Abstract
This paper aims at enriching the semantic treatment standardly assumed in HPSG in order to deal with several issues not adequately solved, concerning the representation of: verbal and nominal complement optionality, non-intersective uses of adjectives, selection restrictions imposed by predicates to their arguments, and the implication of syntactically non-expressable participants and events as part of the denotation of lexical items. To this purpose, we modified and enriched the content description level of HPSG as well as its governing principle. Our point of departure is the Generative Lexicon model (GL), basically because of its rich and flexible view of semantics, and its similarity to HPSG with regard to the underlying representation logic. In particular, we take advantage of both the GL representational aspect (that is, the multi-layered, structured conception of semantic information) and its generative dimension. The resulting proposal is implementable in LKB (We are grateful to José Castaño, Louise McNally, James Pustejovsky, Carlos Rodríguez, and Enric Vallduví for their very valuable comments and help at different stages of this work).
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Notes
- 1.
Some relevant references are Van Eynde and Schmidt (1998), Kay et al. (1994), and http://lingo.stanford.edu.
- 2.
The proposal that events introduce an existential variable comes from Davidson (1967).
- 3.
- 4.
Note that if evstr were an attribute of the restind type, alongside index, argstr, and restr, the event structure information obtained from the different constituents during the compositional process would be unified. On the other hand, keeping it in the restr type allows for composing the evstr of the different constituents by an operation of union (as ruled by the Semantics Principle, to be restated in the following section) which, in contrast to unification, is preserving by nature.
- 5.
For practical reasons, from now on we will use the restind type to represent not only the semantic structure of non-quantified nominal expressions, but also both quantified and predicative expressions, omitting the other attributes in the quantifier and psoa types.
- 6.
Since we have not discussed the HPSG treatment of quantification, we assume that the part of the Semantics Principle that concerns quantification remains unaltered.
- 7.
A nominalisation of a simple transitive verb would have 4 distinct lexical entries: with the two complements, with either of the complements, or without any complement.
- 8.
In this and the following figures, the index subtypes for each entity involved in the semantics of the word being represented will be indicated within boxes and using the following code: t for entity indices, d for degree, i for individuals, and e for eventualities, which in addition can be split into s and p (for states and processes, respectively). Also, the idenstr and funcstr attributes within the qualia structure will not be represented unless they are relevant for the discussion.
- 9.
- 10.
The ?? in (28b) show that a creation participle can only be used to modify a head noun under certain circumstances. Here its use is somewhat awkward because it is not informative enough: all houses are objects that have been built. A default argument such as amb totxana vermella (‘with red bricks’) appears here obligatory in order to make the sentence pragmatically acceptable. See Goldberg and Ackerman (2001) for a detailed analysis of similar data.
- 11.
The same consideration is applicable to adverbs introducing complements, as independentment (de), (‘independently (of)’), paral⋅lelament (a) (‘in a parallel way (to)’), and similar deadjectival adverbs.
- 12.
- 13.
This can be obtained by having a hierarchy of scalar values, where modified belongs to.
- 14.
Such an approach goes pretty much along the lines of McNally and Kennedy (this volume) for the treatment of ‘well’ and its effects in the interpretation of ‘load’-like verbs.
- 15.
For reasons of space, from now on we only show the relevant levels.
- 16.
The fact that nouns present two different prominent qualia (one in idenstr and the other in funcstr) is not a problem. The former is established among individual-type indices, whereas the latter is chosen from eventualities.
- 17.
The Acquilex project references are Esprit-BRA 3030 and Esprit-BRA 7315. SIMPLE is funded by EU’s DG-XIII, within the LE programme (LE4-8346).
- 18.
Due to space limitations, we will not represent the first members of each pair in the tail set as an atomic feature structure. Instead, we integrate all of them in a unique, non-atomic feature structure – this is why there is just one pair in both tails. In addition, we have abbreviated some of the (already abbreviated) attribute names: c | h | m stands for cat | head | mod, whereas r stands for restr.
- 19.
This need for additional structure in order to meet predicate restrictions is in fact significantly pervasive. For instance, it seems to regulate the use of shadow arguments – those that are only semantically adequate if specific semantic conditions are given. Example (i) is from Pustejovsky (1995); example (ii) is ours:
(i)
a.
??Mary buttered the toast with butter.
b.
Mary buttered the toast with an expensive butter.
(ii)
a.
??This is an effective knife to cut.
b.
This is an effective knife to cut frozen meat.
The oddness of both (i.a) and (ii.a) is due to redundancy of the PP complements with butter and to cut, respectively. In (i.a), the PP is redundant with the semantics of just one lexical item, the verbal predicate butter, whereas in (ii.a) it is redundant with the semantics resulting from the composition of a noun and its modifier (effective knife). However, both cases are similar in that the acceptance of a presumably optional argument is only possible if this argument is further specified.
- 20.
Actually, the information required to the noun is more constrained, since enjoy does not accept to co-occur with every eventuality-denoting noun (e.g., *John enjoyed the building). Pustejovsky and Bouillon (1995) analyze these data proposing the existence of aspectual constraints on the type of the coerced complement; i.e., that it must denote a transition. We fully assume this, although for the sake of clarity we do not introduce the information in the figure.
- 21.
Recall that the formal quale of nominal predicates expresses the kind of the entity pointed at (instrument, mother_of, song, building, etc.). By contrast, the formal quale of verbs conveys the state resulting from the process denoted by the verb.
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Badia, T., Saurí, R. (2013). Developing a Generative Lexicon Within HPSG. In: Pustejovsky, J., Bouillon, P., Isahara, H., Kanzaki, K., Lee, C. (eds) Advances in Generative Lexicon Theory. Text, Speech and Language Technology, vol 46. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-5189-7_15
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