teasing apart "word sense"

Analysis of "word sense"

From the point of view of constructions, a c:lexical_sense contributes only part of the meaning of a c:word_usage. The construction itself contributes something additional, which also interacts with the larger discourse environment and the social context of successful communication.

We can divide the meaning of a c:word_usage into a purely semantic representation, which is the typical meaning of the sentence being used. Or even a simplified form of the basic sentence, with only head words and abstracting from embellishments that don't contribute to a specified lexical sense. The semantic representation includes the literal meaning, but may also introduce additional roles that follow from "typically" understood arguments and properties of the explicitly mentioned words. It covers denotation and the related intensional functions, as well as connotations relative to a "typical" mental lexicon (perhaps of an ideal listener/reader).

In addition to the purely semantic representation, competent language users can infer a more c:pragmatic_construal of the c:word_usage.

In the context of the COBUILD lexical word senses and the Bank of English used to generate them, a distinguished lexical sense classifies a class of sentences which share a similar word_usage. It should be possible to isolate the intuitions of this "gold standard" classification into a semantic representation. This abstracts from less reproducible aspects of pragmatic construal, and focuses on what is typically inferred from the sentence itself, as if it were used in isolation rather that in a larger discourse or social situation.

We would like to tease apart the characterization of each lexical sense as a purely semantic representation into two parts, the contribution of the word (e.g. a free morpheme verb, or the stem of an inflected verb) from the contribution of the construction or constructions (including morphological constructions, and argument structure constructions at least).

We would like to discover if the set of lexical senses of a word (initially, some of the more frequently used verbs) can be characterized with a set of constructions related by the inheritance relations distinguished by Goldberg. We also want to see to what extent these constructions are reused across different verbs, and if we can identify verb classes that share the same inheritance-related constructions.