Description
| Author/Contributor(s): | Pustejovsky, James |
| Publisher: | Bradford Books |
| Date: | 1/23/1998 |
| Binding: | Paperback |
| Condition: | NEW |
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 . 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 s; and finally, by formalizing a set of mechanisms for specialized composition of aspects of such s 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
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