The Generative Lexicon
The Generative Lexicon
This book presents a 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 purpose of this book is to provide a detailed exposition of a
generative theory of word meaning, and how that impacts compositional
semantics in general.
The subjects covered in this book include:
1. Semantics of Nominals, including figure/ground nominals, relational
nominals, nominalizations, and other event nominals.
2. The Semantics of Causation, in particular, how causation is
lexicalized in language, including causative/unaccusatives, aspectual
predicates, experiencer predicates, and modal causatives.
3. How semantic types constrain syntactic expression, in particular,
the behavior of type shifting and type coercion operations.
4. A formal treatment of event semantics with subevents.
5. A general treatment of the problem of polysemy.
This is the first formally elaborated theory of a generative
approach to word meaning.
This book is intended primarily for linguists and computational
linguists, and in particular for those interested in lexical
semantics, word meaning, and semantics of language in general. It extends
the generative approach of Chomsky to the lexicon and other areas, and
hence will be of interest to generative linguists of all types, and
psychologists of language interested in modelling word meaning.
This book lays the foundation for an implemented computational
treatment of word meaning that connects explicitly to a composition
semantics.
- A Bradford Book
- MIT Press, Cambridge
- 1995
- ISBN 0-262-16158-3
- 312 pp.
- $35.00
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