When Numbers Surface as Verbs: A Qualia-Oriented Analysis of Denumeral Verbs

This paper proposes a formal treatment of collective nouns (e.g. police, orchestra, and forest) drawing on the rich lexical typing of the Generative Lexicon. Collectives can be alternatively interpreted as collections in the sense of Link (1983), or as individuals, depending on contextual factors. They are therefore polysemous. Their semantics includes a meronymic (part/whole) relation which may or may not be accessible, depending on which interpretation they receive. The polysemy of collectives will be modelled using dot objects nominal types (dot objects being the Cartesian product of simple lexical types within a hierarchical lexicon) and qualia roles, capturing the constraints observed on their meronymic structure and complex lexical typing.

This paper aims to account for direct combination of an entity type noun with the verb HA- ‘do’ (e.g. piano-rul ha- ‘piano-ACC do’) in Korean, based on Generative Lexicon Theory (Pustejovsky 1995). The verb HA- ‘do’ coerces some entity type nouns (e.g. pap ‘boiled rice’) into an event type one by virtue of the qualia of the noun. Arguing type coercion based on qualia in Korean, this paper extended the qualia of GL by adding engagement telic quale. We further point out that qualia cannot be a warehouse of pragmatic information. Qualia are composed of necessary information to explain lexical meaning and co-occurrence constraints. Type coercion of the verb HA- ‘do’ has certain constraints related with the qualia of coerced nouns. The entity type nouns without direct telic quale cannot combine with HA- ‘do’. Natural type nouns are not coerced by HA- ‘do’. Type coercion by HA- ‘do’ does not have aspectual constraint. Finally, we seriously consider co-composition as an alternative to type coercion for the crucial operation of type shift.

After a quick overview of the field of study known as Semantics, where we advocate the need of accessing additional information besides syntax and Montague-style semantics at the lexical level in order to complete the full analysis of an utterance, we summarize the current formulations of a well-known theory of that field. We then propose and justify our own model of the Generative Lexicon Theory, based upon a variation of classical compositional semantics, and outline its formalization. Additionally, we discuss the theoretical place of informational, knowledge-related data supposed to exist within the lexicon as well as within discourse and other linguistic constructs. The formalization of the structure of natural language utterances around a surface form (phenogrammatics), a structure (tectogrammatics) and the meaning thereof as a logical form (semantics) has developed from the original theories of Curry and Montague to form coherent, type-driven models. Most of these new theories rely upon variations of the compositional analysis of the sentence: from pheno to tectogrammatics, and then to semantics. Our contribution to this work aims at giving such a model a means to overcome the problems posed by polysemous lexical units during the semantical analysis of the tectogrammatical form. Building upon an assumed deep structure, we formalize parts of Pustejovsky's Generative Lexicon Theory, linguistically motivated in Pustejovsky (The generative lexicon, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1995), in a pre-processing of the semantics of the sentence. The mechanisms of Lexical Semantics we propose are an additional layer of classical Montague compositional semantics, and, as such, integrate smoothly within such an analysis; we proceed by converting the lexical data to modifiers of the logical form. This treatment of Lexical Semantics furthermore induces us to think that some sort of non-evident background knowledge of the common use of words is necessary to perform a correct semantic analysis of an utterance. This commonsense metaphysics would therefore not be strictly confined to pragmatics, as is often assumed.

We present a semantic analysis of the adverb well that captures its degree and manner readings in a principled fashion via the Generative Lexicon Selective Binding composition rule. The analysis integrates Kennedy and McNally’s (Language, 81:345–381, 2005) treatment of scale structure with Generative Lexicon theory, and embeds the resulting semantics in HPSG.

In this chapter, Bassac presents and assesses a theory of the lexicon known as “the Generative Lexicon Theory”. He argues that the substance of such a lexicon can provide a neat explanatory account of the semantic and syntactic properties exhibited by middle verbs in the middle form of the transitive/middle alternation. Bassac then discusses the copredication problem raised by ambiguous deverbal event nouns and shows that this problem can be solved if each lexical entry associated with deverbal event nouns contains a type changing function. Eventually, in both cases, this lexical approach to syntactic and morphological phenomena provides support to Anderson’s basic claim that “the core of syntax is the lexicon.”

This paper focuses on the interface between lexical semantics and word formation. These two linguistic domains give us distinct types of intrinsic information on the semantic content of morphologically constructed words. A common formalism, called Morphological Structure Composition Schema (MS-CS), designed within Generative Lexicon Theory (GL), establishes strong links between these domains. It is illustrated in French by the representation of the Noun-to-Verb (NtoV) versus Verb-to-Noun (VtoN) conversion word formation processes. The relevance of this word formation type for lexical semantics is threefold. It consists in a non-conventional, affix-free, and hence uniquely semantics-driven mechanism. It is a topic of interest to the morphology, syntax, and semantics communities. Finally, it is both a productive and frequent phenomenon, observed in several languages. After an overview of linguistic theories related to this phenomenon, an analysis follows based on a large corpus designed to build a frequency-ranked semantics-based typology of NtoV and VtoN conversion. On the basis of such a classification, a unified GL-inspired model is proposed and illustrated through several examples

Ontology alignment became a very important problem to ensure semantic interoperability for different sources of information heterogeneous and distributed. Instance-based ontology alignment represents a very promising technique to find semantic correspondences between entities of different ontologies when they contain a lot of instances. In this paper, we describe a new approach to manage ontologies that do not share common instances.This approach extracts the argument and event structures from a set of instances of the concept of the source ontology and compared them with other semantic features extracted from a set of instances of the concept of the target ontology using Generative Lexicon Theory. We show that it is theoretically powerful because it is based on linguistic semantics and useful in practice. We present the experimental results obtained by running our approach on Biblio test of Benchmark1 series of OAEI2 2011. The results show the good performance of our approach.

