Linking by Types in the Hierarchical Lexicon (review)

The basic question to be addressed in this chapter is: what is the status of the notions ‘inheritance’ and ‘default inheritance’ in the theoretical framework of Construction Morphology (CM)? This framework, developed in Booij (2010), assumes a hierarchical lexicon with both abstract morphological schemas and stored complex words that instantiate these schemas. The lexicon of a language can be modelled in such a way that the abstract word formation schemas dominate their individual instantiations. Thus, the lexicon is partially conceived of as a hierarchical network in which lower nodes, the existing complex words, can be assumed to inherit information from dominating higher nodes. Advantages of a full-entry theory over an impoverished entry theory are outlined, and the chapter includes discussion of polysemy, allomorphy, and the class of items that fall between derivatives and compounds using ‘affixoids’.

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Suppletion and dependency in inflectional morphology

Proceedings of the International Conference on Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar ◽

10.21248/hpsg.2001.4 ◽

2002 ◽

Author(s):

Olivier Bonami ◽

Gilles Boyé

Keyword(s):

Lexical Entry ◽

Inflectional Morphology ◽

Phonological Information ◽

Verbal Inflection ◽

Optimal Analysis ◽

Dependency Tree ◽

Hierarchical Lexicon ◽

Type Construction ◽

Dependency Relations

This paper presents a general approach to verbal inflection with special emphasis on suppletion phenomena. The paper focuses on French, but the approach is general enough to apply to a wide variety of languages. In the first part of the paper, we show that suppletion is not erratic: suppletive forms tend to always appear in groups, in definite areas of verbal paradigms. Our analysis is based on the observation of a number of dependency relations between inflectional forms of verbs (somewhat similar to rules of referral (Zwicky 1985, Stump 1993)). We define for each language a stem dependency tree based on these observations, which allows one to predict the whole paradigm of every verb in the language on the basis of a minimal number of idiosyncratic stems. We use the tree to minimize the quantity of redundant phonological information that has to be listed in the lexicon for a given lexeme, assuming that an optimal analysis of inflection should be able to derive all and only intuitively predictable inflectional forms from a single representation. The second part of the paper attempts to integrate the analysis in an HPSG hierarchical lexicon. Morphological dependency relations are represented directly by mentioning a lexical sign in another sign's lexical entry. The approach to suppletion proposed in the first part is made explicit using a combination of online type construction and default constraints on the phonology of dependent signs.

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Linking experiencer-subject psych verb constructions in Modern Greek

Proceedings of the International Conference on Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar ◽

10.21248/hpsg.2000.12 ◽

2001 ◽

Author(s):

Valia Kordoni

Keyword(s):

Argument Structure ◽

Prepositional Phrase ◽

Modern Greek ◽

Verb Constructions ◽

Hierarchical Lexicon ◽

Word Classes ◽

The Individual ◽

Psych Verb Constructions ◽

Semantic Properties ◽

Psych Verb

This paper focuses on the semantic properties and the syntactic behaviour of Modern Greek (hence MG) Experiencer-Subject Psych Verb Constructions (hence ESPVCs). MG ESPVCs include verbs like miso (hate), agapo (love), or latrevo (adore), which feature a nominative experiencer in agreement with the verb and an accusative theme (see examples (1)-(3)). MG ESPVCs include also predicates like fovame (fear), which feature an experiencer-subject in agreement with the verb and either an accusative theme (example (4)), or a theme as the object of a prepositional phrase (example (5)). We should underline here that examples (4) and (5) below convey the same meaning. That is, they do NOT differ semantically. O Gianis misi to sholio.the Gianis.N hate.3S the school.A"John hates school." O Gianis agapa tin Maria.the Gianis.N loves.3S the Maria.A"John loves Mary." O Gianis latrevi tin musiki.the Gianis.N adore.3S the music.A"John adores music." I Maria fovate tis kategides.the Maria.N fear.3S the storms.A"Maria is afraid of the storms." I Maria fovate me tis kategides.the Maria.N fear.3S with the storms.A"Maria is afraid of the storms." The challenge that constructions like the ones in (4) and (5) pose lies on the split syntactic realization of the "experienced" (hence EXPD) semantic role (i.e., the theme), which in constructions like (4) is syntactically realized as the object of the sentence, while in constructions like (5) it is syntactically realized as the object of a prepositional phrase. Our aim is to propose a unified linking account of the MG ESPVCs. This unified account is based on the assumption that the individual denoted by the object NP (or PP) of the MG ESPVCs is entailed to be semantically underspecified, and makes use of Wechsler's (1995) Notion Rule, Davis and Koenig's (2000) linking theory, as well as Markantonatou and Sadler's (1996) proposal for the linking of indirect arguments. References Davis, A.R. and J.-P. Koenig (2000). Linking as constraints on word classes in a hierarchical lexicon. Language 76, 56-91. Markantonatou, S. and L. Sadler (1996). Linking Indirect Arguments. Essex Research Reports in Linguistics 9, 24-63. Wechsler, S. (1995). The Semantic Basis of Argument Structure. Stanford: CSLI Publications. Series: Dissertations in Linguistics, Joan Bresnan, Sharon Inkelas, William J. Poser, and Peter Sells (eds.).

