Browsing by Subject "Lexical semantics"
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Item Argument marking with prepositions in German : a constructional approach to 'auf' ('on')(2013-08) Moehring, Anja; Boas, Hans Christian, 1971-Argument marking prepositions in German are part of more complex structures referred to here as verb-preposition combinations (verb-PPs), e.g. warten auf ('to wait for') and pochen auf ('to insist on'). The preposition auf ('on') attaches to a wide range of verbs to form such combinations in which auf encodes different semantic relations that elude concrete description. Nevertheless, previous research in valency theory and related approaches could identify patterns in the distribution of verb-PP[subscript 'auf'] combinations (Eroms 1981, 1991, Lerot 1982, Bouillon 1984, Domínguez Vázquez 2005), based on perceived similarities in the meaning of the governing verbs. Cognitive linguistics provides insights into seemingly opaque senses of prepositions by analyzing them as motivated by metaphorical meaning extension (Brugman 1988, Lakoff 1987, Meex 2001, Liamkina 2007). Finally, generative approaches scrutinize the semantic relationships between verbs and their PP-arguments and systematize them under the concept of semantic roles (Fillmore 1968, Rauh 1993). However, none of these approaches can fully account for the distribution of verb-PPauf combinations in German. This dissertation proposes a novel approach towards identifying and analyzing the distributional patterns of verb-PP[subscript 'auf'] combinations by applying insights from Frame Semantics (Fillmore 1982, 1985) and Construction Grammar (Goldberg 1995, 2006). Goldberg's theory of argument structure constructions already served as a model for analyzing auf as a partially schematic argument structure construction encoding the meaning 'future orientation/future event' (Rostila 2007). Based on a large amount of corpus data, I show that such generalizing accounts are better arrived at by employing a usage-based bottom-up approach to verb-PP[subscript 'auf'] combinations. I argue that the detailed semantic and syntactic information provided by the lexical database FrameNet for each lexical unit can be used to identify distributional patterns and to describe them in detail. Furthermore, I argue that integrating the verb-PP[subscript 'auf'] combinations and the frames they evoke into a hierarchical lexical-constructional network allows us to discover substantiated generalizations about these combinations while at the same time preserving the description of their idiosyncratic features.Item Argument structure and the typology of causatives in Kinyarwanda : explaining the causative-instrumental syncretism(2013-12) Jerro, Kyle Joseph; Beavers, John T.In the Bantu language Kinyarwanda, the morpheme –ish can be used to mark both causation and the instrumental applicative. This report pro- poses an explanation for this causative-instrumental syncretism, arguing that both causation and the introduction of an instrument are—at their core—two outgrowths of the same semantic notion. Fitting with other morphological causatives in Bantu, the causative use of –ish patterns as a lexical causative marker. The analysis presented here captures the lex- ical nature of the causative use of the morpheme by arguing that the new causal link is added sub-lexically, situating Kinyarwanda into a cross- linguistic typology of morphological causatives.Item Causativization as antireflexivization : a study of middle and ingestive verbs(2012-05) Krejci, Bonnie Jean; Beavers, John T.; Wechsler, StephenThis report investigates the causativization patterns of verbs of eating and drinking from a typological perspective, arguing that ingestive verbs may be grouped together with middle verbs with respect to causativization. It is argued that both ingestive verbs and middle verbs are lexically reflexive and, in some languages, their causative variants are derived from their non-causative variants by an antireflexivization operation that delinks the verbs' coidentified arguments. Evidence from English and Marathi shows that such an operation is plausible as a causativization strategy on both semantic and morphological grounds.Item Latent variable models of distributional lexical semantics(2012-05) Reisinger, Joseph Simon; Mooney, Raymond J. (Raymond Joseph)Computer SciencesItem Selectional preferences of semantically primitive verbs in English : the periphrastic causatives and verbs of becoming(2013-05) Childers, Zachary Witter; Wechsler, StephenAnalyses of English verb meaning often rely on quasi-aspectual operators embedded in event structures to explain shared properties across classes. These operators scope over temporally basic meaning elements that make up the idiosyncratic semantic core of complex verbs. While the inventory of operators – or semantic primes – differ from proposal to proposal, they are generally presented as a closed class that includes at least CAUSE and BECOME, and their presence and location in event structures account for several alternation and ambiguity phenomena. In this study, I investigate a number verbs whose decompositions would include only operator(s) and event structure frames under most current decompositional lexical theories; in particular, the periphrastic causatives (cause, make, etc) and the verbs of becoming (become, get, etc). I account for differences in the selectional behavior of these verbs by positing incorporated meaning components beyond the purely aspectual or event structural. Based in part on regularities among corpus collocations, I propose additional meaning distinctions among these verbs along the parameters of causal patient complicity, sentiment, and register.Item The syntax and semantics of applicative morphology in Bantu(2016-05) Jerro, Kyle Joseph; Beavers, John T.; Diercks, Michael; Epps, Patience; Myers, Scott; Wechsler, StephenThis dissertation concerns itself