Predicate Concepts and their Normal Form

Abstract

This paper argues that a simple system of meaning relations drawn from words/lexical items in a natural language and framed in terms of syntax-free relations in linguistic texts can help ground linguistic predicates or concepts thereof in a number of meaning relations. These relations are constrained by the logical structures of linguistic meanings across sentence and discourse contexts. Significantly, such meaning relations are not defined over, or do not ride on, the syntactic structure of a given language. Nor do they (necessarily) turn on compositional relations for the computation of meaning values. This facilitates the formulation of meaning relations to be defined on the symbolic elements of a lexicon. This specific insight is carried over to the reduction of predicates or predicate concepts in natural language to the minimal form they can assume. This minimal form is formulated in terms of meaning relations in a manner that all complex predicates or predicate concepts can be reduced to a sort of normal form defined by meaning relations.