VERB IDIOSYNCRASY, ARGUMENT REALIZATION AND POLYSEMY

276 Pages·2007·1.2 MB·English

ABSTRACT
Title of dissertation: ON AN APPARENT LIMIT TO VERB
IDIOSYNCRASY, GIVEN A MAPPING
BETWEEN ARGUMENT REALIZATION
AND POLYSEMY (OR ARGUMENT
OPTIONALITY)
Scott C. Thomas
Doctor of Philosophy, 2007
Dissertation directed by: Professor Don Perlis
Department of Computer Science
Professor Tim Oates
Department of Computer Science
University of Maryland, Baltimore County
Full-scale natural language processing systems require lots of information on
thousands of words. This is especially true for systems handling the meanings of
words and phrases, and it seems especially true for the verbs of a language: at first
glance at least, and when viewed as if they were argument-taking functions, verbs
seem to have highly individual requirements—along at least two dimensions. 1)
They vary in the range of arguments they take (further complicated by polysemy,
i.e. the proliferation of their senses). And to a significant extent 2) they vary in
the way in which those arguments are realized in syntax. Since arbitrary informa-
tion must be stored anyway—such as the particular concept pairing with the sound
and/or spelling of a word—it seems reasonable to expect to store other potentially
idiosyncratic information, including what might be needed for polysemy and argu-
ment realization. But once the meanings of words are stored, it isn’t completely
clear how much else really needs to be stored, in principle. With a significant degree
of patterning in polysemy, and in argument realization, real speakers extrapolate
from known senses and realizations. To fully model the processing of natural lan-
guage, there must be at least some automatic production, and/or verification, of
polysemy and argument realization, from the semantics.
Since there are two phenomena here (polysemy and argument realization), the
interaction between them could be crucial; and indeed particular instances of this
interaction appear again and again in theoretical studies of syntax and meaning.
Yet the real extent of the interaction has not itself been properly investigated. To
do so, we supply a kind of high-level semantics for the varying argument-taking
configurations of 3000 English verbs, analyzing the resulting patterns. The results
suggest a rule of co-occurrences: divergences in argument realization are in fact
rigorously accompanied by divergences in polysemy or argument optionality. We
argue that this implies the existence of highly productive mechanisms for polysemy
and argument realization, thus setting some crucial groundwork for their eventual
production by automated means.
ON AN APPARENT LIMIT TO VERB IDIOSYNCRASY,
GIVEN A MAPPING BETWEEN ARGUMENT REALIZATION
AND POLYSEMY (OR ARGUMENT OPTIONALITY)
by
Scott Carlton Thomas
Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the
University of Maryland, College Park in partial fulfillment
of the requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
2007
Advisory Committee:
Professor Don Perlis, Chair
Professor Tim Oates, Co-advisor
Professor Michael Israel
Professor Michael Morreau
Professor Chau-When Tseng
(cid:13)c Copyright by
Scott C. Thomas
2007
TABLE OF CONTENTS
List of Tables v
List of Figures vi
Part I
....................................................The phenomena
1 Mapping concepts ‘into language’ 2
1.1 An example . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
1.2 ‘Argumentation’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
1.2.1 Argument types . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
1.2.2 Linking . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
1.3 Polysemy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
1.4 The category Verb . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
2 The extent of the mapping 34
2.1 Productivity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34
2.2 A connection? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
2.3 Polysemy, homonymy, and synonymy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39
2.3.1 Mapping from labels to words to senses . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40
2.3.2 Senses or words . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45
2.4 More potential ‘atoms’ of language? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46
Part II
....................................................Mostly on the data
3 A tangle of verbs 50
3.1 Diathesis alternations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51
3.1.1 ‘Argument-preserving’ alternations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56
ii
3.1.2 ‘Argument-merging’ alternations. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59
3.1.3 Implied-argument alternations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59
3.1.4 Event-composition alternations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61
3.1.5 ‘Hidden compositions’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65
3.1.6 Miscellanea . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65
3.2 Verb classes (often of one element) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66
3.2.1 Construction families . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68
3.2.2 ‘Linking up’ the alternations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70
4 A mass of conceptualizations 72
4.1 Relating the θ-roles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72
4.1.1 Generalizing to a few schemata . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73
4.1.2 Application to the Levin classes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77
4.2 Reverse-engineering the system . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88
Part III
........................................Searching for a system
5 Tackling idiosyncrasy 92
5.1 Words and Rules . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 94
5.2 Limits to (ir)regularity? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95
5.3 ‘Linking’ linking and polysemy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99
5.3.1 A complementary approach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 100
5.3.2 Constructing the isomorphism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107
5.4 Idiosyncrasy’s last stand? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 110
6 Toward a reappraisal 114
6.1 Prospects for completing the isomorphism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115
6.2 Prospects for generating the lexicon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119
7 Conclusion 121
iii
A Homonymy in Levin 1993 123
B Θ-families in the isomorphism 127
Bibliography 221
Indices
Verbs in the Isomorphism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 231
General Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 259
iv
LIST OF TABLES
3.1 Argument-preserving alternations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58
3.2 Argument-merging alternations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60
3.3 Argument-suppressing alternations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62
3.4 Compositional alternations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63
3.5 Hidden compositions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64
3.6 Additional constructions and interpretations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64
3.7 Hit verb class intersections . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67
v
LIST OF FIGURES
1.1 Our hypothesis, simplified. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
2.1 Homonymy vs. polysemy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41
3.1 Histogram of intersective class intersection size . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68
3.2 Histogram of intersective class size . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69
3.3 Histogram of construction-family size (in number of constructions) . . 70
4.1 Θ-roles and -realizations vs. verb class . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90
5.1 A Pustejovsky-style lexical entry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97
5.2 Θ-sets → constructions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 100
5.3 Θ-families → construction families . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103
5.4 Θ-roles of the isomorphism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 108
vi
Part I
The phenomena
1