Underspecified Lexical Conceptual Structures For Sense Variations

Abstract

Underspecification has often been felt to be a powerful way of representing, with a certain degree of generality, the semantics of lexical items whose meaning remains generic or vague and may vary depending on other constituents in the sentence. Meaning specializations and variations introduced by arguments and modifiers are particularly complex and very frequent for predicative terms, especially for verbs (Nunberg et al., 1992; Ostler et al., 1992; Lakoff et al., 1980). The meaning of a predicate indeed depends largely on the meaning of its arguments and, possibly, also on their syntactic position. This is studied in depth in lexical semantics, e.g. in the Generative Lexicon (GL) approach (Pustejovsky, 1991; 1995).