Lexical Information and Beyond : Constructional Inferences in Semantic Representation

LEXICAL INFORMATION AND BEYOND: CONSTRUCTIONAL INFERENCES IN SEMANTIC REPRESENTATION Mei-Chun Liu, National Chiao Tung University Chu-Ren Huang, Academia Sinica Ching-Y i Lee, National Tsing Hua University Mei-Chun Liu (giimg) Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures National Chiao Tung University, Hsinchu 300, Taiwan Email: mliu@cc.nctu.edu.tw Abstract This paper aims to show that semantic representation of verbs may require the inclusion of constructional inferences in addition to lexical specifications. By examining the transitive pattern of the Mandarin verb GAN (,y) 'rush' , we found that verbal semantics can only be adequately represented if constructionally coerced information is taken into consideration. The construction [GAN + NP] renders specific interpretations that are not directly derived from the lexical meaning of either the verb or the object NP. The construction itself carries salient information for the appropriate interpretation. Besides outlining a compositional approach with Qualia Structure (Pustejovsky 1995) , this paper attempts to account for the construction- triggered meanings from the perspective of Construction Grammar and to explain their interrelationship with cognitive mechanisms for sense extension. 1. INTRODUCTION Knowledge representation of the verbal system has always been one of the core issues in both theoretical and computational linguistics. In the early generative paradigm, verbs are considered to be the structural head of the sentence since it subcategorizes its arguments and hence dictates the form of the sentence. Verb meanings are treated as general tendencies in selectional preferences, and the semantic details of individual verbs are largely neglected. Recent development in lexical research has shifted the focus to investigating the interdependency between verb meanings and syntactic behavior. Most lexical semanticists share a common assumption that the syntactic behavior of a verb, especially its argument expression, is determined by the meaning of the verb (cf. Levin, Song and Atkins 1996, Pustejovsky 1995, Levin 1993, Atkins and Levin 1991, Atkins et al. 1988, etc.). Levin (1993) tries to categorize English verbs into semantically distinct classes on the basis of their argument alternation patterns. Pustejovsky (1995)'s program on generative lexicon moves one step further in spelling out a multi-layered representational scheme for lexical information that includes Argument Structure, Event Structure, Qualia Structure, and Inheritance Structure. His goal is to fully represent the interaction of word meaning and its composition. Another commonly shared belief among lexical semanticists is that the traditional 'sense enumerative lexicon', as Pustejovsky puts it, is inadequate to capture the real picture of natural language semantics. Specifically, such an approach cannot account for three lexically relevant phenomena: the creative use of words, the permeability of word senses, and the expression of multiple syntactic forms with a single word (Pustejovsky 1995: 39). It is argued that a more powerful compositional mechanism with predicative strength is needed to allow coercion of lexical meanings into more complicated or innovative senses. In view of the fact that lexical knowledge involves more than just the listing of different senses or simple combination of word meanings, we would like to present in this paper an interesting case in Mandarin where a single verb …

Content truncated to 500 words