Advances in Generative Lexicon Theory pp 385-413 | Cite as
Word Formation Rules and the Generative Lexicon: Representing Noun-to-Verb Versus Verb-to-Noun Conversion in French
Abstract
This paper focuses on the interface between lexical semantics and word formation. These two linguistic domains give us distinct types of intrinsic information on the semantic content of morphologically constructed words. A common formalism, called Morphological Structure Composition Schema (MS-CS), designed within Generative Lexicon Theory (GL), establishes strong links between these domains. It is illustrated in French by the representation of the Noun-to-Verb (NtoV) versus Verb-to-Noun (VtoN) conversion word formation processes. The relevance of this word formation type for lexical semantics is threefold. It consists in a non-conventional, affix-free, and hence uniquely semantics-driven mechanism. It is a topic of interest to the morphology, syntax, and semantics communities. Finally, it is both a productive and frequent phenomenon, observed in several languages. After an overview of linguistic theories related to this phenomenon, an analysis follows based on a large corpus designed to build a frequency-ranked semantics-based typology of NtoV and VtoN conversion. On the basis of such a classification, a unified GL-inspired model is proposed and illustrated through several examples
Keywords
Word Formation Argument Structure Semantic Constraint Lexical Unit Lexical SemanticReferences
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