Research in Generative Lexicon Theory: The Semantics of Complex Types

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Research in Generative Lexicon Theory: The Semantics of Complex Types The goal of this research is to study the role of the mental dictionary within the cognitive apparatus underlying language use, from the dual perspective of formal linguistics and computational modeling. Our investigation focuses on the complex nature of words by addressing the problem of the "multiplicity of meaning", namely the way in which humans combine words in a creative way to generate an infinite number of senses out of a finite vocabulary of semantic types. The consequences of this research are cross-disciplinary, since a linguistic account of the formal properties of language meaning has implications for the psychological modeling of the activities responsible for production, generation, and categorization. Contrasting a generative view of word meaning to a static sense- enumeration approach, we are interested in identifying the nature of the universal components of the lexicon and their role in elucidating the compositional processes involved in language use.