The paper surveys arguments from linguistics, artificial intelligence and philosophy about semantic primitives. It concentrates discussion on arguments of Charniak, Hayes, Putnam and Bobrow and Winograd; and suggests that many of the arguments against semantic primitives are based on no clear views about what the defenders are arguing for. The proponents of semantic primitives must share blame for this, as well as for supporting these entities by a range of highly specious arguments. However, the paper claims that, provided primitives are supported only by weak and commonsensical hypotheses, they can continue to play a valuable role in the analysis and processing of meaning
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Wilks, Y. (2007). Good and Bad Arguments About Semantic Primitives. In: Ahmad, K., Brewster, C., Stevenson, M. (eds) Words and Intelligence I. Text, Speech and Language Technology, vol 35. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/1-4020-5285-5_6
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