CTF09: Call for Participation

[Wiebke Petersen]

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                  CALL FOR PARTICIPATION

     Second Conference on Concept Types and Frames
          in Language, Cognition, and Science

               August 24 - 26, 2009
                Düsseldorf, Germany


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Conference site:
http://www.phil-fak.uni-duesseldorf.de/fff/fff-conference-ctf09/overview-call/

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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 Löbner


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


--
Wiebke Petersen
Department of Computational Linguistics
Institute of Language and Information
Heinrich-Heine University Düsseldorf
Universitätsstraße 1,
40225 Düsseldorf, Germany
e-mail: petersew@...
http://www.phil-fak.uni-duesseldorf.de/~petersen/
tel.: [phone]; fax: [phone]




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