Recent advances in psycholinguistic research have ignited renewed interest in the linguistic and philosophical debate regarding what words mean. An increasing awareness of the fact that most, of not all, words are associated with a range of different senses -- the phenomenon traditionally known as polysemy -- have led scholars to reconsider their accounts of word meaning representation and its relation to conceptual structure, compositional semantics, and the semantics-pragmatics divide.

 

While most contemporary accounts converge on the hypothesis that the senses of at least many polysemous expressions derive from a single meaning representation, there is little agreement as to what the status of this representations is: Are the lexical representations of polysemous expressions informationally scarce and underspecific with respect to the range of distinct senses they can take on in different context? Or do they have to be informationally rich in order to store and be able to generate all these senses? Alternatively, are lexical senses computed from a literal, primary meaning via semantic or pragmatic mechanisms such as coercion, modulation, or ad hoc concept construction? While in some fields these issues have been debated for some time already (e.g., psycholinguistics, pragmatics and cognitive linguistics), they are more recent in other fields (e.g., formal semantics, philosophy of language, generative grammar), where they are linked to concerns regarding standard truth-theoretical semantics stemming both from the study of I-language and the semantics/pragmatics interface.

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This workshop brings together leading scholars in linguistics, pragmatics, philosophy and cognitive science in order to provide an opportunity of in-depth interdisciplinary discussion of the topic of word meaning -- with a special focus on polysemy and on the nature of word meaning representation -- which may shape the path forward.