Abstract
In the last chapter, we have step by step introduced the various components of word meaning that we assume in our generation framework. As the focus of our work is on verbs, though, one important point still needs to be adressed: How can the various alternations of a verb be accounted for? In this chapter, we propose a set of lexical rules that derive more complex verb readings from a single base form.
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Notes
These alternations are often called diatheses. From the perspective of truth-functional semantics, one would say that they do not change the truth conditions of the sentence.
Monotonicity might be too strong a requirement for alternations in general, though. Cf. Section 7.6.
Unnoticed by Levin, to leak can also be a verb of substance “intrusion”, as in The camera leaked light. This reading reverses the directionality of the PATH involved; we do not handle that reading here.
The two roles ‘inclusive’ and ‘of-matter’ (used later) are the roles used by PENMAN to realize the desired structure, but they are not very good descriptions of these semantic relationships. For a more systematic treatment, for instance along the lines of Somers [1987], the Upper Model needs to be extended.
We ignore the role of the definite determiner here, which in fact has critical influence on the ‘holistic’ interpretation of mass nouns. See, for example, White [1994].
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© 1999 Springer Science+Business Media New York
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Stede, M. (1999). Verb Alternations and Extensions. In: Lexical Semantics and Knowledge Representation in Multilingual Text Generation. The Springer International Series in Engineering and Computer Science, vol 492. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-5179-9_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-5179-9_7
Publisher Name: Springer, Boston, MA
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