11.10 Semantics II
http://www.coli.uni-saarland.de/courses/msc-prep-11/page.php?id=slides

Idioms
  By definition non-compositional
  The degree of non-compositionality varies
  In some cases, we can understand the motivation of some idioms (source), as in "let one's hair down"

Lexical Semantics

Polysemy vs. Monosemy
  Words with multiple related meanings. 
  Zeugma test = "I didn't buy his car, or his argument" 
  
  ## Considered "#" wrong, but debatable if it really sounds funny. 
  ## '*' marks linguistic ungrammaticality and '#' an ill-formed derivation. 
  
### I often use ## to indicate notes, as well. ## = notes. 
  
Polysemy: Related senses of the same phonological word
Homonymy: Unrelated senses of the same phonological word
Sometimes homonuyms are distinguished from homographs
    Homonyms: talk - torque (or to/too/two)
    Homographs: ear (of corn) - ear (body part)  can be differently pronounced, too, like wind (breeze) vs. wind (wind-up toy)

Etymology: Homo- (same) -nym (name). 

Synonymy: Have the same (ish) meaning
    Extensionally and intentionall equivalent
    Paraphrases
    tap/faucet (example) - can be used as paraphrases for one another
    
Hyponymy: dog is a hyponym of animal
Hypernym: animal is a hypernym of dog

is-a is the arrow graph you use to schematically represent this. 

Troponymy: loosely speaking, this is hyponym for verbs. 
    The relation between two verbs where one conveys a meaning which is a particular case of the meaning of the other. For example, to amble is a troponym of to move.
        (A worked out theory for this is Gordman --Mikos)
        
Antonyms: Opposites, basically. 
    Three classes: complementary, gradable, relational:
        If one holds, the other must be false
            true/false
            dead/alive
            etc.
    Complementary predicates give rise to predications that are Contradictions
        Mostly verbs/adjectives
        Verbal complementaries oftenhave a joint relation to a third presupposed predicate
        On a scale - we don't have a strict domain
        mostly adj.
        domain not strictly bisected, intermediate terms (eg neither long nor short)
        middle of region/default value usually is not lexicalised
        For gradable antonyms, it holds that less of one is more of the other, 
        e.g. less short  equals more tall, whereas less dead == more alive doesn't work

        degress of some variable propertty (from 0 to infinity)
        terms relative to type of entity (small for elephant, etc.)
        Often not a lexicalisation for the middle value - average height. 
        
    Opposites V: 
        [...slides online...]
        
WordNet:         http://wordnet.princeton.edu/
Causative/Inchoative/Stative (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inchoative_verb)
    Basically, these are a change of state
    x CAUSE y to BECOME z
Meronymy (Part) - Holonymy (Whole)
    toe is part of a foot (transitivity: if toenail is part of toe, it's part of foot, too)
    tire is part of a car
    test: an x is part of a y; a y has x/xs
    Physical objects & regions in physical space: the part whole relationship is very clearly transitive: if x is part of y, and y is part of z, then x is part of z.
    Most discussions of meronyms are restricted to examples of Ns denoting physical objects. Can other parts of speech stand in a part-whole relationship?    

Portion/Unit extractors:
    head of cattle, lump of coal, etc.

-er/-or (agent-like participant): observer, rider, negotiator 
-ee (undergoer-like participant): employee, signee 
observe watch - observation, observatory 
observe comply/adhere - observance

Encoding: start with concepts or things and asks how people talk about them (onomasiology)
Decoding: start with words and looks for their meanings (semasiology)
Dictionaries traditionally take the decoding view
In theory, doing a full lexical analysis from an encoding point view should lead to the same result as doing it from a decoding point of view

Modeling meaning relations (Katz)
Relation to syntactic and morphological processes (see below, Levin)
View on human conceptual structure (Jackendoff) <-- Also referred to as Lexical Conceptual Structures (LCS) - popular in the eighties. 

Modelling lexical relations:
    Spinster is a hyponym of woman
    A lexical item P can be defined as a hyponym of Q if all the features of Q are contained in the feature specification of P, e.g. spinster contains all the attributes ofye woman, plus "unmarried"

Katzian Decomposition:

Preliminaries
Assumptions recursive semantic rules semantic compositionality
Semantics works as follows give specifications of meanings of lexical items
give rules showing how the meanings of lexical items combine into larger and larger units do this a universally applicable metalanguage
Dictionary bachelor N
a (human) (male) [one who has never been married] b (human) (male) [young knight serving under the standard
of another knight] c (human) [one who has the first or lowest academic degree] d (animal) (male) [young fur seal without a mate in the
breeding season]

Projection rules: how to combine meanings
we amalgamate lexical entries moving up the tree main constraint on the amalgamation are selectional restrictions
colourful ADJ a (colour) [abounding in contrast or variety of bright colors]
< (physical object) or (social activity)> b (evaluative) [having distinctive character, vivideness, or picturesequeness] < (aeshtetic object) or (social activity)>

Cognitive Semantics
       (Moving away from Katzian decomposition. This is more functional vs formal linguistics - cognitive is more functional). 
Other languages: Mayan
    X -                         Y
    mountain.n-poss    head.n.
    
