Paired Structures in Logical and Semiotic Models of Natural Language

Abstract

The evidence coming from cognitive psychology and linguistics shows that pairs of reference concepts (as e. g. good/bad, tall/short, nice/ugly, etc.) play a crucial role in the way we everyday use and understand natural languages in order to analyze reality and make decisions. Different situations and problems require different pairs of landmark concepts, since they provide the referential semantics in which the available information is understood accordingly to our goals in each context. In this way, a semantic valuation structure or system emerges from a pair of reference concepts and the way they oppose each other. Such structures allow representing the logic of new concepts according to the semantics of the references. We will refer to these semantic valuation structures as paired structures. Our point is that the semantic features of a paired structure could essentially depend on the semantic relationships holding between the pair of reference concepts from which the valuation structure emerges. Different relationships may enable the representation of different types of neutrality, understood here as an epistemic hesitation regarding the references. However, the standard approach to natural languages through logical models usually assumes that reference concepts are just each other complement. In this paper, we informally discuss more deeply about these issues, claiming in a positional manner that an adequate logical study and representation of the features and complexity of natural languages requires to consider more general semantic relationships between references.