Abstract

To ascertain that a formalization of the intuitive notion of a ‘concept’ is linguistically interesting, one has to check whether it allows to get a grip on distinctions and notions from lexical semantics. Prime candidates are notions like ‘prototype’, ‘stereotypical attribute’, ‘essential attribute versus accidental attribute’, ‘intension versus extension’. We will argue that although the current paradigm of formal concept analysis as an application of lattice theory is not rich enough for an analysis of these notions, a lattice theoretical approach to concepts is a suitable starting point for formalizing them.