scholarly journals Semantic (Ir)regularities in Action Nouns in Irish

2018 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
pp. 31-62
Author(s):  
Maria Bloch-Trojnar ◽  

Cross-linguistically, verbal nominalizations display a close semantic and syntactic affinity to their corresponding predicates. Another characteristic feature of action nominalizations is that they exhibit the process/result dichotomy. In the process of lexicalization, the meanings of nominals drift away from the core actional reading, and come to denote ‘something material connected with the verbal idea (agent, instrument, belongings, place or the like)’ (Marchand 1969, 303). Nominalizations in Irish show a systematic polysemy between an abstract action reading and more concrete meanings such as result or object of activity, e.g. míniú ‘explanation’, ceartú ‘correction’, filleadh ‘bend’. We can observe a cline with a non-count action nominal and a count result nominal as extremes. The ability to pluralize is a clear indicator of lexicalization, e.g. oiriúintí ‘fittings, accessories’, admhálacha ‘receipts’, socruithe sochraide ‘funeral arrangements’. It will be demonstrated that the patterns of polysemy in verbal nouns are constrained by the lexical semantics of the base verbs. In the paper an overview is made of nominals related to verbs of different situation types (i.e. Vendler’s (1967) classes such as states, accomplishments, achievements, activities), and different lexical semantic categories (i.e. verbs of creation, consumption, motion, speech act verbs, verbs of emission etc.). The study is based on the corpus of ca. 2300 verbs and their corresponding VNs from Ó Dónaill (1977).

2015 ◽  
pp. 213-228
Author(s):  
Viktor Bayda ◽  

Irish has a large number of constructions consisting of a verb of general meaning (a light verb), a noun (usually abstract) and a preposition. These light-verb constructions (LVCs) form a unit: the light verb fulfils the grammatical functions while also retaining some of its lexical semantics, and the noun conveys the core semantics of the whole, so that the meaning of the predicate is distributed among the parts of the construction. The tendency to use periphrastic means of conveying predicates in Irish has been discussed by Wagner (1959) and Greene (1966) and the same phenomenon has recently been discussed by Wigger (2004, 2008 and 2009) from a contrastive and lexicological point of view. LVCs containing verbal nouns (NV-LVCs) have been discussed by Bloch-Trojnar (2009a, 2009b and 2010) with particular stress on their aspectual characteristics and the interaction between the verb-noun predicate and the choice of the light verb. The present paper is intended as an attempt to introduce LVCs involving simple (non-verbal) nouns into the discussion.


2019 ◽  
Vol 80 (1) ◽  
pp. 81-87
Author(s):  
Sergei A. Karpukhin

This article describes the connection between perfect verb forms and the typical lexical meanings of generating imperfectives using the example of a prefix model in the Russian language. The research is based on a fundamentally new approach, i.e. the means of “fixing” action in the objective time. The relevance of combining the action and the situational background to the lexical-semantic groups of verbs is established. In the course of the research, the materials of the Bolshoi Akademichescky Slovar (Big Academic Dictionary) were used.


2018 ◽  
Vol 2 (XXIII) ◽  
pp. 121-133
Author(s):  
Katarzyna Wojan

This article outlines the original research concept developed and applied by the Voronezh researchers, which brought both quantitative and qualitative results to the field of linguistic comparative research. Their monograph is devoted to the macrotypological unity of the lexical semantics of the languages in Europe. In addition, semantic stratification of Russian and Polish lexis has been analyzed. Their research concept is now known as the “lexical-semantic macrotypological school of Voronezh.” Representatives of this school have created a new research field in theoretical linguistics – a lexical-semantic language macrotypology as a branch of linguistic typology. The monograph has been widely discussed and reviewed in Russia.


