Over the last thirty years, the phenomenon of polarity sensitivity has proven both a touchstone and a stumbling block for theories of grammatical representation. Unfortunately, an abundance of scrutiny does not always guarantee an increase in insight. Two major pitfalls are worth mentioning. On the one hand, as the theorist strives for intimations of universality, the complexity and subtle vari...

In this paper, we report our work on the creation of a number of lexical resources that are crucial for an interlingua based MT from English to other languages. These lexical resources are in the form of sub-categorization frames, verb knowledge bases and rule templates for establishing semantic relations and speech act like attributes. We have created these resources over a long period of time...

This paper will focus on the semantic representation of verbs in computer systems and its impact on lexical selection problems in machine translation (MT). Two groups of English and Chinese verbs are examined to show that lexical selection must be based on interpretation of the sentence as well as selection restrictions placed on the verb arguments. A novel representation scheme is suggested, a...

ion var variable arg me equation arg1 me arg2 me

This article reviews some linguistic and philosophical work in lexical semantics. In Section 1, the general methods of lexical semantics are explored, with particular attention to how semantic features of verbs are associated with grammatical patterns. In Section 2, philosophical consequences and issues arising from this sort of research is reviewed. There is a longstanding philosophical tradit...

The last decade has seen a striking expansion of interest in the lexicon and in lexical semantics. Within theoretical linguistics, this trend can be measured by the increasing interest generative grammarians have displayed toward such issues as lexical conceptual structure and argument structure and by the increased appeal of cognitive semantics. Within computational linguistics, the same perio...

Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles is a futuristic, science fiction novel that chronicles the colonization of Mars by humans, projecting the United States’ colonial and immigrant past on to a symbolic future. Bradbury’s use of language is mostly picturesque and sensory. The present paper applies a text-oriented analysis of stylistic elements that construct meaning in the text and evoke the n...

This contribution investigates the interactions between the (mental) lexicon and pragmatics. It aims to give an overview about pragmatic phenomena that are connected with the semantic underspecification of lexical items. Cases in point are the pragmatics of adjectives, effects of negative strengthening, systematic polysemy, the distribution of lexical and productive causatives, blocking phenome...

This article addresses the distinction amongst adpositions between those which are lexical and functional. The uses a corpus linguistic approach to address outstanding questions: whether there two distinct subclasses of adposition, is continuum adpositions, how— by what properties— functional distinguished. argues for primarily semantic, multifaceted best understood as continuum. argued be quit...