Semantics and The Lexicon

Semantics and The Lexicon
Author: James Pustejovsky
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 416
Release: 2012-12-06
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9401119724

The goal of this book is to integrate the research being carried out in the field of lexical semantics in linguistics with the work on knowledge representation and lexicon design in computational linguistics. Rarely do these two camps meet and discuss the demands and concerns of each other's fields. Therefore, this book is interesting in that it provides a stimulating and unique discussion between the computational perspective of lexical meaning and the concerns of the linguist for the semantic description of lexical items in the context of syntactic descriptions. This book grew out of the papers presented at a workshop held at Brandeis University in April, 1988, funded by the American Association for Artificial Intelligence. The entire workshop as well as the discussion periods accom panying each talk were recorded. Once complete copies of each paper were available, they were distributed to participants, who were asked to provide written comments on the texts for review purposes. VII JAMES PUSTEJOVSKY 1. INTRODUCTION There is currently a growing interest in the content of lexical entries from a theoretical perspective as well as a growing need to understand the organization of the lexicon from a computational view. This volume attempts to define the directions that need to be taken in order to achieve the goal of a coherent theory of lexical organization.

Semantic Relations and the Lexicon

Semantic Relations and the Lexicon
Author: M. Lynne Murphy
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 306
Release: 2003-10-02
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1139437453

Semantic Relations and the Lexicon explores the many paradigmatic semantic relations between words, such as synonymy, antonymy and hyponymy, and their relevance to the mental organization of our vocabularies. Drawing on a century's research in linguistics, psychology, philosophy, anthropology and computer science, M. Lynne Murphy proposes a pragmatic approach to these relations. Whereas traditional approaches have claimed that paradigmatic relations are part of our lexical knowledge, Dr Murphy argues that they constitute metalinguistic knowledge, which can be derived through a single relational principle, and may also be stored as part of our extra-lexical, conceptual representations of a word. Part I shows how this approach can account for the properties of lexical relations in ways that traditional approaches cannot, and Part II examines particular relations in detail. This book will serve as an informative handbook for all linguists and cognitive scientists interested in the mental representation of vocabulary.

Advances in Generative Lexicon Theory

Advances in Generative Lexicon Theory
Author: James Pustejovsky
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 492
Release: 2012-12-18
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 9400751893

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. Today’s 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.

Meaning and the Lexicon

Meaning and the Lexicon
Author: Ray Jackendoff
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 502
Release: 2010-02-25
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0199568871

'Meaning and the Lexicon' brings together Ray Jackendoff's pathbreaking work on language. It traces the development of his parallel architecture, in which phonology, syntax, and semantics are independent generative components, and in which knowledge of language consists of a repertoire of stored structures.

Theories of Lexical Semantics

Theories of Lexical Semantics
Author: Dirk Geeraerts
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 362
Release: 2010
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 019870030X

Theories of Lexical Semantics offers a comprehensive overview of the major traditions of word meaning research in linguistics. In spite of the growing importance of the lexicon in linguistic theory, no overview of the main theoretical trends in lexical semantics is currently available. This book fills that gap by charting the evolution of the discipline from the mid nineteenth century to the present day. It presents the main ideas, the landmark publications, and thedominant figures of five traditions: historical-philological semantics, structuralist semantics, generativist semantics, neostructuralist semantics, and cognitive semantics. The theoretical and methodological relationship between the approaches is a major point of attention throughout the text: going well beyond amere chronological enumeration, the book does not only describe the theoretical currents of lexical semantics, but also the undercurrents that have shaped its evolution.

Computational Lexical Semantics

Computational Lexical Semantics
Author: Patrick Saint-Dizier
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 461
Release: 1995-02-24
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 0521444101

Lexical semantics has become a major research area within computational linguistics, drawing from psycholinguistics, knowledge representation, and computer algorithms and architecture. Research programs whose goal is the definition of large lexicons are asking what the appropriate representation structure is for different facets of lexical information. Among these facets, semantic information is probably the most complex and the least explored. Computational Lexical Semantics is one of the first volumes to provide models for the creation of various kinds of computerized lexicons for the automatic treatment of natural language, with applications to machine translation, automatic indexing, and database front-ends, knowledge extraction, among other things. It focuses on semantic issues, as seen by linguists, psychologists, and computer scientists. Besides describing academic research, it also covers ongoing industrial projects.

The Generative Lexicon

The Generative Lexicon
Author: James Pustejovsky
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 318
Release: 1998-01-23
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9780262661409

The first formally elaborated theory of a generative approach to word meaning, The Generative Lexicon lays the foundation for an implemented computational treatment of word meaning that connects explicitly to a compositional semantics. The Generative Lexicon presents a novel and exciting theory of lexical semantics that addresses the problem of the "multiplicity of word meaning"; that is, how we are able to give an infinite number of senses to words with finite means. The first formally elaborated theory of a generative approach to word meaning, it lays the foundation for an implemented computational treatment of word meaning that connects explicitly to a compositional semantics. In contrast to the static view of word meaning (where each word is characterized by a predetermined number of word senses) that imposes a tremendous bottleneck on the performance capability of any natural language processing system, Pustejovsky proposes that the lexicon becomes an active—and central—component in the linguistic description. The essence of his theory is that the lexicon functions generatively, first by providing a rich and expressive vocabulary for characterizing lexical information; then, by developing a framework for manipulating fine-grained distinctions in word descriptions; and finally, by formalizing a set of mechanisms for specialized composition of aspects of such descriptions of words, as they occur in context, extended and novel senses are generated. The subjects covered include semantics of nominals (figure/ground nominals, relational nominals, and other event nominals); the semantics of causation (in particular, how causation is lexicalized in language, including causative/unaccusatives, aspectual predicates, experiencer predicates, and modal causatives); how semantic types constrain syntactic expression (such as the behavior of type shifting and type coercion operations); a formal treatment of event semantics with subevents); and a general treatment of the problem of polysemy. Language, Speech, and Communication series

Understanding the lexicon

Understanding the lexicon
Author: Werner Hüllen
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
Total Pages: 457
Release: 2011-05-02
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 3111355195

Over the past few decades, the book series Linguistische Arbeiten [Linguistic Studies], comprising over 500 volumes, has made a significant contribution to the development of linguistic theory both in Germany and internationally. The series will continue to deliver new impulses for research and maintain the central insight of linguistics that progress can only be made in acquiring new knowledge about human languages both synchronically and diachronically by closely combining empirical and theoretical analyses. To this end, we invite submission of high-quality linguistic studies from all the central areas of general linguistics and the linguistics of individual languages which address topical questions, discuss new data and advance the development of linguistic theory.

Syntax and the Lexicon

Syntax and the Lexicon
Author: Timothy Angus Stowell
Publisher: Brill
Total Pages: 320
Release: 1992
Genre: Grammar, Comparative and general
ISBN:

Presenting a dynamic investigation into the role of the lexicon in syntactic theory, this book provides an insightful overview and introduction to lexical theory. It discusses the nature of argument and structure and debates the relation of argument nature to constituent structure and binding theory.