Compounding is a highly productive phenomenon in Persian and compound verbs have been the subject of several interesting studies in a variety of frameworks. In this paper, I look at a small subset of these verbs and try to capture some of the constraints and generalities involved in the compounding process. The theoretical framework of the paper is the Generative Lexicon (GL) as formalized in P...

The paper argues that Fodor and Lepore are misguided in their attack on Pustejovsky’s Generative Lexicon, largely because their argument rests on a traditional, but implausible and discredited, view of the lexicon on which it is e ectively empty of content, a view that stands in the long line of explaining word meaning (a) by ostension and then (b) explaining it by means of a vacuous symbol in ...

The goal of this paper is to provide an annotation scheme for compounds based on generative lexicon theory (GL, Pustejovsky, 1995; Bassac and Bouillon, 2001). This scheme has been tested on a set of compounds automatically extracted from the Europarl corpus (Koehn, 2005) both in Italian and French. The motivation is twofold. On the one hand, it should help refine existing compound classificatio...

A corpus-based investigation of Italian Complex Nominals (CNs), of the form N+PP, which aims at clarifying their syntactic and semantic constitution, is presented. The main goal is to find out useful parameters for their representation in a computational lexicon. As a reference model we have taken an implementation of Pustejovsky’s Generative Lexicon Theory (1995), the SIMPLE Italian Lexicon, a...

The event structure (aktionsart) is a widely discussed issue for the representation of verbal semantics in languages. However, there is still problems for the classification of verbs into state, activity, accomplishment, achievement and semelfactive. It is also not clear where are the differences of them embedded in terms of lexical, semantic or syntactic levels. In this paper, we will give a d...

We describe CzEngVallex, a bilingual Czech–English valency lexicon which aligns verbal valency frames and their arguments. It is based on a parallel Czech-English corpus, the Prague Czech-English Dependency Treebank (PCEDT), where for each occurrence of a verb, a reference to the underlying Czech and English valency lexicons (PDT-Vallex and CzEngVallex, respectively) is recorded. The CzEngValle...

The knowledge representation tradition in computational lexicon design represents words as static encapsulations of purely lexical knowledge. We suggest that this view poses certain limitations on the ability of the lexicon to generate nuance-laden and context-sensitive meanings, because word boundaries are obstructive, and the impact of non-lexical knowledge on meaning is unaccounted for. Hopi...

There is an evident correlation between semantic distance and creativity in the treatment of metaphor. When the tenor and vehicle concepts of a metaphor are semantic neighbors, the local structure of the taxonomy can be used to constrain any interpretations and thus significantly curtail the breadth of the search space. This reliance on taxonomy makes WordNet ideally suited to the treatment of ...

We present a method for learning bilingual translation lexicons from monolingual corpora. Word types in each language are characterized by purely monolingual features, such as context counts and orthographic substrings. Translations are induced using a generative model based on canonical correlation analysis, which explains the monolingual lexicons in terms of latent matchings. We show that hig...

In recent years the basic principles of generative phonology have been subjected to increasingly critical scrutiny. Many questions have been raised; but answers have been few and, for the most part, have lacked firm empirical support. One important unresolved issue concerns the abstract relationship between the phonological shape of morphemes in the lexicon and their phonetic manifestations. In...