Pustejovsky J., Bouillon P., Isahara H., Kanzaki K., Lee C. (eds.) Advances in Generative Lexicon Theory

Springer, 2013. — 492 p. — (Text, Speech and Language Technology, Vol. 46). — ISBN: 978-94-007-5188-0 (Print); 978-94-007-5189-7 (Online).This volume collects some of the most recent papers addressing models of linguistic composition from the perspective of Generative Lexicon Theory. Generative Lexicon (henceforth GL) developed out of a goal to provide a compositional semantics for the contextual modulations in meaning that emerge in real linguistic usage. Since it was first proposed, GL has developed to account for a broad range of phenomena involving argument alternation, polysemy, type coercion, as well as discourse phenomena and metaphor. Many of the observations from GL regarding the importance of non-verbal meaning towards determining the semantic shifts and alternations in sentence composition have been adopted by other grammatical frameworks and researchers.
The works collected here address the relationship between compositionality in language and the mechanisms of selection in grammar that are necessary to maintain this property. There are two great challenges to the traditional view on compositionality in language:
The Interpretation of Context: this includes quantifier interpretation, definiteness, modal scope, and adverbial modification;
The Mechanisms of Selection: this involves the phenomenon of polymorphism at all levels, including type shifting and polysemy more broadly.
The first challenge above has been addressed by linguists for decades, and is now the focus of two debates, direct compositionality (cf. Barker and Jacobson, 2007) and dynamics in semantics (Heim, 1982, Kamp and Reyle, 1993, Chierchia, 1995). The former issue relates to whether syntax reflects any artifice of the semantics in a transparent manner, giving rise to predictable, if not deterministic interpretations. From the perspective of direct compositionality researchers, surface syntax is a fair reflection of the semantic complexity and richness in the language. As a result, syntactic categories and their combinations in syntax are subject to a variety of type shifting and category changing mechanisms. The latter issue relates to how context is modeled in the logical form for an utterance in a discourse.
The second challenge also concerns direct compositionality in the syntax as well as the interpretation of context. Characterizing the nature of argument and type selection is at the core of semantic theory, since it determines the projection of lexical semantic information to compositional interpretations in the sentence, as well as the mutability of meaning through contextual modulations. Much of the work in the GL tradition over the past 10 years has focused on this problem: namely, what information structures and associated mechanisms are necessary in the grammar to allow for creative and novel meanings to emerge in context. This challenge will be the main focus of the present volume.
Generative Lexicon attempts to provide a compositional semantics for the contextual modulations that occur in language in two respects: first, it enriches the data structures associated with the lexical encoding of semantic information; secondly, it enhances the means by which this information is exploited in composition. These two changes result in a semantic theory with a distributed view on what linguistic units are responsible for determining meaning and selection. In recent work, this distinction has been identified as inherent versus selectional polysemy (Pustejovsky 2011, this volume). In fact, polysemy cannot truly be modeled without enriching the various compositional mechanisms available to the language. In particular, lexically driven operations of coercion and type selection provide for contextualized interpretations of expressions, which would otherwise not exhibit polysemy. This is in contrast with Cruse’s (2000) view that it is not possible to maintain a distinction between semantic and pragmatic ambiguity. Cruse suggests that polysemy is best viewed as a continuous scale of sense modulation. The view within GL is generally that a strong distinction between pragmatic and semantic modes of interpretation should be maintained if we wish to model the complexity and provenance of the contributing factors in compositionality.
The notion of context enforcing a certain reading of a word, traditionally viewed as selecting for a particular word sense, is central both to lexicon design (the issue of breaking a word into word senses) and local composition of individual sense definitions. However, most lexical theories continue to reflect a static approach to dealing with this problem: the numbers of and distinctions between senses within an entry are typically frozen into a grammar’s lexicon. This sense enumerative approach has inherent problems, and fails on several accounts, both in terms of what information is made available in a lexicon for driving the disambiguation process, and how a sense selection procedure makes use of this information.
The issues mentioned above are addressed from four distinct perspectives in the present volume:
Basic Theoretical Mechanisms of GL
Analysis of Linguistic Phenomena within GL
Interfacing with a GL Lexicon
Building GL-related ResourcesType Theory and Lexical Decomposition
A Type Composition Logic for Generative Lexicon
Lexical Representation, Co-composition, and Linking Syntax and Semantics
The Telic Relationship in Compounds
Metonymy and Metaphor: Boundary Cases and the Role of a Generative Lexicon
Spanish Clitics, Events and Opposition Structure
Adjective-Noun Combinations and the Generative Lexicon
Combination of the Verb Ha- ‘Do’ and Entity Type Nouns in Korean: A Generative Lexicon Approach
Generative Lexicon Approach to Derived Inchoative Verbs in Korean
Degree vs. Manner Well: A Case Study in Selective Binding
V-Concatenation in Japanese
Change of Location and Change of State
Event Structure and the Japanese Indirect Passive
Developing a Generative Lexicon Within HPSG
Purpose Verbs
Word Formation Rules and the Generative Lexicon: Representing Noun-to-Verb Versus Verb-to-Noun Conversion in French
Boosting Lexical Resources for the Semantic Web: Generative Lexicon and Lexicon Interoperability
Automatic Acquisition of GL Resources, Using an Explanatory, Symbolic Technique
The Semi-generative Lexicon: Limits on Productivity