Universals and Semantics

Abstract

This contribution proposes a view of linguistic semantics as a set of mental computations defined on a suitably restricted inventory of interpreted features borrowed from conceptual structures external to the language organ. These features enter both a lexical and a syntactic computation. Semantic universals can be identified regarding the nature of these featural primitives, the nature of the lexical computation (involving both formal and substantive universals), the nature of the mapping between syntactic categories and notional categories, the role of grammatical features in pre-encoding interpretive operations. It is argued that consensus about semantic universals can be reached cutting across the artificial divide between functionalist and formalist approaches to human language.