Cognitive Semantics : Meaning and Cognition

180 JORDAN ZLATEV
Figure 2. A training set of situations presented to Regier’s system as examples of over. The
set could not be learned with the original architecture and interpretive scheme (a), cf. text.
Figure 3 illustrates this modified system, which indeed had no difficulty in
performing the association task. However, this is achieved at the expense of
what I have called “the subscript problem” (cf. Zlatev 1992). The point is that
subscripts and other technical devices used to separate “senses” have no
physical realization. For instance no one says “Go to the bank-sub-1 along the
bank-sub-2”. Thus, they give no clue as to how a given “sense” is associated
with the right kind of entity or situation during learning (cf. the “association
line” between the sub-type 1 situation and OVER 1 in Figure 3). Furthermore this
misleading solution leads to another problem, which has tormented “natural