TY - JOUR AU - Abrusán, Márta AU - Asher, Nicholas AU - van de Cruys, Tim PY - 2018/01/01 Y2 - 2024/03/30 TI - Content vs. function words: the view from distributional semantics JF - ZAS Papers in Linguistics JA - Zaspil VL - 60 IS - SE - Artikel DO - 10.21248/zaspil.60.2018.451 UR - https://zaspil.leibniz-zas.de/article/view/451 SP - 1-21 AB - <p>Counter to the often assumed division of labour between content and function words,<br>we argue that both types of words have lexical content in addition to their logical content. We<br>propose that the difference between the two types of words is a difference in degree. We conducted<br>a preliminary study of quantificational determiners with methods from Distributional<br>Semantics, a computational approach to natural language semantics. Our findings have implications<br>both for distributional and formal semantics. For distributional semantics, they indicate<br>a possible avenue that can be used to tap into the meaning of function words. For formal semantics,<br>they bring into light the context-sensitive, lexical aspects of function words that can<br>be recovered from the data even when these aspects are not overtly marked. Such pervasive<br>context-sensitivity has profound implications for how we think about meaning in natural language.<br>Keywords: function words, lexical semantics, determiners, distributional semantics.</p> ER -