SFB 471: Variation and Evolution in the Lexicon Project A22: Lexical semantic specification via Discourse Relations

Participants | General Information| Goals | Publications | Related Literature | News|

 

Participants

Prof. Dr. Miriam Butt +49 7531 88 5109 (work) +49 7531 88 5115 (fax) E-mail: miriam.butt@uni-konstanz.de     Alexandros Tantos (PhD student) + 49 7531 883028 (work) +49 7531 88 4865 (fax) e-mail: Alexandros.Tantos@uni-konstanz.de Contact Address: Fachbereich Sprachwissenschaft Universität Konstanz Fach 184 78457 Konstanz Germany

 

General Information

The project A22 is sponsored by the DFG (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft) as part of the of Sonderforschungsbereich 471. The project has been running since April 2004.

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Goals

The project focuses on the exploration of the possible links between lexical and discourse levels of representation. We are currently exploring SDRT (Segmented Discourse Representation Theory) [Asher (1993), Asher and Lascarides (2003)], which strives to combine semantic and pragmatic principles in a formal way. It has been argued (Asher and Lascarides, 1995) that lexical semantic representation should include information that interacts with the discourse level in a two-way interchange: Lexical knowledge contributes to discourse interpretation by resolving (mainly rhetorical) underspecification at the discourse level.  Discourse semantics, enriched with the tool of rhetorical relations as presented by Asher (1993), contributes to lexical disambiguation by applying the semantic consequences of the pragmatically preferred rhetorical relations to the selection of the contextually specified sense of the ambiguous word.   We are therefore exploring: a contextually-driven approach of lexical meaning a complex procedure of interpreting the discourse involving lexical knowledge the main architecture of SDRT as explicated in the seminal book of Asher and Lascarides (2003)  underspecified lexical semantic representations.   In terms of data, the project is studying the lexical representation and discourse properties of psych verbs, manner of motion verbs, light verbs like English `have' and the related `get' constructions in comparison with the German `kriegen' (get) passive.   The syntactic framework informing the project is LFG (Lexical Functional Grammar) and we are working on building an implementation modeling the two-way interaction between lexical semantics and discourse in cooperation with the NLTT group at PARC.

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Publications

Tantos, A. 2003. Specifying the Information Flow between Lexical and Discourse meaning: The case of Psych-verbs. MSc Dissertation.   Tantos A. 2003. Rhetorical relations in Verbal Eventual Representations? Evidence from Psych Verbs. In Proceedings of TLS 8 (Texas Linguistic Society) Butt M. and A. Tantos. 2004. Lexical semantics via Petri Nets. Online LFG Proceedings (LFG04 - New Zealand)(available in the LFG'04 Proceedings) Tantos A. 2004. The light verb `have' as a Discourse Active Element. In Proceedings of International Workshop of Computational Semantics 6 (IWCS6) - Tilburg Tantos A. 2004. The interface between lexical and discourse semantics. The case of the light verb `have'.In Proceedings of Computational Linguistics in the Netherlands 2004 (CLIN2004) - Leiden Tantos A. 2005. Lexical Contribution to Discourse Interface and Interpretation - The Case of Object-Experiencer Modern Greek Psych Verbs. In Proceedings of Constraints in Discourse - Dortmund Tantos A. 2005. The Lexical Semantics of Greek Psych Verbs from a Discourse Perspective. In Proceedings of The Third International Postgraduate Conference in Linguistics - Athens Butt M., A. Tantos and C. Gohl. 2005. Light have and the Lexicon-Discourse Interface. Handout presented in LAGB05. Tantos A. 2006. The Lexicon-Discourse Interface: Light have. In Proceedings of Constraints in Discourse. - Maynooth (Ireland) Tantos A. 2007 Lexically Triggered Discourse Relations. To appear in Proceedings of the 18th Symposium for Theoretical Linguistics. - Thessaloniki (Greece)

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Related Literature

Asher, N. 1993. Reference to Abstract Objects in Discourse. Kluwer Academic Publishers. Asher, N. and A. Lascarides 1995. Lexical Disambiguation in a Discourse Context. Journal of Semantics 12:69-108. Asher, N. and A. Lascarides 2003. Logics of Conversation. Cambridge University Press. Asher, N. and M. Morreau 1991. Commonsense Entailment. In J. Mylopoulos and R. Reiter (eds.) Proceedings of the Twelfth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 387-392. Morgan Kaufmann, Los Altos, California.

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News

> Past Event Last October, project A22 of SFB471 organized a one-day "Workshop on the Interface between Lexical and Discourse Semantics". The Workshop is taking place as a satellite event of the 8th Conference on Natural Language Processing(KONVENS06). The workshop is open to all attendees of KONVENS06.

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