17.1.5 Expressiveness

Finally, to be useful a meaning representation scheme must be expressive enough to handle an extremely wide range of subject matter. The ideal situation, of course, would be to have a single meaning representation language that could adequately represent the meaning of any sensible natural language utterance. Although this is probably too much to expect from any single representational system, Section 17.4 will show that First-Order Logic is expressive enough to handle quite a lot of what needs to be represented.

17.2 MEANING STRUCTURE OF LANGUAGE

The previous section focused on some of the purposes that meaning representations must serve, without saying much about what we will call the \textit{meaning structure} of \textit{language}. By this, we have in mind the various methods by which human languages convey meaning. These include a variety of conventional form-meaning associations, word-order regularities, tense systems, conjunctions and quantifiers, and a fundamental predicate-argument structure. The remainder of this section focuses exclusively on this last notion of a predicate-argument structure, which is the mechanism that has had the greatest practical influence on the nature of meaning representation languages. The remaining topics will be addressed in Ch. 18 where the primary focus will be on how they contribute to how meaning representations are assembled, rather than on the nature of the representations.