This paper examines the interaction of semantic factors of reflexivity in the availability of result type te-ir and te-ar constructions in Japanese. The semantic factors of reflexivity have been examined in a number of studies, and they are known to be of relevance to the te-ir construction of result interpretation as well as to the availability of the te-ar construction. It has not been made e...

The interpretation of coercion constructions (to begin a book) has been recently considered as resulting from the operation of type changing. For instance, a phrase of type o (object) is coerced to a phrase of type e (event) under the influence of the predicate. We show that this procedure encounters empirical difficulties. Focussing on the begin/commencer case, we show that the coercion interp...

Recently, Melinger (2018) demonstrated that translation equivalent dialectal words compete for selection in a way from non-target language do not. She argued are stored as within-language representations. However, Dylman and Barry showed synonyms behave like between-language equivalents, calling Melinger's interpretation into question. The aim of the present study is to compare non-dialectal di...

Lexical rules have been used to cover a very diverse range of phenomena in constraint-based grammars. Examination of the full range of rules proposed shows that Carpenter’s (1991) postulated upper bound on the length of list-valued attributes such as subcat in the lexicon cannot be maintained, leading to unrestricted generative capacity in constraint-based formalisms utilizing HPSG-style lexica...

Lieber (Morphology and lexical semantics. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2004; A lexical semantic approach to compounding. In: Lieber R, Štekauer P (eds) The Oxford handbook of compounding, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2009) suggests that semantic-encyclopedic knowledge plays an important role in determining the meaning of a compound. In this chapter, we discuss psycholinguistic res...

This paper presents a lexical model dedicated to the semantic representation and interpretation of individual words in unrestricted text, where sense discrimination is difficult to assess. We discuss the need of a lexicon including local inference mechanisms and cooperating with as many other knowledge sources (about syntax, semantics and pragmatics) as possible. We suggest a minimalist represe...

It has been widely acknowledged that the interpretation of logical metonymies involves the interpretation of covert events (begin the book → reading / writing). Whether this implicit content is part of our lexicon or rather derives from general pragmatic inference, it is currently subject of debate. We present results from a probe recognition experiment, providing novel evidence in support of e...

Aptness is an umbrella term that covers a multitude of issues in the interpretation and generation of creative metaphor. In this paper we concentrate on one of these issues — the notion of lexical systematicity — and explore its role in ascertaining the coherence of creative metaphor relative to the structure of the target concept being described. We argue that all else being equal, the most ap...