216 The formalization of sentence-meaning

ill-formedness (meaninglessness), on the assumption that, oven though it may not be as widespread as is commonly supposed, it does in fact exist. Our assumption, more precisely, is that in English and in other natural languages, there are some gram­matically well-formed, but semantically ill-formed, sentences (though not as many as linguists tended to assume in the classical period of Chomskyan transformational-generative grammar).

The Katz-Fodor mechanism for handling semantic ill-formedness is that of selection-restrictions. These are asso­ciated with particular lexemes and are therefore listed, in what we may think of as dictionary entries, in the lexicon. They tell us, in effect, which pairs of lexemes can combine with one another meaningfully in various grammatical constructions. For exam­ple, they might say that the adjective 'buxom' can modify nouns such as 'girl', 'woman', 'lass', etc., but not 'boy', 'man', 'lad', etc., that the verb 'sleep' can take as its subject nouns such as 'boy', 'girl', 'cat', etc. (or, rather noun-phrases, with such nouns as their principal constituent), but not such nouns as 'idea' or 'quadruplicity'; and so on. If the selection-restrictions are vio­lated, the projection-rules will fail to operate. Consequently, they will fail to assign to the semantically ill-formed sentence a formal specification of its meaning - thereby marking the sen­tence as meaningless and (provided that this information is pre­served in the output) indicating in what way the sentence is semantically ill-formed.

A further task of the selection-restrictions, operating in con­junction with the projection-rules, is to block certain interpreta­tions as semantically anomalous, while allowing other interpretations of the same phrases and sentences as semanti­cally acceptable. For example, in some dialects or registers of English, the word 'housewife' is polysemous: in one of the senses ("housewife₁") it denotes a woman who keeps house; in another ("housewife₂') it denotes a pocket sewing-kit. Many phrases in which 'housewife' is modified by an adjective ('good housewife', 'beautiful housewife', etc.) will be correspondingly ambiguous. But 'buxom housewife', presumably, will not, since "house­wife₂', unlike "housewife₁", cannot combine with the meaning of 'buxom'. In general, then, the selection-restrictions will tend

7.4 Projection-rules and selection-restrictions 217

to cut clown the number of interpretations assigned to lexically composite expressions. In fact, the failure to assign any inter­pretations at all to a sentence, referred to in the previous paragraph, can be seen as the limiting case of this process. The rules select from the meanings of an expression those, and only those, which are compatible with the (sentence-internal) context in which it occurs.

The Katz-Fodor theory of sentence-meaning is formulated within the framework of componential analysis (see 4.2). For example, instead of listing, in the lexical entry for 'buxom', all the other lexemes with which it can or cannot combine, the theory will identify them by means of one or more of their sense-components. It might say (in an appropriate formal notation) that 'buxom' cannot be combined, in semantically well-formed expressions, with any noun that does not have as part of its meaning the sense-components human and, let us assume, female. As we have seen, componential analysis runs into quite serious problems, if it is pushed beyond the prototy­pical, or focal, meaning of expressions. It is for this reason that most of the textbook examples used by linguists to illus­trate the operation of Katz-Fodor selection-restrictions are empirically suspect. But we are not concerned, at this point, with the validity of componential analysis. Nor is it necessary to take up once again the problem of drawing a distinction between contradiction and semantic ill-formedness. My pur­pose has been simply to explain what selection-restrictions are and how they are formalized in the Katz-Fodor theory.

It is important, however, to say something here about cate-gorial incongruity, which was mentioned at the end of Chap­ter 5; and what I have to say will be relevant to other theories of formal semantics. The term 'categorial incongruity' is intended to refer to a particular kind of semantic incompatibility which, in particular languages, is intimately associated with grammati­cal, more precisely syntactic, ill-formedness. It may be intro­duced by means of the following examples:

(7) 'My friend existed a whole new village' and