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

An issue of interest to work in areas ranging from lexical semantics to natural language processing (especially automatic text generation) to language pedagogy is the

: The sentence Irving was closer to me than he was to most of the others contains a quantifier, most of the others, in the scope of a comparative. The first part of this paper explains the challenges presented by such cases to existing approaches to the semantics of the comparative. The second part presents a new analysis of comparatives based on intervals rather than points on a scale. This innovation is analogized to the move from moments to intervals in tense semantics. The remainder of the paper is concerned with an interval based semantics of degree in relation to issues other than the comparative proper. The paper begins with a discussion of the role negative polarity has played in studies on the semantics of comparatives. 0.

This paper studies a distinction that was proposed in previous works between total and partial adjectives. In pairs of adjectives such as safe-dangerous, clean-dirty and healthy-sick, the first ("total") adjective describes lack of danger, dirt, malady etc., while the second ("partial") adjective describes the existence of such properties. It is shown

Current theories of aspect acknowledge the pervasiveness of verbs of variable telicity, and are designed to account both for why these verbs show such variability and for the complex conditions that give rise to telic and atelic interpretations. Previous work has identified several sets of such verbs, including incremental theme verbs,

Linguistic access to uncertain quantitative knowledge about physical properties is provided by dimensional adjectives, e.g. long-short in the spatial and temporal senses, near-far, fast-slow, etc. Semantic analyses of the dimensional adjectives differ on whether the meaning of the differential comparative (6 cm shorter than) and the equative with factor term (three times as long as) is a compositional function of the meanings the difference and fac- tor terms (6 cm and three times) and the meanings of the simple comparative and equative, respectively. The compositional treatment comes at the price of a meaning representation that some authors ([Pinkal, 1990], [Klein, 1991]) find objectionally un- parsimonious. In this paper, I compare semantic approaches by investigating the complexity of reasoning that they entail; specifically, I show the complexity of constraint propagation over real-valued intervals using the Waltz algorithm in a system where the meaning representations of sen- tences appear as constraints (cf. [Davis, 1987]). It turns out that the compositional account is more complex on this measure.

This contribution investigates the interactions between the (mental) lexicon and pragmatics. It aims to give an overview about pragmatic phenomena that are connected with the semantic underspecification of lexical items. Cases in point are the pragmatics of adjectives, effects of negative strengthening, systematic polysemy, the distribution of lexical and productive causatives, blocking phenomena, the interpretation of compounds, and many phenomena presently discussed within the framework of Cognitive Semantics. After emphasizing some important consequences of the traditional view of lexical semantics -- the contrastive analysis of lexemes within the Katz-Fodor tradition of semantics --, several phenomena are collected that seem to conflict with the theoretical settings made by it. These phenomena are taken as arguments in favor of a particular account of the division of labor between lexical semantics and pragmatics. This account combines the idea of (radical) semantic underspecification in the lexicon with a theory of pragmatic strengthening, based on conversational implicatures. The basic pragmatic mechanism can be expressed within the framework of (bidirectional) optimality theory for interpretation. It is suggested that this approach may provide a principled account of several of the lexical-pragmatic phenomena that are currently discussed. 1

We specify a model for the conceptual interpretation of relative adjectives (like “big”), which covers a crucial aspect of the underlying comprehension process – the comparison to a norm that is associated with a comparison class. Building on an elaborate domain ontology and knowledge about intercorrelations, comparison classes are dynamically created depending on the context in which adjectival utterances occur. To appear in: Cognitive Science ' 98 — Proc. of the 20th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive

An expression is vague, if its meaning is not precise. For vagueness at the sentence-level this means that a vague sentence does not give rise to precise truth conditions. This is a problem for the standard theory of meaning within linguistics, because this theory presupposes that each sentence has a precise

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