Abstract
Although there is a clear requirement for generative devices in the lexicon, there are limits to productivity, which must be accounted for. This article provides an overview of several different classes of semi-productivity, including both lexical and phrasal examples. A probabilistic approach is outlined.
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Notes
- 1.
Verspoor also notes that nouns like story and song occur with begin and finish in the sense of tell/perform. However, these might alternatively be classified as agentive. The data is also complicated because Verspoor excludes eventive nouns in her definition of metonymy, and while this distinction may be justified, it is a little hard to make precise. Her comparison with other verbs also raises interesting issues. For my current purposes, however, all that matters are the limitations on the use of begin and finish with nouns denoting physical objects or substances, since this is not predicted on a fully productive account of metonymy.
- 2.
Although this concept has been discussed in the literature, there doesn’t appear to be any standard terminology: the term anti-collocation is taken from Pearce (2001).
- 3.
The phrase heavy eater is not found in the BNC: heavy eaters occurs once, but in a context referring to plants.
- 4.
Notice that the non-compositional adjective-noun multiword expressions tend not to occur in predicative form. Adjectives applying to the event in a deverbal noun are also not found predicatively, in general: the smoker is heavy and the teacher is French only have the reading where the adjective applies directly to the individual.
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Acknowledgements
This paper is based on an earlier work published in the proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Generative Approaches to the Lexicon in 2001, but it also includes some material presented at the 3rd Workshop in 2005. I am grateful to the audiences at both events for their feedback and also to the other colleagues who commented on the earlier paper. I am especially grateful to Ted Briscoe and Simone Teufel for their detailed comments on this version. As usual, all mistakes are the responsibility of the author.
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Copestake, A. (2013). The Semi-generative Lexicon: Limits on Productivity. 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_20
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