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8 - Underspecification, Context Selection, and Generativity
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- By Jacques Jayez, EHESS-CELITH
- Edited by Federica Busa, Université de Genève, Pierrette Bouillon
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- Book:
- The Language of Word Meaning
- Published online:
- 07 October 2011
- Print publication:
- 15 January 2001, pp 124-148
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Summary
Abstract
The idea that semantic representations are underspecified, that is more abstract than the specific interpretations obtained in various contexts, is by now current in lexical semantics. However, the way in which underspecified representations give rise to more precise interpretations in particular contexts is not always clear. On one view, context provides missing information, for instance because it contains salient entities that can be referred to. I consider here the symmetric dependency, in which lexical elements impose certain semantic profiles to the contexts they fit in. I show that, although they are highly underspecified, those profiles cannot be reduced to a general semantic frame, unlike what is proposed in Pustejovsky's Generative Lexicon, and that their semantic adaptability reflects the highly abstract and similarity-based character (vagueness) of the predicates that help to define them.
Introduction
Recent work about the relation between lexical items, context, and interpretation has highlighted two notions of underspecification (see van Deemter and Peters, 1996 for various points of view). In some approaches, underspecification amounts to code ambiguities in an efficient way, to avoid carrying a set of alternatives during the interpretation process (Reyle, 1995). In the domain of the lexicon, underspecification sometimes takes the form of information enrichment.
19 - Introducing LexLog
- Edited by Patrick Saint-Dizier, Institut de Recherche en Informatique, Toulouse, Evelyn Viegas, Brandeis University, Massachusetts
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- Book:
- Computational Lexical Semantics
- Published online:
- 29 September 2009
- Print publication:
- 24 February 1995, pp 399-425
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Summary
Introduction
LexLog is not a lexical theory, but a package of logical specifications for constructing explicit representations for lexical items in restricted information domains. We usually call a domain “restricted” in two main cases.
The domain is notionally bounded. It is sufficiently simple to be decomposed into an organized finite set of notions, which might be enriched, if necessary, by applying a finite number of explicit combination rules. Metaphorically, one could say that the domain has been “axiomatized”. A clear example of this situation can be found in Palmer (1990).
The domain is lexically bounded. The representations to be constructed apply to a finite set of lexical items, and not to the whole of a language, or to an indefinite set of terms.
While they are often associated, neither of these properties strictly implies the other. For example, although the use of a statistical tool like PATHFINDER (Schvaneveldt, 1990) allows the construction of limited lexical clusters (case 2), their notional homogeneity is not warranted by the clustering procedure. E.g., in a study of the word marriage based on the definitions in the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English (Wilks et al., 1989), the words marriage and muslim co-occur. Although the religious link is obvious, making precise the amount of knowledge about muslim which would be relevant to marriage is not easy. LexLog is designed only for situations which exhibit the TWO forms of boundedness, that is, it can be of some help only when the domain allows the use of a finite notional and a finite lexical basis.