Word Formation Rules and the Generative Lexicon: Representing Noun-to-Verb Versus Verb-to-Noun Conversion in French

  • Fiammetta Namer
  • Evelyne Jacquey
Chapter
First Online:
Part of the Text, Speech and Language Technology book series (TLTB, volume 46)

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 Semantic 
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
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Copyright information

© Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013

Authors and Affiliations

  • Fiammetta Namer
    • 1
  • Evelyne Jacquey
    • 1
  1. 1.UMR 7118 ATILF CNRS & Université de LorraineNancyFrance

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