Categorisation of Actions by Analogy: From the Analysis of Metaphoric Utterances to a Computational Model

May 2002

Proceedings of the Fifteenth International Florida Artificial Intelligence Research Society Conference (FLAIRS 2002)

Volume

Proceedings of the Fifteenth International Florida Artificial Intelligence Research Society Conference (FLAIRS 2002)

All Papers

If work in psychology has clearly brought to light the existence of conceptual flexibility in the categorisation of objects, which led to a re-questioning of the traditional conception of categorisation which considers rigid and discontinuous categories, it is not the case in linguistics and psycholinguistics. We propose, through a highlighting of the role of analogy in the categorisation of verbs, to defend the idea of semantic flexibility which constitutes a linguistic counterpart to psychologists’ advances on categorisation. Accordingly, we show that the production of metaphoric verbal utterances by adults and particularly by 2/3 year old children, reflects the existence of an analogical categorisation of verbs which makes it possible to argue in favour of a computational model of the role of analogy in the semantic network of the verb lexicon.