In this paper I propose that the principles of Emergent Grammar (Hopper 1987, 1998) can be applied to lexical semantics. I discuss three instances of discourse semantics to show why an emergent view of semantics can provide a realistic account of semantics in discourse. The three cases are: 1) emergence and negotiation of meaning due to participant interaction in discourse; 2) (re)distribution ...

The Practical Lexical Function (PLF) model is a model of computational distributional semantics that attempts to strike a balance between expressivity and learnability in predicting phrase meaning and shows competitive results. We investigate how well the PLF carries over to free word order languages, given that it builds on observations of predicate-argument combinations that are harder to rec...

Over the last two decades, numerous algorithms have been developed that successfully capture something of the semantics of single words by looking at their distribution in text and comparing these distributions in a vector space model. However, it is not straightforward to construct meaning representations beyond the level of individual words – i.e. the combination of words into larger units – ...