What ever happened to meaning?
Michael Eric Goodale1,2, Salvador Mascarenhas1,2
1Department of Cognitive Studies, Ecole Normale Superieure, Paris, France salvador.mascarenhas@ens.fr michael.goodale@ens.fr.
The Behavioral and Brain Sciences
|June 30, 2026
Abstract:
By "linguistics," the target article means usage-based linguistics, which, we agree, plays very well with language models. But the article summarily dismisses important work on meaning from the now disreputable tradition of generative linguistics. We refute the authors' arguments from distributional semantics and "green tea," and highlight the importance of formal compositional semantics for the study of thought.
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