6.4 Semantics Construction for Underspecified Semantics

In this section we show you to you can derive underspecified representations from syntactic analyses. The semantics construction algorithm we present here uses the syntax/semantics framework laid out in the earlier chapters of this course.

To conclude our chapter on underspecification, we will show you how you can derive underspecified representations from syntactic analyses. The semantics construction algorithm we present here uses the syntax/semantics framework laid out in the earlier chapters of this course. The relevant changes are:

  1. Devising the semantic macros that provide the meanings of words on the lexical level.

  2. Giving the combine-rules that combine smaller constraint graphs for subphrases to larger ones representing the meanings of the larger phrases.

As you will see, the division of labour between the two types of rules is different than what it used to be. Our implementation of Montague semantics was highly lexicalized: The lexical entries were relatively rich, and the combine-rules just told us what was the functor and what was the argument in a functional application. Here it's going to be the other way round: Most lexical entries are going to be very simple, and the combination rules will do most of the work.



Aljoscha Burchardt, Stephan Walter, Alexander Koller, Michael Kohlhase, Patrick Blackburn and Johan Bos
Version 1.2.5 (20030212)