The Linguistic versus Cognitive Role of Classifying Nouns

Abstract

Semantic classifications play a role in both the organization of our world knowledge and our vocabulary. Lexicons with semantic information are likewise often organized as taxonomies in which specific words are related or decomposed to (a small set of) more general words. Conceptual knowledge bases are structured as networks in which redundancies are predicted by more general concepts for more specific concepts. Even though lexical knowledge and conceptual knowledge do not necessarily coincide, in practice, most databases do not make a clear distinction between these two types ofknowledge. In semantic lexicons and dictionaries it is not clear what is being described - knowledge of words or knowledge of worlds - and conceptual databases often just store information for the same words in capital letters, suggesting that a definition of CAR is automatically different from a definition of "car". Because no clear distinction is made in the role of the semantic information, it is also not clear what criteria are to be used to evaluate that information or, more specifically, what is the role of classification structures in these specifications.