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The aim of this symposium is to bring together four researchers whose recent work relies on the Conceptual Spaces framework promoted by Gärdenfors, in order to discuss ongoing developments that all bear on the main topic of the conference, namely the discrete vs continuum opposition, in relation to the general problem of the assignment of boundaries to ordinary categories. The symposium will consist of a short introduction, followed by three main contributions each with theoretical and experimental content (see abstracts in extended proposal). One contribution concerns the issue of category boundaries for color terms, another the phenomenon of meaning negotiation and variation in language, and a third the relation between typicality and membership for gradable adjectives. The contributions aim to show the reality and fruitfulness of the notion of typicality in relation to the meaning of various categories, from perceptual to more abstract. Another goal is to discuss the phenomenon of individual variability about meaning, and how the phenomenon can be accommodated in the CS framework.
