Description

Ontology in the past was considered mainly a pursuit of philosophers, asking questions about being in most general terms. While some philosophers made appeal to natural language in order to argue for an ontological category or notion, others have rejected such an appeal arguing that the ontology reflected in language diverges significantly from what there really is, from any philosophically accepted ontology. Whatever one’s view may be of what a philosopher should pursue, it has become clear, especially with the development of natural language semantics, that the ontology of natural language is an important object of study in itself, as the subject matter of Natural Language Ontology. In addition, ontology is now also being studied with respect to other areas of cognition, as Applied Ontology

This year’s SPE consists in two special sessions preceded by a one-day tutorial

Special Session 1:

Ontology and Generative Grammar

Description

Not only semantics bears on the ontology of natural language. There also more direct connections to syntax (within the generative tradition). Various categories and elements that syntacticians have posited appear to reflect ontological notions, such as existence, ontological dependence, parthood, causation (or more generally grounding), plurality and unity, as well as ontological categories (events, facts, tropes, qualities etc). Moreover, within generative linguistics the question arises whether and in what way language bears a relation to objects. As has often been pointed out, a great range of objects can be the semantic values of ‘referential’ NPs in natural language that most philosophers and even nonphilosophers, upon reflection, may be unwilling to accept. But does this mean referential NPs in natural language could only be investigated with respect to a lexical-conceptual structure deployed on an occasion of reference and thus with respect to another level of syntax, as Chomsky has argued, or can one make sense in another way of a rich ontology of what we appear to conceive of as objects of reference, at least when using natural language?

Invited Speakers:

Scientific Committee:

Guglielmo Cinque (Venice), John Collins (East Anglia), Giuliana Giusti (Venice), Heidi Harley (Arizona), Wolfram Hinzen (ICREA, Barcelona), Richard Kayne (NYU), Friederike Moltmann (CNRS, New York)

Special session 2:

Applied Ontology and Natural Language Ontology

Description

Differently from pure metaphysics, applied ontology, as conceived today, can’t ignore the role of language and cognition. Indeed, as long as its goal is to make explicit (by means of computer-readable conceptual models) people?s assumptions about reality, applied ontology is an intrisically interdisciplinary area of research, which involves philosophy, linguistics and cognitive science, as well as computer science. We welcome therefore talks concerning the ontological grounds of cognition and natural language semantics; the impact of linguistic analysis on conceptual modeling; the role of lexical resources and NLP for ontology engineering; and the role of formal ontology for natural language understanding, image understanding, and the development of lexical resources and NLP tools.

Invited Speakers:

Scientific Committee:

Massimiliano Carrara (Padua), Ciro de Florio (Milan), Nicola Guarino (Trento), Giorgio Lando (L’Aquila), Vittorio Morato (Padua), Elisa Paganini (Milan), Peter Simons (Dublin), Amie Thomasson (Miami), Paolo Valore (Milan)

Tutorial:

Natural Language Ontology: Syntactic and Semantic Perspectives

Applied Ontology and Analytic Metaphysics