Coercion and copredication as flexible frame composition

语义组合理论必须处理词在组合关系中共同出现时所表现出的灵活的语义行为。该项目解决了两个这样的现象。第一部分关注的是多义词的不同意义贡献，这取决于它们出现的谓语。固有系统多义是指一个词或短语有两种或两种以上可明确区分但又相互关联的解释，并且存在其他具有相同语义变化模式的词或短语。众所周知的例子是“book”和“letter”这样的名词，它们可以表示物理或信息对象，“lunch”和“dinner”可以指食物或事件。这些名词的特点是，它们可以出现在共同复制结构中，如在“记住并烧掉这封信”中，两个或两个以上针对不同意义方面的谓语共同应用于同一论点。第二个现象是，如果参数表达式的语义类型与谓词的要求之间的不匹配不是通过facet选择解决的，而是通过扩展的组合模式（其中添加适当的信息片段以消除不匹配）来解决，则会出现语义丰富的系统强制。例如，当一个相动词（如“finish”）或一个心理动词（如“enjoy”）采用非事件参数（如“letter”或“coffee”）时，就会出现这种情况。该项目的目标是开发一种对这些现象的框架语义解释，将词典中的丰富语义表示与语法和语义之间的灵活组合的形式模型相结合。潜在的假设是：(i)基于框架的语义分解特别适合建模多义词的各种意义方面以及它们之间的关系，以及（ii）将语义框架与Lexicalized Tree邻接语法的基本语法树连接起来的语法-语义接口架构为我们建模共同复制和强制结构提供了适当的灵活性。此外，项目中制定的正式分析将基于广泛的经验基础，其中包括从语料库中半自动提取的合作和强制数据。

Theories of semantic composition have to cope with the flexible semantic behavior of words that often shows up when they co-occur in syntagmatic relationships. The project addresses two such phenomena. The first one is concerned with the varying meaning contributions of inherently polysemous words depending on the predications in which they occur. Inherent systematic polysemy means that a word or phrase has two or more clearly distinguishable but related interpretations and that there are other words or phrases which show the same pattern of semantic variation. Well-known examples are nouns like "book" and "letter", which can denote physical or informational objects, and "lunch" and "dinner", which can refer to food or events. It is characteristic of these nouns that they can occur in copredication constructions, as in "memorize and burn the letter", where two or more predicates that aim at different meaning facets are jointly applied to the same argument. The second phenomenon is the systematic coercion of semantic enrichment that occurs if a mismatch between the semantic type of an argument expression and the requirements of the predicate is not resolved by facet selection, but by an extended mode of composition in which appropriate pieces of information are added to eliminate the mismatch. This is the case, for instance, when a phase verb such as "finish" or a psych verb such as "enjoy" takes a non-eventive argument such as "letter" or "coffee". The goal of the project is to develop a frame-semantic account of these phenomena which combines rich semantic representations in the lexicon with a formal model of flexible compositionality at the interface between syntax and semantics. The underlying hypothesis is (i) that a frame-based semantic decomposition is particularly well suited for modeling the various meaning facets of polysemous words and the relations between them, and (ii) that an architecture of the syntax-semantics interface that links semantic frames to the elementary syntactic trees of Lexicalized Tree Adjoining Grammars gives us the right amount of flexibility for modeling copredication and coercion constructions. Moreover, the formal analyses developed in the project will be based on a broad empirical basis which includes copredication and coercion data semi-automatically extracted from corpora.