Lexical structures as generalizations over descriptions (original) (raw)

Compositional mechanisms in a generative model of the lexicon

Sergi Torner and Elisenda Bernal (eds.): Collocations and other lexical combinations in Spanish, 2017

In this chapter, we provide an overview of one of the theoretical frameworks that encode the selectional constraints in the lexicon, the Generative Lexicon theory. We will review the different compositional mechanisms put forward in GL (with special attention to the type shifting or coercion ) and apply them to analyze a set of predicate-argument (verb-argument) and modifi cation (adjectival modifi er-noun) constructions in Spanish.

Towards a Type-Theoretical Account of Lexical Semantics

Journal of Logic, Language and Information, 2010

After a quick overview of the field of study known as "Lexical Semantics", where we advocate the need of accessing additional information besides syntax and Montaguestyle 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.

Introduction to Generative Lexicon

Generative Lexicon is a theory of linguistic semantics which focuses on the distributed nature of compositionality in natural language. Unlike purely verb-based approaches to compositionality, Generative Lexicon (henceforth, GL) attempts to spread the semantic load across all constituents of the utterance. Central to the philosophical perspective of GL are two major lines of inquiry: (1) How is it that we are able to deploy a finite number of words in our language in an unbounded number of contexts? (2) Is lexical information and the representations used in composing meanings separable from our commonsense knowledge?

Inheritance-based models of the lexicon

Interface Explorations, 2006

A rapid and remarkable development took place within computational linguistics in the years immediately following the introduction of unification-based models of language, in particular Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG) and Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar (GPSG), which employ feature structures to represent linguistic information. By the end of the 1980s a consensus had emerged, according to which the lexicon, which pairs word forms with feature structures, constitutes the main repository of information in a language. Furthermore, hierarchical structuring had come to be viewed as an essential aspect or perhaps even the most salient characteristic of the lexicon (cf. Briscoe et al. 1993). GPSG, as conceived in Gazdar & Pullum (1982) and even in Gazdar et al. (1985), still largely represents the older, dichotomous view of the lexicon. Here major aspects of linguistic structure were encoded in syntactic rules, many of which later came to be regarded as stating the possible complement structures of verbs, i.e. lexical information. Later developments in the treatment of subcategorization are only alluded to in a footnote (cf. Gazdar et al. 1985: 107). While the question "How is a classification imposed on the content of the lexicon by the system of features" is raised (p. 13), the answer of GPSG does not explicitly model the hierarchical inheritance relations inherent in lexical classifications. Rather, these relations are captured in logical feature co-occurrence restrictions (FCRs) and feature specification defaults (FSDs), the latter of which, prophetically, are nonmonotonic. From the start the lexicalist orientation was prominent in LFG (cf. Bresnan 1982, therein Kaplan & Bresnan 1982) and reached a peak in the radical lexicalism of Karttunen (1986), which uses the framework of categorial grammar to shift the entirety of linguistic description to the lexicon. The move toward the lexicalist view was independent of hierarchical modelling, which emerged in other work. In particular, Flickinger (1987) pioneered the explicit description of relations between English verb classes in terms of inheritance hierarchies. On a separate front,