Guest Editors' Preface

Abstract

This volume brings together three contributions to the 2007 conference on ‘Concept Types and Frames’ held in Düsseldorf in August 2007 (CTF07).1 The conference was a broad interdisciplinary meeting attended by scholars from the fields of semantics, computational linguistics, philosophy, psychology, neurology and other areas. Its aim was to bring together these disciplines to jointly contribute to a very ambitious enterprise: a general theory of concepts in human cognition. At the heart of the approach taken is an attempt to link up Barsalou’s theory of frames (Barsalou 1992) with perspectives of linguistic semantics. Barsalou’s theory of frames is a theory of the cognitive representation of sortal concepts (of logical type <e,t>); the same holds for almost all other theories of concepts, from Aristotle’s, over binary feature models, to prototype theory. A frame describes a category of objects in terms of the attributes these objects exhibit, and the type of values which each of the attributes may take. The attributes are functions that relate unique values to the bearer of the attribute. A good illustration of a frame-format description of an object is the way in which the holder of a passport is described by the personal data in the document: ‘name’, ‘date of birth’, ‘place of birth’, ‘height’, ‘sex’ are attributes, that is functions that are generally defined in the domain of persons and return a unique value for every possible argument. The respective entries in a passport are the values which these functions take for the bearer of the passport. Frame descriptions in terms of attributes and values are recursive: the values of attributes can themselves be described by their own attributes and the values they take.