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A constructional approach to transitional formatives

Review of Cognitive Linguistics ◽

10.1075/rcl.12.1.06por ◽

2014 ◽

Vol 12 (1) ◽

pp. 160-192 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Carmen Portero Muñoz

Keyword(s):

Hierarchical Lexicon ◽

Noun Compounds ◽

The Right ◽

English Noun

The noun head is commonly found in the second position of many English noun compounds. Typically, noun compounds with head in the right are endocentric formations, that is, composite forms which designate a more specific type of the concept denoted by head (e.g. pinhead). The noun head is also found in a significant number of so called ‘exocentric’ formations with a variety of interconnected meanings (e.g. airhead, acidhead, Potterhead). The different exocentric patterns where head participates raise questions about the grammatical status of this element, which is sometimes analysed as a suffixal element, illustrating the fuzzy boundaries between derivation and compounding. In the linguistic literature there is an extensive debate as to whether processes like this one are to be regarded as cases of grammaticalization or lexicalisation. In this paper it will be proposed that exocentric formations in -head are suitable for an analysis using a schema-based approach in Ryder’s (1994) fashion, or a constructional approach (Booij, 2010a) insofar as new creations arise by analogy with the patterns that can be extracted from existing cases. The different patterns of exocentric formations with head can be conveniently characterized by postulating a hierarchical lexicon with schemas or constructions of different degree of abstraction.

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Anthony R. Davis, Linking by types in the hierarchical lexicon (Studies in Constraint-Based Lexicalism). Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications, 2001. Pp. viii+312.

Journal of Linguistics ◽

10.1017/s0022226703252361 ◽

2004 ◽

Vol 40 (1) ◽

pp. 170-172

Author(s):

ALEX ALSINA

Keyword(s):

Hierarchical Lexicon

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AN EFFICIENT PARSING MODEL FOR UNIFICATION CATEGORIAL GRAMMAR WITH OBJECT-ORIENTED KNOWLEDGE REPRESENTATION AND SELECTION SETS

International Journal of Artificial Intelligence Tools ◽

10.1142/s0218213098000093 ◽

1998 ◽

Vol 07 (02) ◽

pp. 143-162

Author(s):

LI LI ◽

BARRETT R. BRYANT

Keyword(s):

Object Oriented ◽

Experimental Tests ◽

Search Space ◽

Categorial Grammar ◽

Lexical Representation ◽

Object Oriented Programming ◽

Spoken English ◽

New Information ◽

Hierarchical Lexicon ◽

Representation Language

This paper describes an object-oriented lexical representation language based on Unification Categorial Grammar (UCG) that encodes linguistic and semantic information uniformly as classes and objects and an efficient bottom-up parsing method for UCG using selection sets technique. The lexical representation language, implemented in the logic and object-oriented programming language LIFE, introduces several new information sharing mechanisms to enable natural, declarative, modular and economial construction of large and complex computational lexicons. The selection sets are deduced from a transformation between UCG and Context-Free Grammar (CFG) and used to reduce search space for the table-driven algorithm. The experimental tests on a spoken English corpus show that the hierarchical lexicon achieves a dramatic reduction on redundant information and that selection sets significantly improve parsing UCG with a polynomial time complexity.

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