Mental State Adjectives: the Perspective of Generative Lexicon

This paper focusses on mental state adjectives and offers a unified analysis in the theory of Generative Lexicon (Pustejovsky, 1991, 1995). We show that, instead of enumerating the various syntactic constructions they enter into, with the different senses which arise, it is possible to give them a rich typed semantic representation which will explain both their semantic and syntactic polymorphism. 1 I n t r o d u c t i o n Recently, work in computational semantics and lexical semantics has made an interesting shift. Motivated by a concern for lexical organization and global coherence in the structure of lexicon, some researchers have moved towards nlore expressive semantic descriptions, as well as more powerful methods of combining them (see for example Pustejovsky, 1991, 1995; Briscoe, 1993). This article will exploit one of these theories, The Generative Lezicon (GL: Pustejovsky, 1995), and extend it for the treatment of French mental adjectives. The following section summarizes the problematic behaviour of these adjectives. The GL approach is then described, and a GL analysis of the data.