gotten no closer to explicating meaning if the meanings of the primitives have not themselves been explained (this is
also Lewis's 1972 objection to“Markerese”, quoted in section10.4). My workinghypothesis is that the meaning of the
primitives is exhausted by (a) their capacity for combination with other primitives and (b) their use in triggering
inference rules and interface rules, individually and in combination. But I acknowledge that this remains to be
demonstrated.
Another major challenge is to enumerate the primitivesand the inference rules. The spatialfield has been well served,
but otherfields such as mental verbs and verbs of social interaction have hardly been touched (though Wierzbicka
1987 goes into considerable detail within her somewhat less structural approach). Finally, functional decompositions
such as (24)–(27) are only skeletal, and there is the usual proble mof“completers”: can we characterize the rest of the
meaning? Even as greater success is achieved in functional decomposition, it is important to keep these larger
questions in mind.
11.9 Qualia structure: characteristic activities and purposes
By comparison with verbs, the compositional semantics of nouns has been relatively neglected. James Pustejovsky
(1995) proposes two major innovations that take the theory of noun meanings beyond mere lists of features: qualia
structure and dot objects. We take these up in order.
Pustejovsky's theory of qualia structure includes three major points. First, following suggestionsof Aristotle(via Julius
Moravcsik),onecanpartition the propertiesof lexicalconcepts intoa numberof distincttypes called“qualia.”Second,
these properties need not be single monadic features like [HAS-A-BACK]; they may themselves have rich internal
structure. Third, the meaning of a sentence cannot be constructed by the simple technique of gluing together the
meanings of its words. Rather, the information within the qualia structure plays an active role in constructing the
connections among word meanings in a sentence, a process called“co-composition.”
Pustejovskyidentifies fourqualia:formal, constitutive,agentive,and telic.I donottakethistobean exhaustivelist, but
itisusefulinclassifying propertiesofa greatnumberofconcepts.^193 Theformal qualeincludesthetaxonomicstructure
discussed in section 11.4, for instance that a dog is a kind of animal, a kind of living thing, and a physical object. It
might also look downward in the taxonomy,
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(^193) Intheinterests ofcoherence, I havedistributedcertainpropertiesamongthequalia somewhatdifferentlythanPustejovsky. I do nottakethese differencesto beofanygreat
theoretical significance.