WordNet is an on-line lexical reference system whose design is inspired by current

Selectional constraints are limitations on the applicability of predicates to arguments. For example, the statement “The number two is blue” may be syntactically well formed, but at some level it is anomalous — BLUE is not a predicate that can be applied to numbers. According to the influential theory of (Katz and Fodor, 1964), a predicate associates a set of defining features with each argument, expressed within a restricted semantic vocabulary. Despite the persistence of this theory, however, there is widespread agreement about its empirical shortcomings (McCawley, 1968; Fodor, 1977). As an alternative, some critics of the Katz-Fodor theory (e.g. (Johnson-Laird, 1983)) have abandoned the treatment of selectional constraints as semantic, instead treating them as indistinguishable from inferences made on the basis of factual knowledge. This provides a better match for the empirical phenomena, but it opens up a different problem: if selectional constraints are the same as inferences in general, then accounting for them will require a much more complete understanding of knowledge representation and inference than we have at present. The problem, then, is this: how can a theory of selectional constraints be elaborated without first having either an empirically adequate theory of defining features or a comprehensive theory of inference? In this dissertation, I suggest that an answer to this question lies in the representation of conceptual

this paper is to introduce, by means of the detailed analysis of a single grammatical problem, the rudiments of a grammatical theory which assigns a central role to the notion of grammatical construction. To adopt a constructional approach is to undertake a commitment in principle to account for the entirety of each language. 2 This means that the relatively general patterns of the language, such as the one licensing the ordering of a finite auxiliary verb before its subject in English as illustrated in (1), and the more idiomatic patterns, such as those exemplified in (2), stand on an equal footing as data for which the grammar must provide an account. (1) a What have you done? b Never will I leave you. c So will she. d Long may you prosper! e Had I known, . . . f Am I tired! g . . . as were the others h Thus did the hen reward Beecher. (2) a by and large b [to] have a field day c [to] have to hand it to [someone] d (*A/*The) Fool that I was, . . . e in x's own right Given such a commitment, the construction grammarian is required to develop an explicit system of representation, capable of encoding economically and without loss of generalization, all the constructions (or patterns) of the language, from the most idiomatic to the most general. This goal was advanced in the form of a promissory note in an earlier paper that dealt with the English let alone construction: "It appears to us that the machinery needed for describing the so-called minor or peripheral constructions of the sort which has occupied us here will have 1 The authors gratefully acknowledge much fruitful discussion regarding the content of this paper with Mary Catherine O'Connor. We are indebted to Yunsook Chung, Ron Kaplan, Ray Jackendoff, Susanne Riehemann and Ivan Sag for comments on earlier dr...

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this paper, we'll consider three examples where this occurs: logical metonymy (e.g., enjoy the book means enjoy reading the book), adjectives (e.g., the interpretation of fast in fast car, fast motorway, fast typist etc.), and noun-verb agreement. We'll argue for a new version of default inheritance, which allows default results of lexical generalisations to persist as default beyond the lexicon. We'll show that this persistence can be exploited by the pragmatic component, to reason about when generalisations encoded in the lexicon survive in a discourse context. We'll represent the link between the lexicon and pragmatics via two axioms. These will predict the pragmatic exceptions to lexical generalisations that arise in a discourse context. We thereby explain how words are interpreted in discourse, in a way that neither the lexicon nor pragmatics could achieve on their own.

this paper is to motivate the use of inheritance in lexical specification. To do this, we take a narrowly circumscribed phenomenon in English grammar--that of vp-complementtaking adjectives, as in hard + to deliver--and spell out the lexical specifications a thorough treatment demands. The sheer complexity of these specifications cries out for a redundancy-eliminating approach, and we propose a structured lexicon treatment. The grammatical analysis not only serves to motivate the general approach, it also illustrates several key issues in the design of structured lexicons, such as the use of default inheritance, the need for lexical rules, and the range of phenomena amenable to this sort of treatment

this paper allows any defaults to be overridden by defaults which are associated with more specific types: thus priority ordering reflects the type hierarchy ordering. (In 6.2, we will mention other possibilities for imposing a priority order on defaults.) Barring criterion 6, all of the above properties are necessary for making default unification behave as much like normal unification as possible, save that (default) information can be overridden. These criteria ensure that the default unification operation has properties familiar from monotonic unification, such as determinacy, the way information is accumulated, the conditions when unification fails, and order independence. Since this guarantees that default unification shares many of the properties of normal unification, a `seamless transition' is possible between the monotonic approach to linguistic analysis supplied by normal unification, and the extension to these analyses provided by supplying default constraints and default unification operating over them. We will justify these assumptions with respect to particular linguistic examples in 4

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This paper presents the syntactic and semantic tags used to annotate predicate-argument structure in the Berkeley FrameNet Project. It briefly explains the theory of frame semantics on which semantic annotation is based, discusses possible applications of FrameNet annotation, and compares FrameNet to other prominent lexical resources.

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