with the applicative morpheme, often analyzed as a valency-increasing morpheme which licenses an additional object to the argument structure of a verb. To date, applicativization has been analyzed as an operation that monotonically adds a new object to the argument structure, with little significant interaction with the verb to which the applicative attaches. However, there are two broad empirical issues with this view. First, there are instances in several languages where the applied variant of a particular verb licenses no additional object, contingent on the choice of verb. Second, the semantic role of the applied object is often conditioned by the meaning of the verb. In this dissertation I propose that applicativization serves fundamentally only to restrict the truth-conditional content of an internal argument of the verb, but that this constraint can be satisfied in various constrained ways on a verb class-by-verb class basis of which canonical object addition is just an option. I present evidence from locative applicatives in Kinyarwanda that the semantic role of the locative applied object, and whether it is even present, is conditioned by the meaning of the verb to which the applicative attaches. Furthermore, I show that the semantics of both verb class and the applicative are important in capturing instrumental applicative-causative syncretism and constraints on what thematic role the applied object of such an applicative will have contingent on the particular verb. Finally, I revisit the question of object symmetry, where I argue that contra the dominant perspective in the literature, there is no universal correlation between a particular syntactic structure or thematic role and any particular symmetry pattern. Instead, I propose that symmetry facts follow on a language by language basis from a variety of factors, such as verb meaning, thematic role, cast of the relevant nouns, and information structure. This semantically-driven framework in which a mélange of other factors conspire to determine symmetry provides a more comprehensive empirical account of the syntactic and semantic nature of applicative morphology in Bantu.Item Word meaning in context as a paraphrase distribution : evidence, learning, and inference(2011-08) Moon, Taesun, Ph. D.; Erk, Katrin; Baldridge, Jason; Bannard, Colin; Dhillon, Inderjit; Mooney, RaymondIn this dissertation, we introduce a graph-based model of instance-based, usage meaning that is cast as a problem of probabilistic inference. The main aim of this model is to provide a flexible platform that can be used to explore multiple hypotheses about usage meaning computation. Our model takes up and extends the proposals of Erk and Pado [2007] and McCarthy and Navigli [2009] by representing usage meaning as a probability distribution over potential paraphrases. We use undirected graphical models to infer this probability distribution for every content word in a given sentence. Graphical models represent complex probability distributions through a graph. In the graph, nodes stand for random variables, and edges stand for direct probabilistic interactions between them. The lack of edges between any two variables reflect independence assumptions. In our model, we represent each content word of the sentence through two adjacent nodes: the observed node represents the surface form of the word itself, and the hidden node represents its usage meaning. The distribution over values that we infer for the hidden node is a paraphrase distribution for the observed word. To encode the fact that lexical semantic information is exchanged between syntactic neighbors, the graph contains edges that mirror the dependency graph for the sentence. Further knowledge sources that influence the hidden nodes are represented through additional edges that, for example, connect to document topic. The integration of adjacent knowledge sources is accomplished in a standard way by multiplying factors and marginalizing over variables. Evaluating on a paraphrasing task, we find that our model outperforms the current state-of-the-art usage vector model [Thater et al., 2010] on all parts of speech except verbs, where the previous model wins by a small margin. But our main focus is not on the numbers but on the fact that our model is flexible enough to encode different hypotheses about usage meaning computation. In particular, we concentrate on five questions (with minor variants): - Nonlocal syntactic context: Existing usage vector models only use a word's direct syntactic neighbors for disambiguation or inferring some other meaning representation. Would it help to have contextual information instead "flow" along the entire dependency graph, each word's inferred meaning relying on the paraphrase distribution of its neighbors? - Influence of collocational information: In some cases, it is intuitively plausible to use the selectional preference of a neighboring word towards the target to determine its meaning in context. How does modeling selectional preferences into the model affect performance? - Non-syntactic bag-of-words context: To what extent can non-syntactic information in the form of bag-of-words context help in inferring meaning? - Effects of parametrization: We experiment with two transformations of MLE. One interpolates various MLEs and another transforms it by exponentiating pointwise mutual information. Which performs better? - Type of hidden nodes: Our model posits a tier of hidden nodes immediately adjacent the surface tier of observed words to capture dynamic usage meaning. We examine the model based on by varying the hidden nodes such that in one the nodes have actual words as values and in the other the nodes have nameless indexes as values. The former has the benefit of interpretability while the latter allows more standard parameter estimation. Portions of this dissertation are derived from joint work between the author and Katrin Erk [submitted].