Leveraging Preposition Ambiguity to Assess Representation of Semantic Interaction in CDSM

Consider the meanings of the following phrases: “red apple,” “red hair,” and “red state.” The meaning of the word “red” in each of these examples interacts with the meaning of the noun it modifies, applying a different color to the first two and a political affiliation to the third. This is an example of a common phenomenon in natural language in which the meaning of a whole expression is not derived from a simple sum of its parts, but is composed by interactions among their meanings. Semantic interactions have been acknowledged in the philosophical literature, notably by Frege [9], who asserted that a word in isolation is only an abstraction, and its precise meaning only assigned when it is placed in the context of a proposition. Further, semantic interaction is a detectable component of human language processing, as evidenced by the well documented phenomenon of sentential priming [8].