Constructional Semantics

There has been extensive research on Lexical Semantics (e.g. Levin, Pustejovsky), often presuming a bottom-up compositionality. This is sometimes contrasted with a Phrasal Semantics that is often in the tradition of Montague grammar, focusing on issues like anaphora and scoping, often assuming that each lexical token contributes one atomic symbol to a semantic representation.

Rather than talk about Phrasal Semantics directly, I will assume that the semantical representation of a phrasal expression can be decomposed into both a lexical contribution and a constructional contribution. Compositionality is still possible, but it involves both bottom-up and top-down contributions.

An initial focus will be Argument Structure Constructions (ASCx) of verbs, such as those analyzed by Goldberg for English. However, I am also interested in modeling Austronesian morphosyntactic alignment (comparing with Llido's analysis of Cebuano, for example). I am assuming that related but distinct senses of a lexical entry are actually expression-level construal from combining fewer word senses with meaning-contributing constructions, especially ASCx's. It is possible that a set of related lexical entry senses are actually the same underlying word sense distinguished in usage by the constructions forming different expressions. It is further possible that the constructions are actually related constructions, perhaps linked by inheritance (Goldberg proposes several distinct types of Inheritance, some of which involve Lakoff-style metaphor).

Whether this approach captures a significant amount of generality about lexical senses can be explored empirically. If this proves productive, it could later be incorporated into a linguistic exploration environment.

A gold standard for distinguishing senses in a lexical entry using a corpus-based approach is the COBUILD dictionary of English. Each entry has a stylized definition, which generally picks out the typical arguments of the verb, including a common noun as a general type constraint for each argument. To some extent, it identifies other participants in the mentioned situation which may not be explicitly realized in arguments. These additional participants may be a mechanism for characterizing the connotations of a specific sense.

I propose to explore some of the most common verbs of English (those in the top tier of of 680+ most frequent used lexical entries). For the sample sentences of each sense (and perhaps additional sentences from the underlying corpus, the Bank of English), I would try to identify any ASCx, based on typical arguments for that sense. Closely related senses may have related constructions imposed on the same underlying verb sense.

Multilingual Explorations

It may be useful to compare several languages at this level of semantics, for example Chinese or German or Filipino or Cebuano. I am interested if there are potential applications in basic education, adult L2 education, human translation, machine assisted translation, etc. This may also be relevant to the documentation and description of less studied languages by people more familiar with another more widespread language (the SIL use cases for Fieldworks).