Generative lexicon

Generative lexicon (GL) is a theory of

? (2) Is lexical information and the representations used in composing meanings separable from our commonsense knowledge?

Motivation

GL was initially developed as a theoretical framework for encoding selectional knowledge in natural language. This in turn required making some changes in the formal rules of representation and composition. Perhaps the most controversial aspect of GL has been the manner in which

consist of the following four levels:

1. Lexical typing structure: giving an explicit type for a word positioned within a type system for the language;
2. Argument structure
   : specifying the number and nature of the arguments to a predicate;
3. Event structure: defining the event type of the expression and any subeventual structure it may have; with subevents;
4. Qualia structure: a structural differentiation of the predicative force for a lexical item.

Qualia structure

The qualia structure, inspired by Moravcsik's (1975) interpretation of the aitia of Aristotle, are defined by Pustejovsky as the modes of explanation associated with a word or phrase in the language, and are defined as follows:

1. Formal: the basic category of which distinguishes the meaning of a word within a larger domain;
2. Constitutive: the relation between an object and its constituent parts;
3. Telic: the purpose or function of the object, if there is one;
4. Agentive: the factors involved in the object's origins or coming into being.

References

Sources

• Bouillon, P. 1997. "Polymorphie et sémantique lexicale: le cas des adjectifs", Ph.D., Paris VII. Paris.
• Busa, F. 1996. Compositionality and the Semantics of Nominals, Ph.D. Dissertation, Brandeis University.
• Moravcsik, J. M. 1975. Aitia as Generative Factor in Aristotle's Philosophy, Dialogue, 14:622-36.
• Pustejovsky, J. and B. Boguraev. (1993). Lexical Knowledge Representation and Natural Language Processing, in Artificial Intelligence, 63:193-223.