Since Vendler (1967), the event structure and the verbal aspect have been one of the controversial issues in verbal semantics. These issues result from the fact that all the verbs, which belong to each aspectual class, do not behave in the same way within each class. Among four aspectual classes suggested by Vendler (1967), achievement verbs show various behaviors and the subclasses of achievem...

Generative Lexical Semantics aims, among other things, to model cocompositional meanings that classical Montague semantics is unable to express. This paper outlines a simple extension of Montague semantics which amends the standard compositional mechanisms for the use of specific terms provided by the lexicon, in order to account for this theory. We hope that such a logical system would prove b...

Generative Lexicon is a theory of linguistic semantics which focuses on the distributed nature of compositionality in natural language. Unlike purely verb-based approaches to compositionality, Generative Lexicon (henceforth, GL) attempts to spread the semantic load across all constituents of the utterance. Central to the philosophical perspective of GL are two major lines of inquiry: (1) How is...

This paper proposes an elaboration of the Generative Lexicon (GL) in Pustejovsky (1995) based on a survey of BCCWJ (2009). I manually classified the Japanese NP1-no NP2 “NP1’s NP2” construction in accordance with semantic relations between the two nominals. The result indicates the need for the expansion of GL for computing the meaning of the NP1no NP2 construction by incorporating referential ...

The semantics of determiner phrases, be they definite descriptions, indefinite descriptions or quantified noun phrases, is often assumed to be a fully solved question: common nouns are properties, and determiners are generalised quantifiers that apply to two predicates: the property corresponding to the common noun and the one corresponding to the verb phrase. We first present a criticism of th...

Logical metonymies like The author began the book involve the interpretation of events that are not realized in the sentence (covert events:→ writing the book). The Generative Lexicon (Pustejovsky, 1995) provides a qualia-based account of covert event interpretation, claiming that the covert event is retrieved from the qualia structure of the object. Such a theory poses the question of to what ...

This paper ln'esenl.s a semantic interpretation of adjectival modilicatiotl in terms of the Generative l,cxicon. It. tfighlights the elements wlfich can be borrowed from the GI, and develops limitations and extensions. We show how elements of the Qualia structure can bc incorporated into semantic composition rules to make explicit the semantics of the combination adjective + noun.

The paper reports on the development and experimental implementation of a combined methodology of knowledge transfer from an existing lexical resource with a view to semiautomatically inducing a new lexicon, in a cross-language environment. The source resource, a multi-layered Italian lexicon whose theoretical approach to the content and representation of semantic information follows the genera...