Implementation of qualia structures provided by relative adjectives and composites in German

The present paper deals with the semantic representation of attributive elements in the nominative group − relative adjectives and composites. The aim of the present study is to analyze the semantic representation of a predominantly noun in an attributive group with reference to Qualia structures, as applied in J. Pustejovsky’s theory of generative lexicon, and their realization through relative adjectives and composites, which are direct explicators of the semantic structure of predominant words (nouns). The study is based on the 150 most frequent relative adjectives identified on the basis of the electronic corpus of the German language. Relative adjectives qualify as Qualia structures and can denote objective constitutive (material and origin), formal (physical parameters, colour, time, place), telic (purpose and function of an object) and agentive (information about the creator, artifact, natural genus and causal chain) properties. The system of relative adjectives demonstrates a wide range of semantic meanings that are expressed in German by other linguistic means, e.g. composites. When describing the possibility of implementing Qualia structures in the noun group, other correlative linguistic units, such as composites, are analyzed. The variation in the use of nouns in composites and relative adjectives formed from them helps to actualize the presence of a feature in a particular situation, to give the nominal groups a terminological character and to make the transition from one qualification group to another.

Delimiting durative events with manner

Durative events by default are atelic. However, temporal targets are typically required for durative verbs with a rushing manner, such as ‘We are catching the 3:30 flight’ and ‘The farmer rushed to harvest before the storm’. Why and how does manner introduce delimiting temporal concepts to durative verbs? This puzzle is addressed by our current study of two near-synonymous Mandarin durative verbs describing events carried out in a rushing manner: 赶 gǎn and 抢 qiǎng. Our event-base account will examine both their compositional meanings and their constructional patterns. We will show that 赶 gǎn and 抢 qiǎng not only coerce eventive readings from their nominal objects, but also require certain delineating temporal targets. The verb 赶 gǎn requires an understood deadline, while the verb 抢 qiǎng requires the presupposition of the limited availability of the object. As neither temporal targets mark the time of the actual activities, these are exceptional cases of aktionsart. We will show that the different ways to delineate event meanings of the constructions [gǎn/qiǎng+ noun] can be predicted from the lexical meaning of the two verbs and can in turn predict the event types represented by the object with the MARVS theory. Based on this lexical semantic representation, we further show that the Generative Lexicon theory predicts the coercions of the rushing meaning from the original activity verb senses, and that the Construction Grammar theory accounts for their sharing of the same syntactic configuration.

ENGLISH WAY OF VOCAL VERBS AND THEIR ITALIAN EXPLANATION: A CROSS-SPOKEN COMPARISON

This examination expects to break down the diverse way by which Way of Vocal action words are understood in English and Italian. Following Talmy's differentiation between Satellite-outlined and Verb-outlined dialects, we target exhibiting how the semantic data passed on by these action words might be lost or advanced when changing from English into Italian. To do as such, four contemporary English books just as their Italian interpretations were considered. 83 English MoS action words were distinguished for a sum of 776 events. Their Italian partners (148 among action words and multi-word developments) were in this way dissected inside the Generative Lexicon model (Pustevjosky, 1998). As per our outcomes, English and Italian show a serious level of granularity in the semantic acknowledgment of Way of Vocalaction words. Also, inside this space, the resistance between a Satellite-outlined language like English and a Verb-outlined language like Italian is by all accounts obscured, since the two dialects, as a general rule, pick to conflate Way in the action word root.

Compositional mechanisms and selectional constraints in syntax and word formation

This study compares compositional processes involved in syntax on the one hand and word formation on the other hand within the Generative Lexicon framework. It first shows how semantic types incorporated in a structured lexical entry are acted on by different compositional mechanisms in predicates headed by verbs and in modification constructions, and then analyzes non-evaluative suffixation in Spanish in order to determine how the head suffix interacts with the meaning of the base word. It is concluded that different parts of the lexical entry of the selected component (syntactic argument or morphological base) can be accessed in both phrase construction and word formation, but the mechanisms underlying complex syntactic and morphological structures differ in significant ways.

