Forms of meaning, meaning of forms BRUNO GAUME*, KARINE DUVIGNAU**, OLIVIER GASQUET* and MARIE-DOMINIQU E GINESTE*** * IRIT-UPS, 118 rte de Narbonne, F-31062 Toulouse cedex 4, France. e-mail: {gasquet,gaume}@irit.f r ** Lab. J. Lordat, 5 alle Âes A. Machado, F-31058 Toulouse cedex 1, France. e-mail: duvignau@univ-tlse2.f r ***Lab. de Psychologie, Paris XIII, 99, av J-B Clement F-93430, Villetaneuse, France. e-mail: gineste@lshs.univ-paris13.f r Abstract. If work in psychology has clearly brought to light that `conceptual ¯exibility’ exists in the categorization of objects, which led to re-questioning the traditional conception of categorization which considers rigid and discontinuous categories, it is not the case in linguistics and psycholinguistics. We propose, through highlighting the role of analogy in the categorization of verbs, to defend the idea of semantic ¯exibility which constitutes a linguistic counterpart to psychologists’ advances on categorization. Accordingly, it is shown that the production of `meta- phoric’ verbal utterances by adults and more particularly by 2/3-year-old children re¯ects analogical categorization of verbs which makes it possible to argue in favour of a computational model of the role of analogy in the semantic network of the verb lexicon. Keywords: categorization, analogy, action, verb semantics, approximatio n by analogy, computationa l model, metaphorymy, real-graphs, small- worlds Received December 2001; accepted March 2002 `To say what a thing is, is to say what it is like’. (Jackson 1866) 1. Introduction Currently, the concept of `approximate identi®cations’ proposed by Jakobson (1956), which suggests that there is `semantic ¯exibility’ in linguistic categories, has not yet been truly validated. Thus, the metaphorÐa linguistic phenomenon that consists in bringing distinct entities closer by substituting one for the otherÐis still primarily considered to be a deviance while at the same time it could be the linguistic guarantee of the relevance of the categorial ¯exibility phenomenon brought to light by psychologists. This lexical connection by the metaphor, which reveals a semantic similarity relation, highlights the `non-rigidity’, the `pliability’ of meaning of J. Expt.Theor.Artif.Intell. 14(2002)61±74 Journal of Experimental & Theoretical Artificial Intelligence ISSN 0952±813X print/ISSN 1362±3079 online # 2002 Taylor & Francis Ltd http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/09528130210162262