Lexical representation and modification within the noun phrase

Formal semanticists of natural language have traditionally worked with relatively impoverished lexical representations and have generally been conservative in drawing the line between those aspects of interpretation which are determined by lexical information and composition rules, and those which are determined contextually, leaving a substantial amount of work to context. While this strategy is justifiable if one considers the job of the semanticist to account only for what is strictly entailed, it has also in some sense greatly simplified this job, resulting in rather impoverished lexical representations and relegating many problems to the so-called pragmatics wastebasket, if in a relatively orderly fashion. Nonetheless, in this paper I discuss two kinds of problems, both related to modification within the noun phrase, which show why richer lexical representations similar to those proposed in Generative Lexicon theory (Pustejovsky 1995) should be of interest to formal semanticists.