First published in 1983, this book represents an effort to lay the groundwork for a general approach to lexical semantics that pays heed to the needs of a theory of discourse interpretation, a theory of compositional semantics, and a theory of lexical rules. The first chapter proposes a basic framework in which to undertake lexical description and a lexical semantic analogue to the classical syntactic distinction between subcategorized for complement and adjunct. This apparatus for lexical description is expanded in the second chapter. A theory of the semantics of nuclear terms along with a proposed implementation is presented in chapter three. The fourth chapter argues that a number of regular, semantically governed valence alternations could be captured in frame representations that give rise to various kinds of realisation options. The final chapter examines interaction of these phenomena with a general account of prediction or control along with the general framework of lexical representation.

Discover vital research on the lexical and cognitive meanings of words. In this exciting book from a team of world-class researchers, in-depth articles explain a wide range of topics, including thematic roles, sense relation, ambiguity and comparison. The authors focus on the cognitive and conceptual structure of words and their meaning extensions such as coercion, metaphors and metonymies. The book features highly cited material – available in paperback for the first time since its publication – and is an essential starting point for anyone interested in lexical semantics, especially where it meets other cognitive and conceptual research.

Now in paperback for the first time since its original publication, the material gathered here is perfect for anyone who needs a detailed and accessible introduction to the important semantic theories. Designed for a wide audience, it will be of great value to linguists, cognitive scientists, philosophers, and computer scientists working on natural language. The book covers theories of lexical semantics, cognitively oriented approaches to semantics, compositional theories of sentence semantics, and discourse semantics. This clear, elegant explanation of the key theories in semantics research is essential reading for anyone working in the area.

In this rich reference work, Beth Levin classifies over 3,000 English verbs according to shared meaning and behavior. Levin starts with the hypothesis that a verb's meaning influences its syntactic behavior and develops it into a powerful tool for studying the English verb lexicon. She shows how identifying verbs with similar syntactic behavior provides an effective means of distinguishing semantically coherent verb classes, and isolates these classes by examining verb behavior with respect to a wide range of syntactic alternations that reflect verb meaning. The first part of the book sets out alternate ways in which verbs can express their arguments. The second presents classes of verbs that share a kernel of meaning and explores in detail the behavior of each class, drawing on the alternations in the first part. Levin's discussion of each class and alternation includes lists of relevant verbs, illustrative examples, comments on noteworthy properties, and bibliographic references. The result is an original, systematic picture of the organization of the verb inventory. Easy to use, English Verb Classes and Alternations sets the stage for further explorations of the interface between lexical semantics and syntax. It will prove indispensable for theoretical and computational linguists, psycholinguists, cognitive scientists, lexicographers, and teachers of English as a second language.

This book introduces a theory, Naive Semantics (NS), a theory of the knowledge underlying natural language understanding. The basic assumption of NS is that knowing what a word means is not very different from knowing anything else, so that there is no difference in form of cognitive representation between lexical semantics and ency clopedic knowledge. NS represents word meanings as commonsense knowledge, and builds no special representation language (other than elements of first-order logic). The idea of teaching computers common sense knowledge originated with McCarthy and Hayes (1969), and has been extended by a number of researchers (Hobbs and Moore, 1985, Lenat et aI, 1986). Commonsense knowledge is a set of naive beliefs, at times vague and inaccurate, about the way the world is structured. Traditionally, word meanings have been viewed as criterial, as giving truth conditions for membership in the classes words name. The theory of NS, in identifying word meanings with commonsense knowledge, sees word meanings as typical descriptions of classes of objects, rather than as criterial descriptions. Therefore, reasoning with NS represen tations is probabilistic rather than monotonic. This book is divided into two parts. Part I elaborates the theory of Naive Semantics. Chapter 1 illustrates and justifies the theory. Chapter 2 details the representation of nouns in the theory, and Chapter 4 the verbs, originally published as "Commonsense Reasoning with Verbs" (McDowell and Dahlgren, 1987). Chapter 3 describes kind types, which are naive constraints on noun representations.

This is the first book that presents a complete description and analysis of the Spanish suffixes that alter the grammatical behaviour of nouns and adjectives without changing their grammatical category, supporting a fine-grained decomposition of the syntactic area where these word classes are defined. In this monograph the reader will find a detailed empirical description of suffixes for gender, mereological properties of nouns, scalar properties of adjectives and a variety of nominal suffixes expressing actions, measures or locations, as well as an integral Neo-Constructionist analysis of the syntactic structure of the resulting formations. Framed within a Nanosyntactic-oriented framework, this book sheds light on the nature of lexical categories and the components of the low syntactic structure of nouns and adjectives. The book will be useful both to researchers in Spanish linguistics or theoretical morphology and to advanced students of Spanish interested in learning more about the expressive devices that nouns and adjectives allow.