    In these languages, preps. are identical or very similar to body parts. A cognitive approach would be interested in the process of grammaticalisation. 
 
Central concepts:
##Moin: Why don't they just talk together and figure it out?
##Palmer: Good question. [...] discussion on flaws in the field. 

Active Zones
    If an entity participates in a situation, often certain parts of it are more involved in it than others.
    There are some clear cases where there is no active zone: The Earth moves around the Sun.

But in most others, a closer look reveals that an understanding of an active zone is needed (see pictures)
What are applications of the concept of active zones? 
## "There must be some in cognitive linguistics"

Generative Lexicon:
    Main idea: There are different components of meaning that are manifested in different ways in different lexical items. 
So, under this approach, we talk about different roles, which are part of the word. 

Limitations of generative lexicon ideas
## No implementation so far? Not much. 
## Implementation by Richard: http://www.burntfen.net/merecat/?p=447

##Alexis Palmer knows James Pustejovsky - the main generative linguist in lexical semantics - and says he's a pretty nice guy. Good to know. 
## http://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?q=pustejovsky&hl=en&btnG=Search&as_sdt=1%2C5&as_sdtp=on

Syntax-Semantics Interface
Levin's word classes (As well as Rappaport Hovav - they've done a lot of work together)
            ## Conative alternation: Changes the object NP into a PP (http://www.ilc.cnr.it/EAGLES96/rep2/node10.html), is therefore somewhat tied to the structure "at"; 
            ## "tried to cut the bread / break the twig" is not conative alternation
Support Constructions
    Take functions in quite  alot of constructions in this form, as well. The complement tells you more about the verb than the verb intself. 
    Mikos: In WordNet, it doesn't work like this. Is there a database that has this sort of construction?
    AP: I don't know of one. FrameNet doesn't quite do it. A lot of the support constructions were specifically not annotated. 
    
This is something that should be left for Pragmatics and Discourse. 
Meaning Beyond Words

Thematic Roles, Semantic Roles
What are the roles of the entities in the situation being discussed?
##We're interested in the relations, and the participants, but mostly in the semantic structure: who is doing what, given a sentence? 
##How exactly do we want to link these? I think these examples are pretty clear. Labelling is easy. What isn't is linking across the syntax-semantics interface, or to do this automatically.

Problems with Roles
##We want to know, for any given predicate, how many roles there might be, how to define them, and how complex this might be. 

Proto-Roles
    (help assign roles in unclear cases)
    
    Proto-agent (prototypical agent) 
Linking thematic roles to grammatical functions
Another approach is that of Frame Semantics.
##For any given expression, we are using this based on our knowledge of a situation that this expression corresponds to. For instance, commerce events that have to do with buying or selling. We expect certain participants, goods, price, location, etc. 
Frame Semantics
##FrameNet is based on this - an inventory of defined semantic frames. 
FrameNet
## FrameNet: https://framenet.icsi.berkeley.edu/fndrupal/
## Wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FrameNet
## Josef Ruppemhofer (http://www.coli.uni-saarland.de/~josefr/index.html) would be the person to talk to (about FrameNet) at CoLi.
##The problem is coverage. There was an aim to cover a wide range -- so what we get is a nice corpus that does not follow the distribution of normal text. 

##Milos - anyone tried to learn it?
##AP - Yes. Lots on this. Saarbrücken is one of the key places for this. There's a German FrameNet - the SALSA project (http://www.coli.uni-saarland.de/projects/salsa/page.php?id=index ) -- that does this. Lots of work on semi-superivsed and unsupervised approaches. 


Tense, Aktionsart, and Aspect

Situation Types
(Not transferable)
## Wikipedia has a simplified chart (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexical_aspect ) that leaves out the static property.

Aktionsart ≠ Aspect
## Aktionsart = German for "type of action"
Modality
    Modality comprises linguistic devices that serve to realize commitment to, or belief, in a proposition.
##There's a lot of stuff on wikipedia about this. And it's beautiful in other languages. Look at Navajo if you want to have fun. Alternatively, ask Richard to describe Llárriésh for you. 

Evidentiality
##End of Lecture. Lots of slides not covered, but they will be covered later in the Pragmatics bit later. 
##Lots of references 
Resources and Contact:
## Not directly related, but there used to be a course on the semantics of tense and aspect (http://www.coli.uni-saarland.de/%7Esaurer/lehre/SemRaumZeit/tense-and-aspect.htm ) - has a short introduction to the topic.