Tài liệu tham khảo Journal of semantics | Offprint from JOURNAL OF SEMANTICS AN INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL FOR THE INTERDISCIPLINARY STUDY OF THE SEMANTICS OF NATURAL LANGUAGE DECEMBER 1983 VOL. II - NO. 3 4 Published bv the . Foundation Nijmegen Instituie of Semantics. . Box 1454. NL-bSOl BL Nijmegen. Holland ISSN 0167 - 5133 by the . Foundation Printed tn the Netherlands A FUZZY-SET-THEORETIC APPROACH TO THE COMPOSITIONALITY OF MEANING PROPOSITIONS DISPOSITIONS AND CANONICAL FORMS . Zadeh Abstract In its traditional interpretation Frege s principle of compositionality is not sufficiently flexible to have- a wide applicability to natural languages. In a- fuzzy-set-theoretic setting which is outlined in this paper Frege s principle is modified and broadened by allowing the meaning of a proposition p. to be composed not from the meaning of the constituents of p. . but more generally from the meaning of a collection of fuzzy relations which form a so-called explanatory aataoase that is associated with p. More specifically through the application of test-score semantics the meaning of p is represented as a procedure which tests scores and aggregates the elastic constraints which are implicit in pi The employment of fuzzy sets in this semantics allows p to contain fuzzy predicates such as tall. kind. much richer etc. fuzzy quantifiers such as most. several few usually etc. modifiers such as very more or less quite somewhat e tc. and other types of semantic entities which cannot be dealt with within the framework- of classical logic. The approach described in the paper suggests a way of representing the meaning of dispositions . Overeating causes ooesity icy roads are slippery. Young men like young women etc. Specifically oy viewing a disposition d as a proposition with implicit fuzzy quantifiers the problem of representing the meaning of d may be decomposed into a restoring the suppressed fuzzy quantifiers and or fuzzifying the nonfuzzy quantifiers in the body of d and b representing the meaning
