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By highlighting relations between experimental and theoretical work, this volume explores new ways of addressing the problem of concept composition, which is one of the central challenges in the study of language and cognition. An introductory chapter lays out the background to the problem. The subsequent chapters by leading scholars and younger researchers in psychology, linguistics and philosophy, aim to explain how meanings of different complex expressions are derived from simple lexical concepts, and to analyze how these meanings connect to concept representations. This work demonstrates an important advance in the interdisciplinary study of concept composition, where points of convergence between cognitive psychology, linguistics and philosophy emerge and lead to new findings and theoretical insights.

If a theory of concept composition aspires to psychological plausibility, it may first need to address several preliminary issues associated with naturally occurring human concepts: content variability, multiple representational forms, and pragmatic constraints. Not only do these issues constitute a significant challenge for explaining individual concepts, they pose an even more formidable challenge for explaining concept compositions. How do concepts combine as their content changes, as different representational forms become active, and as pragmatic constraints shape processing? Arguably, concepts are most ubiquitous and important in compositions, relative to when they occur in isolation. Furthermore, entering into compositions may play central roles in producing the changes in content, form, and pragmatic relevance observed for individual concepts. Developing a theory of concept composition that embraces and illuminates these issues would not only constitute a significant contribution to the study of concepts, it would provide insight into the nature of human cognition.

It’s no secret that different of the subfields in cognitive science dispute what the correct solution is to various problems that they each investigate in their separate ways. Sometimes this is due to differing antecedent ideas about what is the appropriate way to investigate the phenomenon, other times it is due to differing antecedent ideas about what principles an adequate solution should embody, and still other times it is due to differing antecedent ideas concerning what the dispute is about...as for example when they use the same terminology for different phenomena. This paper is an investigation into these differing antecedent ideas in the realm of meaning and compositionality as they play out in linguistics, cognitive psychology, and philosophy of language. The focus is on the notions of and , and a main conclusion is that there needs be a “two-factor semantic theory” to accommodate the overall goals of both sides. Some steps are made towards that end, but various previous attempts are argued to have missed the point. In the end it will be shown that, clearly, more work needs to be done along a number of specified dimensions, especially on the subjective side of the dispute.

In this chapter I aim to explain how psychology understands concepts, and why there is a need for semantic theory to take on the challenge of psychological data. All of the contributors to this volume are (presumably) in the business of trying to understand and explain how language has meaning, and the primary source of evidence for this has to be our intuitions of what things mean. Furthermore, if my semantic intuitions (as a theorist) are out of kilter with those of the common language user, then it is my theory which should be called into question and not the lay intuition. This chapter describes a range of results from my research program over the last 30 years, some old and some new, with the aim of giving a general account of using Prototype Theory as a way to explain semantic intuitions.

In this paper, we discuss our experimental results involving color preference and yes/no categorization judgments that provide insight into the interpretation of color adjectives. We selected a set of object categories that show a consistent color typicality bias, and presented them with varying degrees of color manipulation in our experiments. In Experiment 1, Dutch speakers performed a forced-choice picture-phrase matching task. Between a photograph of an object in its typical color (e.g., a light green tomato) and another photograph in a focal color (a darker green tomato), participants showed a significantly higher proportion of preference for the typical, nonfocal color for categories with a color bias (e.g., tomato; 52%) than for categories without a bias (e.g., box; 36%). In Experiment 2, we conducted a categorization task in which participants judged whether an image was an example of the target adjective-noun combination or not, in yes-no format, for 14 adjective-noun combinations including color and other adjectives, such as pattern and material adjectives. When presented with nonfocal images, participants were much more likely to give ‘Yes’ responses for categories with a typicality bias (55%) than for those without a bias (27%), demonstrating an effect of world knowledge in yes-no categorization judgments as well.

This chapter studies the interpretations of plural sentences with conjoined predicates, e.g. and . Such sentences are sometimes interpreted intersectively, sometimes non-intersectively (or ‘split’), and sometimes both interpretations appear to be allowed. This is surprising, since the logical structure of these sentences is identical, i.e. they differ only with respect to content words (e.g. , vs. , ). I propose that the logical interpretation of these sentences is systematically affected by lexical information tied to the complex predicate in the sentences, specifically their so-called typicality effects. With a set of experiments, I show that (a) the acceptability of a sentence in a non-intersective situation can be expressed in terms of a continuum and (b) each acceptability proportion is predicted by the typicality of the two conjoined predicates applying simultaneously. This way, I specify at least one of the relevant pragmatic considerations that determine the interpretation of a plural sentence with conjunctive predicates. More generally, these results stress the importance of conceptual structure of predicates in semantic theories of language.

