Sense Variation and Lexical Semantics Generative Operations

l / I l / / / / / | / I Sense Variation and Lexical Semantics Generative Operations Patrick Saint-Dizier IRIT-CNRS, 118, route de Narbonne 31062 Toulouse Cedex France stdizier@irit, fr Abstract In this document, we outline some elements related to sense variation and to sense delim- itation within the perspective of the Gener- ative Lexicon. We then show that, in some cases, the Qualia structure can be combined with or replaced by a small number of rules, which seem to capture more adequately the relationships between the predicator and one of its arguments. 1 Introduction Investigations within the generative perspective aim at modelling, by means of a small number of rules, principles and constraints, linguistic phenomena (ei- ther morphological, syntactic or semantic) at a high level of abstraction, level which seems to be appro- priate for research on multi-linguism and language learning. These works, among other things, attempt at modelling a certain form of 'creativity' in lan- guage: from a limited number of linguistic resources, a potentially infinite set of surface forms can be gen- erated. Among works within the generative perspective, let us concentrate on the Generative Lexicon (Puste- jovsky 91, 95), which has Settled in the past years one of the most innovative perspective in lexical semantics. This approach introduces an abstract model radically opposed to 'flat' sense enumeration lexicons. This approach, which is now well-known, is based (1) on the close cooperation of three lexi- ca] semantic structures: the argument structure (in- cluding selectional restrictions), the aspectual struc- ture and the Qualia structure, (2) on a detailed type theory and a type coercion procedure and (3) on a refined theory of compositionality. The Generative Lexicon (GL) investigates the problem of the mul- tiplicity of usages of a sense of a lexeme and shows how these usages can be analyzed in terms of possi- ble type shirtings w.r.t, the type expected by a usage of that sense defined as the core usage. Type shift- ing is modelled by a specific inference mechanism: type coercion. The GL shows very clearly the inter- dependence between arguments and predicates. In our perspective, we are not only interested in deciding whether an expression is an acceptable ar- gument for a predicate and for what reasons as it is also the case in the GL, but we want to be able to 'reconstruct' or infer the meaning of the proposi- tion from its parts (the predicate and its arguments), and possibly also from the implicit semantics con- veyed by the syntactic form (Goldberg 94). We as- sume that the impossibility of building a semantic representation for a proposition entails that it is se- mantically ill-formed w.r.t, our grammar, lexicon and composition rules. The work presented here is not definitive, it is a feasability study which aims at opening new perspectives and new treatments for the GL, while remaining in the same spirit. We will in particular show that in some cases, the Qualia structure can be combined with, or replaced by, …

Content truncated to 500 words