This book is an investigation into the problems of generating natural language utterances to satisfy specific goals the speaker has in mind. It is thus an ambitious and significant contribution to research on language generation in artificial intelligence, which has previously concentrated in the main on the problem of translation from an internal semantic representation into the target language. The author’s approach, based on a possible-worlds semantics of an intensional logic of knowledge and action, enables him to develop a formal representation of the effects of illocutionary acts...
This book focuses on the linguistic representation of temporality in the verbal domain and its interaction with the syntax and semantics of verbs, arguments, and modifiers. Leading scholars explore the division of labour between syntax, compositional semantics, and lexical semantics in the encoding of event structure, encompassing event participants and the temporal properties associated with events.
This book makes an original contribution to the understanding of perception verbs and the treatment of argument structure, and offers new insights on lexical causation, evidentiality, and processes of cognition. Perception verbs - such as look, see, taste, hear, feel, sound, and listen - present unresolved problems for theories of lexical semantics. This book examines the relations between their semantics and syntactic behaviour, the different kinds of polysemy they exhibit, and the role of evidentiality in verbs like seem and sound.
This book is the most comprehensive study to date of the development of the three suffixes -hood, -dom and -ship in the history of English. An in depth investigation from Old English to Modern English based on data from annotated corpora reveals that all three suffixes developed from nouns into today's suffixes building abstract nouns. It is shown that the rise of suffixes is triggered by semantic change. The findings are analysed in a current model of lexical semantics of word formation (Lieber 2004).
Theories of Lexical Semantics: A Cognitive Perspective
Theories of Lexical Semantics offers a comprehensive overview of the major traditions of word meaning research in linguistics. In spite of the growing importance of the lexicon in linguistic theory, no overview of the main theoretical trends in lexical semantics is currently available. This book presents the main ideas, the landmark publications, and the dominant figures of five traditions: historical-philological semantics, structuralist semantics, generativist semantics, neostructuralist semantics, and cognitive semantics.
