"No one has more clearly challenged the assumptions of traditional lexicography." -- George Miller, Princeton University
The first formally elaborated theory of a generative approach to word meaning, The Generative Lexicon lays the foundation for an implemented computational treatment of word meaning that connects explicitly to a compositional semantics.
The first formally elaborated theory of a generative approach to word meaning, The Generative Lexicon lays the foundation for an implemented computational treatment of word meaning that connects explicitly to a compositional semantics.The Generative Lexicon presents a novel and exciting 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 first formally elaborated theory of a generative approach to word meaning, it lays the foundation for an implemented computational treatment of word meaning that connects explicitly to a compositional semantics.In contrast to the static view of word meaning (where each word is characterized by a predetermined number of word senses) that imposes a tremendous bottleneck on the performance capability of any natural language processing system, Pustejovsky proposes that the lexicon becomes an active-and central-component in the linguistic description. The essence of his theory is that the lexicon functions generatively, first by providing a rich and expressive vocabulary for characterizing lexical information; then, by developing a framework for manipulating fine-grained distinctions in word descriptions; and finally, by formalizing a set of mechanisms for specialized composition of aspects of such descriptions of words, as they occur in context, extended and novel senses are generated.The subjects covered include semantics of nominals (figure/ground nominals, relational nominals, and other event nominals); the semantics of causation (in particular, how causation is lexicalized in language, including causative/unaccusatives, aspectual predicates, experiencer predicates, and modal causatives); how semantic types constrain syntactic expression (such as the behavior of type shifting and type coercion operations); a formal treatment of event semantics with subevents); and a general treatment of the problem of polysemy.Language, Speech, and Communication series
"No one has more clearly challenged the assumptions of traditional lexicography." George Miller , Princeton University "[W]ell worth reading... For those who are unfamiliar with theemerging field of lexical semantics... it will present aninteresting entry point. For those who work in the field, it covers awide range of interesting and serious problems, in ways that suggestfruitful interaction with a variety of other views and approaches." J. Terry Nutter , Computational Linguistics
Chris Bohjalian is the critically acclaimed author of sixteen books, including the New York Times bestsellers The Sandcastle Girls, Skeletons at the Feast, The Double Bind, and Midwives. His novel Midwives was a number one New York Times bestseller and a selection of Oprah's Book Club. His work has been translated into more than twenty-five languages, and three of his novels have become movies (Secrets of Eden, Midwives , and Past the Bleachers ). He lives in Vermont with his wife and daughter. Visit him at or on Facebook.
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