This article aims to analyse the four major sense organs of human beings, viz., 眼 (yǎn, eyes), 耳 (ěr, ears), 口/嘴 (kǒu/zuǐ, mouth) and 鼻 (bi, nose), in Chinese compound words with the combination of Generative Lexicon Theory and Embodied Cognition. It was shown that Embodied Cognition gives us an idea of the locus of the source domain in figurative use of organ-related words. Meanwhile, qualia structure in Generative Lexicon Theory, in particular, can be used to examine which sense of the word is activated when combining with other morphemes in a compound word. Moreover, the study found that the involved qualia roles vary in different syntactic structures and metaphorization of the compound words, which further demonstrates different lexical compositionality and productivity of the four basic sense organ words.

Work within the framework of the Generative Lexicon (GL) has, to this point, concentrated on the lexical categories: nouns, verbs, and adjectives. Serious research on the non-lexical (minor) categories has not yet been undertaken. In this paper, I examine the polysemous behavior of Modern Greek και (ke “and”) and examine the ways in which GL theory can be used to account for its behavior, as well as the limitations of GL theory in treating και. Since this paper raises as many questions as it answers with regard to some of the more striking uses of και, it should be considered a report on work in progress.

This paper claims that the appropriate framework to address Light Verb Constructions is the Generative Lexicon Theory which has both the semantic structure and syntactic structure for each lexical representation. This paper further claims that two types of Light Verb Constructions identified by Kearns (1988) need to be approached differently within Generative Lexicon Theory: True Light Verbs are processed by the Type-Coercion mechanism while Vague Action Verbs are processed by the Co-Composition mechanism. These two different generative mechanisms explain why only True Light Verbs reveal differences from their simple verb counterparts. Addressing the two types of Light Verb Constructions with two generative mechanisms, this paper also supports the view that Light Verb Constructions are semi-productive semantic phenomena, rather than pragmatic phenomena.

This paper presents a method to automatically acquire a given noun's telic and agentive roles from corpus data. These relations form part of the qualia structure assumed in the generative lexicon, where the telic role represents a typical purpose of the entity and the agentive role represents the origin of the entity. Our proposed method employs a supervised machine-learning technique which makes use of template-based contextual features derived from token instances of each noun. The output of our method is a ranked list of verbs for each noun, across the different qualia roles. We also propose a variant of Spearman's rank correlation to evaluate the correlation of two top-N ranked lists. Using this correlation method, we represent the ability of the proposed method to identify qualia structure relative to a conventional template-based method.

Based on the Generative Lexicon Theory, this paper analyses the co-compositon and the qualia projections of the predicate verb denoting an action and the complement verb describing the result in the Verb-Resultative Construction. The paper reveals that the co-compostion of the qualia structures results in a derived causative sense of the VP, where the AGENTIVE role of the action verb matches that of the complement verb, and the FORMAL role of the action verb matches that of the complement verb. In consequence, under the qualia unification (QS α (β) = QS α ∩ QS β), the FORMAL role of the complement verb is shared with that of the VP, and the AGENTIVE role of the action verb is shared with that of the VP, resulting in a derived causative and aspectually telic interpretation.

This collection of papers takes linguists to the leading edge of techniques in generative lexicon theory, the linguistic composition methodology that arose from the imperative to provide a compositional semantics for the contextual modifications in meaning that emerge in real linguistic usage. Todays growing shift towards distributed compositional analyses evinces the applicability of GL theory, and the contributions to this volume, presented at three international workshops (GL-2003, GL-2005 and GL-2007) address the relationship between compositionality in language and the mechanisms of selection in grammar that are necessary to maintain this property. The core unresolved issues in compositionality, relating to the interpretation of context and the mechanisms of selection, are treated from varying perspectives within GL theory, including its basic theoretical mechanisms and its analytical viewpoint on linguistic phenomena.

To make the vision of a European Information Infrastructure and of the Semantic Web a reality, two key issues are tackled: (i) content, which must be dealt with in a multilingual environment; (ii) standards, which are critical to achieve interoperability and integration. In the Semantic Web scenario, ontologies are the key components to manage knowledge, whereas, in Human Language Technology, semantic description is committed to computational lexicons, which have to squarely address the complexity of natural language. Answers to the above issues are found within two frameworks: first, in the framework of Generative Lexicon (GL) theory and GL-based lexicons that account for the complex, multidimensional and multifaceted nature of meaning in lexicon and ontology design; second, in the context of the ISLE enterprise which, with the MILE, represents an essential interface between advanced research in the field of multilingual lexical semantics and the practical task of developing resources for HLT.

The objective of this paper is to provide an overview of the CDT annotation design with special emphasis on the modelling of the interface between the syntactic level and two other linguistic levels, viz. morphology and discourse. In connection with the description of NP annotation we present the fundamentals of how CDT is marked up with semantic relations in accordance with the dependency principles governing the annotation on the other levels of CDT. Specifically, focus will be on how Generative Lexicon (GL) theory has been incorporated into the unitary theoretical dependency framework of CDT. An annotation scheme for lexical semantics has been designed so as to account for the lexico-semantic structure of complex NPs, and the four GL qualia also appear in some of the CDT discourse relation labels as a description of parallel semantic relations at this level.