This collection of papers takes linguists to the leading edge of techniques in generative lexicon theory, the linguistic composition methodology that arose from the imperative to provide a compositional semantics for the contextual modifications in meaning that emerge in real linguistic usage. Today’s growing shift towards distributed compositional analyses evinces the applicability of GL theory, and the contributions to this volume, presented at three international workshops (GL-2003, GL-2005 and GL-2007) address the relationship between compositionality in language and the mechanisms of selection in grammar that are necessary to maintain this property. The core unresolved issues in compositionality, relating to the interpretation of context and the mechanisms of selection, are treated from varying perspectives within GL theory, including its basic theoretical mechanisms and its analytical viewpoint on linguistic phenomena.

The first formally elaborated theory of a generative approach to word meaning, The Generative Lexicon lays the foundation for an implemented computational treatment of word meaning that connects explicitly to a compositional semantics. The Generative Lexicon presents a novel and exciting theory of lexical semantics that addresses the problem of the "multiplicity of word meaning"; that is, how we are able to give an infinite number of senses to words with finite means. The first formally elaborated theory of a generative approach to word meaning, it lays the foundation for an implemented computational treatment of word meaning that connects explicitly to a compositional semantics. In contrast to the static view of word meaning (where each word is characterized by a predetermined number of word senses) that imposes a tremendous bottleneck on the performance capability of any natural language processing system, Pustejovsky proposes that the lexicon becomes an active—and central—component in the linguistic description. The essence of his theory is that the lexicon functions generatively, first by providing a rich and expressive vocabulary for characterizing lexical information; then, by developing a framework for manipulating fine-grained distinctions in word descriptions; and finally, by formalizing a set of mechanisms for specialized composition of aspects of such descriptions of words, as they occur in context, extended and novel senses are generated. The subjects covered include semantics of nominals (figure/ground nominals, relational nominals, and other event nominals); the semantics of causation (in particular, how causation is lexicalized in language, including causative/unaccusatives, aspectual predicates, experiencer predicates, and modal causatives); how semantic types constrain syntactic expression (such as the behavior of type shifting and type coercion operations); a formal treatment of event semantics with subevents); and a general treatment of the problem of polysemy. Language, Speech, and Communication series

Semantic change — how the meanings of words change over time — has preoccupied scholars since well before modern linguistics emerged in the late 19th and early 20th century, ushering in a new methodological turn in the study of language change. Compared to changes in sound and grammar, semantic change is the least understood. Ever since, the study of semantic change has progressed steadily, accumulating a vast store of knowledge for over a century, encompassing many languages and language families. Historical linguists also early on realized the potential of computers as research tools, with papers at the very first international conferences in computational linguistics in the 1960s. Such computational studies still tended to be small-scale, method-oriented, and qualitative. However, recent years have witnessed a sea-change in this regard. Big-data empirical quantitative investigations are now coming to the forefront, enabled by enormous advances in storage capability and processing power. Diachronic corpora have grown beyond imagination, defying exploration by traditional manual qualitative methods, and language technology has become increasingly data-driven and semantics-oriented. These developments present a golden opportunity for the empirical study of semantic change over both long and short time spans. A major challenge presently is to integrate the hard-earned knowledge and expertise of traditional historical linguistics with cutting-edge methodology explored primarily in computational linguistics. The idea for the present volume came out of a concrete response to this challenge. The 1st International Workshop on Computational Approaches to Historical Language Change (LChange'19), at ACL 2019, brought together scholars from both fields. This volume offers a survey of this exciting new direction in the study of semantic change, a discussion of the many remaining challenges that we face in pursuing it, and considerably updated and extended versions of a selection of the contributions to the LChange'19 workshop, addressing both more theoretical problems — e.g., discovery of "laws of semantic change" — and practical applications, such as information retrieval in longitudinal text archives.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-workshop proceedings of the 17th Chinese Lexical Semantics Workshop, CLSW 2016, held in Singapore, Singapore, in May 2016. The 70 regular papers included in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 182 submissions. They are organized in topical sections named: lexicon and morphology, the syntax-semantics interface, corpus and resource, natural language processing, case study of lexical semantics, extended study and application.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-workshop proceedings of the 19th Chinese Lexical Semantics Workshop, CLSW 2018, held in Chiayi, Taiwan, in May 2018. The 50 full papers and 19 short papers included in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 150 submissions. They are organized in the following topical sections: Lexical Semantics; Applications of Natural Language Processing; Lexical Resources; Corpus Linguistics.

An accessible introduction to lexical structure and design, and the relation of the lexicon to grammar as a whole. The Lexicon can be used for introductory and advanced courses, and includes a range of exercises and in-class activities designed to engage students, and help them acquire the knowledge and skills they need.

The book investigates the interface structure of the lexicon from various perspectives, including typology and processing. It surveys work on verb classes, verb-noun similarities, semantic representations, concepts and constructions of polysynthetic languages, research on the processing of inflectional and derivational elements, and new work on inheritance-based network models. The book will be of interest to researchers and advanced students in all fields of linguistics and in the cognitive sciences.