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Secondary predication and the lexical representation of verbs

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Abstract

In this paper it is assumed that syntactic structure is projected from the lexicon. The lexical representation, which encodes the linguistically relevant aspects of the meanings of words, thus determines and constrains the syntax. Therefore, if semantic analysis of syntactic structures is to be possible, it is necessary to determine the content and structure of lexical semantic representations. The paper argues for a certain form of lexical representation by presenting the problem of a particular non-standard structure, the verb phrase of the form V-NP-Adj corresponding to various constructions of secondary predication in English. It is demonstrated that the solution to the semantic analysis of this structure lies in the meaning of the structure's predicators, in particular the lexical semantic representation of the verb. Verbs are classified according to the configuration of the lexical semantic representations, whether basic or derived. It is these specific configurations that restrict the possibilities of secondary predication. Given the class of a verb, its relation to the secondary predicate is predictable; and the correct interpretation of the V-NP-Adj string is therefore possible.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Linguistics and Philosophy, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, USA

    T. R. Rapoport

  2. Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beer-Sheva, Israel

    T. R. Rapoport

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  1. T. R. Rapoport
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Additional information

This work is based on papers presented to the 1988 meetings of the Canadian Linguistic Association and the Brandeis Workshop on Theoretical and Computational Issues in Lexical Semantics. I am grateful to the audiences at these two meetings for comments, and to Anna-Maria di Sciullo, Diane Massam, Yves Roberge and James Pustejovsky for helpful discussion. I also thank SSHRC for funding the research of which this work forms part.

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Rapoport, T.R. Secondary predication and the lexical representation of verbs. Machine Translation 5, 31–55 (1990). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00310041

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