Lexical Factorization and Syntactic Behavior

LiLT volume 15, issue 1 2017 Lexical Factorization and Syntactic Behavior James Pustejovsky, Brandeis University Aravind Joshi, University of Pennsylvania Abstract In this paper, we examine the correlation between lexical semantics and the syntactic realization of the di↵erent components of a word’s meaning in natural language. More specifically, we will explore the ef- fect that lexical factorization in verb semantics has on the suppression or expression of semantic features within the sentence. Factorization was a common analytic tool employed in early generative linguistic ap- proaches to lexical decomposition, and continues to play a role in con- temporary semantics, in various guises and modified forms. Building on the unpublished analysis of verbs of seeing in Joshi (1972), we argue here that the significance of lexical factorization is twofold: first, cur- rent models of verb meaning owe much of their insight to factor-based theories of meaning; secondly, the factorization properties of a lexi- cal item appear to influence, both directly and indirectly, the possible syntactic expressibility of arguments and adjuncts in sentence compo- sition. We argue that this information can be used to compute what we call the factor expression likelihood (FEL) associated with a verb in a sentence. This is the likelihood that the overt syntactic expression of a factor will cooccur with the verb. This has consequences for the compositional mechanisms responsible for computing the meaning of the sentence, as well as significance in the creation of computational models attempting to capture linguistic behavior over large corpora. 1 Introduction There is a long and established tradition in linguistics of the application of component-based decomposition for the analysis of lexical meaning. Early work in generative grammar incorporated both the feature-based 1 2 / LiLT volume 15, issue 1 2017 analysis promoted by Katz and Fodor (1963) and others (Katz and Postal, 1964, Chomsky, 1965), as well as the adoption of more struc- tured lexical templates as put forth by Fillmore (1968b), Leech (1970), Gruber (1976), and Lako↵ (1970), to the study of verb classes and the syntactic and semantic variations associated with class membership. In this paper, we reevaluate the significance of lexical decomposition strategies as they were employed in early generative linguistic studies of verb meaning and syntactic variability, an area now often referred to as the lexicon-syntax interface, and consider their influence on contem- porary treatments of argument selection and polysemy. We look at the general strategy of lexical factorization as a method for characterizing variations in meaning within a semantic class, focusing in particular on an unpublished 1972 manuscript of Aravind Joshi’s, “Factorization of Verbs: An Analysis of Verbs of Seeing”. This work adheres to a style of lexical factorization that was common in the 1970s, particularly with linguists exploring the impact of semantic factors on syntactic behav- ior or psychological plausibility. For example, Joshi’s analysis follows a scheme introduced by Miller (1973) to analyze the conceptual relations between motion verbs, as a way of modeling lexical memory. Miller and other early researchers opened up new avenues for …

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