Lexical and Nonlexical Contributions to Sentence Meaning

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This study will investigate the microstructure of human concepts, with a focus on how concepts expressed by sentences are constructed from lexical meanings plus structural principles. Building of Jackendoff's framework of Conceptual Semantics plus Pustejovsky's work on event structure and the generative lexicon, the project will investigate a number of interrelated problems concerning how word meanings are internally structured in the minds of language users: the linking of characters in an event described by a sentence syntactic positions in the sentence; the internal organization of noun meanings, including properties of form, function, and origin of objects described by nouns; the factoring of object and event concepts into independent dimensions; and the semantics of rights and obligation. In addition, the project will investigate "principles of coercion," whose effects are to add to sentences certain elements of meaning that are not overtly expressed in words. Such principles are heavily involved in simplifying apparent ambiguities in words, as well as in understanding language in context.//