24-26 Aug 2009
Second Conference on Concept Types and Frames in Language, Cognition, and Science August 24 - 26, 2009 Dsseldorf, Germany http://www.phil-fak.uni-duesseldorf.de/fff/fff-conference-ctf09/overview-ca ll/ INVITED SPEAKERS Barbara Abbott Lawrence W. Barsalou Jerry Hobbs Beth Levin James Pustejovsky Barry Smith Paul Thagard GENERAL DESCRIPTION The topic of the conference is the investigation of concept types of nouns and verbs and their respective relationships to frames. Frames provide a recursive device for representing knowledge about arbitrary objects and categories by means of attributes and their values. They offer a flexible way of representing concepts of different types in language, philosophy and sciences at different levels of detail and at different stages of development or processing. The interdisciplinary conference combines approaches from linguistics, computational linguistics, mathematics, cognitive psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, philosophy of science, and the history of science. LINGUISTIC PERSPECTIVES Nouns in natural language correspond to different basic types of concepts. Sortal nouns (e.g. 'cow', 'table', 'adjective') constitute the unmarked type of nouns; individual nouns (e.g. 'Mary', 'pope', 'moon') and functional nouns (e.g. 'mother', 'head', 'size') are marked in being inherently unique; relational nouns (e.g. 'son', 'leg', 'modifier') and functional nouns are marked by involving one or more additional arguments. The linguistic perspective on noun types includes determination in general and productive type shifts, as both permit systematic transitions between types of nouns. The types of nouns can be modelled by frames of different types. A second focus is on verbs: dimensional verbs such as 'cost', 'last', 'widen', and 'cool' can incorporate functional concepts as well. Moreover, verbs also lend themselves naturally to a frame account of lexical meaning. A systematic frame analysis of verb and noun meanings promises a substantial contribution to theories of both syntactic and semantic composition. Among the different concept types, functional concepts are of particular interest since they directly correspond to attributes in frames. Therefore, they play a central role not only in linguistics but in conceptual and theoretical evolution in general. PHILOSOPHICAL AND COGNITIVE PERSPECTIVES Frames, in Barsalou's sense, are recursive attribute-value structures. While frames can be used to implement individual and sortal concepts, their attributes can themselves be analysed as recursively interrelated functional concepts. Given that frames are the basic format of concept formation in cognition, attributes and frames might have neural correlates in our brains. Frames are a natural linguistic and conceptual format for the representation of complex ontologies that embody substance-accidence and part-whole relations. Of particular interest is the relation of frames to complex representational formats such as conceptual spaces and mental models. Functional concepts and frames play a crucial role in the human evolution of a stable cognitive framework for communication and cooperation, in everyday life, as well as in science. Insofar as the objects of scientific disciplines are defined in terms of underlying frames, Kuhnian paradigm shifts are related to changes in the frames employed in science. GENERAL CHAIR Sebastian Lbner SCIENTIFIC BOARD Heiner Fangerau Hans Geisler Jim Kilbury Gerhard Schurz Robert D. Van Valin, Jr. Markus Werning ORGANIZATION Thomas Gamerschlag Doris Gerland Rainer Osswald Wiebke Petersen