The Deep Lexical Semantics of Event Words

But doing this requires fairly complex inference, because the words “block”, “enter”, “can”, “not” and “deliver” carve up the world in different ways.1 Words describe the world, so if we are going to draw the appropriate inferences in understanding a text, we must have underlying theories of aspects of the world and we must have axioms that link these to words. This includes domain-dependent knowledge, of course, but 70-80% of the words in most texts, even technical texts, are words in ordinary English used with their ordinary meanings, like “enter” and “deliver”. For example, so far in this paragraph, only the words “theories” and “axioms” and possibly “domain-dependent” have been domain-dependent. Domain-independent words have such wide utility because their basic meanings tend to be very abstract, and they acquire more specific meanings in combination with their context. Therefore, the underlying theories required for explicating the meanings of these words are going to be very abstract. For example, a core theory of scales will provide axioms involving predicates such as scale, lessThan, subscale, top, bottom, and at. These are abstract notions that apply to partial orderings as diverse as heights, money, and degrees of happiness. Then, at the “lexical periphery” we will be able to define the rather complex word “range” by the following axiom:2