focuses on the converse—“the word meaning of language”—specifically, how and whether GL’s finite number of generative devices and rules can be used to construct semantic expressions compositionally. Several contributors (Fodor and Lepore, papers in Section II; Vossen, p. 373) raise interesting ancillary questions: how (and whether) to divide word meaning from world knowledge. Pustejovsky (Chapter 7) and Busa and Bouillon provide especially clear reviews of basic GL concepts. These (and other) surveys would be more useful, however, as a condensed introduction for newcomers (which this review will present with great reduction as part of Section 2). The book claims (according to JP’s preface) that the GL approach to language synthesizes traditions and ideas from ordinary language philosophy (a focus on words and word use), analytic semantics (formalization of rules and types), and generative linguistics (infinite generation of meanings from finite, recursive resources). It claims that GL can tackle empirically difficult problems, both for computational applications and for other formal, even descriptive, systems: specifically, how words vary in context, how new senses emerge, and what the underpinnings are of the systematic mapping of semantic types onto syntactic forms across languages.