Fuzzy Structural Semantics On a generative model of vague natural language meaning

Illustrating the theoretical background of this chapter, I will rst make some preliminary remarks, covering referential and structural semantic theory in linguistics, before second I will sketch the course of my approach in analyzing and describing natural language meaning within the frame of a pragmatically based generative model of structural semantics. Finally and third I will give some examples from computation of a corpus of 19th and 20th Century German students' poetry. 1. As a linguist, who thinks his discipline an empirical science, I will be not so much concerned with either language philosophy, formal logics or mathematics, but mainly with the study of meaning as it is constituted in spoken or written texts used in the process of communication. Rather than focussing on the ction of anìdeal speaker' or the formal rules of an abstract and mere theoretical language usage, my linguistic point of view implies that I am much more interested in the analysis and description of natural language regularities that real speakers/hearers follow and/or establish when they interact verbally by means of texts in order to communicate. For any description of natural language meaning, however, we are in need of a formally adequate metalanguage to depict semantic phenomena, and for any analysis of natural language meaning we need methods and procedures which are empirically adequate. Both, the postulates of formal and empirical adequacy will have to be met by a communicative theory of semantics that is comprehensive and satisfactory. Such a theory | that should be stressed here and kept in mind throughout the following | does not exist and no one has yet presented even the outlines of it | and I shall not either. But I think that the concept of fuzzy sets may prove to serve as an at least formally satisfactory and numerically exible link or joint to connect the two main, seemingly divergent lines of research in modern semantics: namely, the more theoretically oriented models of what formal semanticists feel anìdeal' speaker should, or would do when he produces meaningful sentences a n d the more empirically oriented methods and procedures of experimental semanticists that try to nd out what real speakers actually do when they produce texts for communicative purposes. In general, most linguists will probably agree that | whatever else has to be dealt with | natural language meaning presents two major problems: