Coercion and copredication as flexible frame composition

语义组合理论必须处理词的灵活语义行为，当它们在组合关系中同时出现时，往往会出现这种行为。该项目解决了两个这样的现象。第一个是关于固有的多义词的不同意义贡献，取决于它们出现的预测。固有的系统性多义性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，而且还有其他词或短语表现出相同的语义变异模式。众所周知的例子有“book”和“Letter”这样的名词，它们可以表示实物或信息对象，以及“午餐”和“晚餐”，它们可以表示食物或事件。这些名词的特点是它们可以出现在连词结构中，比如在“记住并烧掉字母”中，两个或两个以上针对不同意义层面的谓词联合应用于同一论元。第二种现象是语义丰富的系统性强制，如果论元表达式的语义类型和谓词的要求之间的不匹配不是通过方面选择来解决的，而是通过扩展的组合模式来解决的，在这种模式中添加适当的信息以消除不匹配。例如，当一个阶段动词，如“Finish”，或一个心理动词，如“享受”，接受一个非均匀的论元，如“字母”或“咖啡”时，就是这种情况。该项目的目标是开发一种对这些现象的框架-语义解释，将词典中丰富的语义表示与句法和语义之间的灵活组合性的形式模型相结合。其基本假设是：(I)基于框架的语义分解特别适合于建模多义词的各种意义方面以及它们之间的关系，以及(Ii)将语义框架链接到词汇化树相邻语法的基本句法树的句法-语义接口的体系结构为我们提供了适当的灵活性来建模共词和强制结构。此外，该项目开发的正式分析将基于广泛的经验基础，其中包括从语料库半自动提取的合作和胁迫数据。

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.