Linguistic meaning and language comprehension☆

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Abstract

Recent developments in cognitive science are assessed as a challenge to the well established view in philosophy of language and linguistics that meaning is inherent to language and is relatively fixed. It is concluded that the challenge is unsuccessful. Current activities in information retrieval which presuppose linguistic meaning are well founded, in that regard. Furthermore, one potential obstacle to the development of information systems which seek to produce comprehension of text has been removed.

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    Partial support for the preparation of this paper was provided by the National Science Foundation, Grant # IST 80-15335.

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