Types, meanings and co-composition in lexical semantics

Nicholas Asher (1, 2) , Marta Abrusan (1, 3) , Tim van de Cruys (1)

1 IRIT-MELODI - MEthodes et ingénierie des Langues, des Ontologies et du DIscours
2 CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique
3 IJN - Institut Jean-Nicod

This paper investigates co-composition, the composition of a predicate and its arguments in which either the predicate, the arguments, or both shift their meaning. We study the implications of this phenomenon for type-theoretic approaches to semantics. We adduce evidence from distributional methods in lexical semantics that co-composition is widespread and then argue that a proper treatment leads to a reconsideration of the basics of type theory for natural language semantics.

Mots clés: Target Word; Dependency Feature; Head Noun; Common Noun; Selectional Restriction

Domaines: Informatique [cs]

Nicholas Asher, Marta Abrusan, Tim van de Cruys. Types, meanings and co-composition in lexical semantics. Chatzikyriakidis, Stergios; Zhaohui, Luo. Modern Perspectives in Type-Theoretical Semantics, 98, Springer, pp.135--161, 2017, Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy book series (SLAP), 978-3319504209. ⟨10.1007/978-3-319-50422-3_6⟩. ⟨hal-03131888⟩