Coercion in Languages in Flux

The classical view of semantics that we inherited from Montague is that natural languages are formal languages where semantics specifies the interpretations which can be associated with expressions of the language. In this context coercion might be seen as a slight but formally specifiable disturbance in the formal semantics which shows how the canonical interpretation of an expression can be modified by its linguistic context. In recent years an alternative to the formal language view of natural language has developed which sees the interpretation of language as a more local and dynamic process where the interpretation of expressions can be modified for the purposes of the utterance at hand. This presents linguistic semantics as a dynamic, somewhat chaotic, system constrained by the need to communicate. An interpretation of an expression will work in communication if it is close enough to other interpretations your interlocutor might be familiar with and there is enough evidence in the ambient context for her to approximate the interpretation you intended. On this view of language as a system in flux, coercion is not so much a disturbance in the semantic system but rather a regularization of available interpretations leading to a more predictable system. I will present some of the reasons why I favour the view of language in flux (but nevertheless think that the techniques we have learnt from formal semantics are important to preserve). I will look at some of the original examples of coercion discussed in the Pustejovskian generative lexicon and suggest that the possibilities for interpretation are broader than might be suggested by Pustejovsky’s original work. Finally, I will suggest that coercion can play a central role in compositional semantics taking two examples: (1) individual vs. frame-level properties and (2) dynamic generalized quantifiers and property coercion.

Deriving ablative, privative, and reversative meanings in Catalan and Spanish

The most productive way to encode ablative, privative, and reversative meanings in current Catalan and Spanish is by means of des- prefixation. This paper investigates how these related values are obtained both from a structural and from a conceptual perspective. To analyze the structural behaviour of these predicates, a new neo-constructionist model is adopted: Nanosyntax, according to which lexical items are syntactic constructs. As for the conceptual content associated to these verbs, it is accounted for by means of a non-canonical approach to the Generative Lexicon Theory developed by Pustejovsky (1995 ff.).The core proposal is that des- prefixed verbs with an ablative, a privative, or a reversative meaning share the same syntactic structure, and that the different interpretation of each semantic class emerges as a consequence of the interactions generated, at a conceptual level, between the Qualia Structure of the verbal root and that of the internal argument of the verb.

A relational adjective and a noun semantic binding in the specialized language of Information and Communication Technology

This study reports on a semantic analysis of a terminology pattern formed by a relational adjective Radj and a noun n, found in specialized texts written in English and Spanish from the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) field. This research is first based on a terminology perspective to later focus on a recurring multi-word lexical unit pattern in which the specialized concept is realized by a relational adjective. The syntactic pattern [Radj+n] will be referred to as Specialized Lexical Combination (SLC). The study presents a step forward to previous terminology research. We argue that the semantic analysis of the adjective-noun relationship will help understand the underlying knowledge organization of this ICT subject area. The analysis is approached from the framework of the Generative Lexicon specially focusing on the qualia structure of this recurring multi-word lexical unit pattern.

Filtered collocations as features in verbal polysemy disambiguation

In Generative Lexicon Theory (glt) (Pustejovsky 1995), co-composition is one of the generative devices proposed to explain the cases of verbal polysemous behavior where more than one function application is allowed. The English baking verbs were used as examples to illustrate how their arguments co-specify the verb with qualia unification. Some studies (Blutner 2002; Carston 2002; Falkum 2007) stated that the information of pragmatics and world knowledge need to be considered as well. Therefore, this study would like to examine whether glt could be practiced in a real-world Natural Language Processing (nlp) application using collocations. We have conducted a fine-grained logical polysemy disambiguation task, taking the open-sourced Leiden Weibo Corpus as resource and computing with Support Vector Machine (svm) classifier. Within the classifier, we have taken collocated verbs under glt as main features. In addition, measure words and syntactic patterns are extracted as additional features for comparison. Our study investigates the logical polysemy of the Chinese verb kao ‘bake’. We find that glt could help in identifying logically polysemous cases; additional features would help the classifier achieve a higher performance.