Compositional semantic frameworks often compute the extension of a complex expression directly from the extensions of its parts. However, much work in cognitive psychology has shown important challenges for compositional methods. For instance, Hampton (J Exp Psychol Learn Mem Cognit 14(1):12–32, ) showed that speakers may let the complex nominal include as one of its instances, without admitting chess in the extension of . Similarly, Lee () experimentally supports the common intuition that instances of are not necessarily categorized as . This paper reviews further results about , showing similar challenges for compositionality. It is proposed that typicality effects play a systematic role in compositional interpretation and the determination of truth-values. For instance, the “overextension” effect in the example is predicted by the fact that focal red is an atypical hair color. Similarly, in the plural sentence , the availability of the split reading (“some men are walking and some men are writing”) increases due to the atypicality of doing both activities at the same time (Poortman, ). Further, in reciprocal sentences like , the number of pinching acts may be three. This is related to the atypicality of situations where every man pinches two other men at the same time, as required by a strong interpretation of . The paper gives a uniform account of truth-value judgements on these different constructions, based on the identification of conflicts between typical preferences.

The so-called coercion verbs have been taken to select for an event as their complement, and to coerce an entity-denoting complement into an event as a resolution to the predictable type mismatch. This process is reported to manifest as additional processing cost that unpredictably has been associated with more than one cortical recruitment locus. Recent work has challenged the traditional view showing that the processing effect is observed only for aspectual verbs (e.g., ) but not psychological verbs (e.g., ) (Katsika et al. ), and that contra the traditional assumption aspectual verbs not only select for events but also for entity-denoting complements (Piñango and Deo). Here, we test the hypothesis that aspectual verbs require their complement to be conceptualized as a structured individual. These verbs encode a set of functions that allow the construal of the structured individual as an axis along a dimension (e.g. ) afforded by the complement. The processing cost associated with the composition of the “coercion configuration” (animate subject + aspectual verb + entity-denoting complement) emerges from (A) exhaustive retrieval of the verbs’ lexical functions and (B) resolution of dimension ambiguity. Results from a self-paced reading and an fMRI experiment confirm that processing aspectual-verb sentences is more costly than psychological-verb counterparts, and that consistently with previous findings, comprehension is associated with both a Wernicke’s area and a left inferior frontal cortex activation. Crucially, this activation pattern tracks the necessary exhaustive lexical retrieval of the functions at the verb (Wernicke’s area) and the subsequent ambiguity resolution of the dimension at the complement (LIFG) required for the interpretation of the aspectual-verb utterance.

Understanding how properties are extended to combined concepts is critical to theories of concepts. In human judgments, properties true of a noun (ducks have webbed feet) become less true when that noun is modified (baby ducks have webbed feet), while properties false of a noun (candles have teeth) become less false when that noun is modified (purple candles have teeth). These modification and inverse modification effects have been shown to be extremely robust. Gagné and Spalding (, ; Spalding and Gagné ) have argued that these effects are driven by expectation of contrast. The current experiment shows that, as expected, the modification and inverse modification effects are unaffected by the normative force with which a property is predicated of the head noun, supporting the expected contrast explanation. The results are discussed with respect to an Aristotelian-Thomistic approach to concepts (Spalding and Gagné ).

One of the defining traits of language is its capacity to mediatebetweenconcepts in our mind, which encapsulate generalizations, and the things they refer to in a given communicative act, with all their idiosyncratic properties. This article examines precisely this interplay between conceptual and referential aspects of meaning, and proposes that concept composition (or concept combination, a term more commonly used in Psychology) exploits both: is at play when a modifier and its head fit as could be expected given the properties of the two concepts involved, whereas in the result of the composition depends on specific, independently available properties of the referent. For instance, tends to be applied to boxes whose surface is red, but, given the appropriate context, it can also be applied to e.g. a brown box that contains red objects. We support our proposal with data from nominal modification, and explore a way to formally distinguish the two kinds of composition and integrate them into a more general framework for semantic analysis. Along the way, we recover the classically Fregean notion of sense as including conceptual information, and show the potential of distributional semantics, a framework that has become very influential in Cognitive Science and Computational Linguistics, to address research questions from a theoretical linguistic perspective.