2014 ◽  
pp. 85-100
Author(s):  
Violetta Koseska

Semantics, contrastive linguistics and parallel corporaIn view of the ambiguity of the term “semantics”, the author shows the differences between the traditional lexical semantics and the contemporary semantics in the light of various semantic schools. She examines semantics differently in connection with contrastive studies where the description must necessary go from the meaning towards the linguistic form, whereas in traditional contrastive studies the description proceeded from the form towards the meaning. This requirement regarding theoretical contrastive studies necessitates construction of a semantic interlanguage, rather than only singling out universal semantic categories expressed with various language means. Such studies can be strongly supported by parallel corpora. However, in order to make them useful for linguists in manual and computer translations, as well as in the development of dictionaries, including online ones, we need not only formal, often automatic, annotation of texts, but also semantic annotation - which is unfortunately manual. In the article we focus on semantic annotation concerning time, aspect and quantification of names and predicates in the whole semantic structure of the sentence on the example of the “Polish-Bulgarian-Russian parallel corpus”.


Author(s):  
Ling Luo ◽  
Xiang Ao ◽  
Yan Song ◽  
Jinyao Li ◽  
Xiaopeng Yang ◽  
...  

Aspect extraction relies on identifying aspects by discovering coherence among words, which is challenging when word meanings are diversified and processing on short texts. To enhance the performance on aspect extraction, leveraging lexical semantic resources is a possible solution to such challenge. In this paper, we present an unsupervised neural framework that leverages sememes to enhance lexical semantics. The overall framework is analogous to an autoenoder which reconstructs sentence representations and learns aspects by latent variables. Two models that form sentence representations are proposed by exploiting sememes via (1) a hierarchical attention; (2) a context-enhanced attention. Experiments on two real-world datasets demonstrate the validity and the effectiveness of our models, which significantly outperforms existing baselines.


2021 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 213-224
Author(s):  
Jarosław Pacuła

The article presents the history of the student jargon. The author describes the vocabulary used in the period: second-half the 19th century – first half the 20th century; the lexis belongs to the thematic category „cheating”. In the text the reader gets to know theses: 1) the lexis discussed is the root cause of one of the most extensive lexical-semantic categories of the student jargon in the post-partition period (after the period of the Partitions of Poland); 2) in former student language a shared store of the vocabulary exists – this group is independent of the administrative dependence of schools; 3) we notice much former vocabulary in the contemporary jargon; 4) we will notice jargon words in the general Polish in the 19th century; 7) we can see the participation of criminal jargon from the 19th century.


2021 ◽  
Vol 34 ◽  
Author(s):  
Seiko Fujii ◽  
Russell Lee-Goldman

Abstract This paper presents a frame-based constructional approach to argument structure satisfaction via unselected adjuncts, by focusing on one such case in Japanese. It points out an intriguing constructional phenomenon whereby causal adjunct clauses marked with node ‘because’, as used with main-clause predicates that evoke communication frames (such as Telling and Warning), serve to satisfy main-clause argument structure. The node clause precedes the main-clause speech act of telling/warning, and can be interpreted as a speech-act causal (Sweetser 1990). The node clause at the same time conveys the content of informing or warning, i.e., the core Frame Element message, which is absent as a main-clause complement. This analysis of argument structure satisfaction via unselected adjuncts provides evidence for a Frame Semantic approach to argument structure that incorporates Construction Grammar.


2019 ◽  
Vol 69 (277) ◽  
pp. 741-770 ◽  
Author(s):  
Luca Incurvati ◽  
Julian J Schlöder

Abstract We present an inferentialist account of the epistemic modal operator might. Our starting point is the bilateralist programme. A bilateralist explains the operator not in terms of the speech act of rejection; we explain the operator might in terms of weak assertion, a speech act whose existence we argue for on the basis of linguistic evidence. We show that our account of might provides a solution to certain well-known puzzles about the semantics of modal vocabulary whilst retaining classical logic. This demonstrates that an inferentialist approach to meaning can be successfully extended beyond the core logical constants.


2014 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-27 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ying Chen ◽  
Zhuo Jing-Schmidt

AbstractTwo empirical studies – a verb elicitation experiment and a collostructional analysis – were conducted to investigate the Mandarin LVS construction with respect to the lexical semantics of the verb and its collocation with grammatical aspect. Converging evidence from both studies indicates strong schematicity and productivity in the verb category of the LVS construction. Although most exemplars fall into a few major lexical semantic clusters, there are more low-frequency marginal exemplars than previously recognized, reinforcing the constructional schema in an essentially radial category. In addition to the lexical semantic regularity of the verb slot, both studies showed the existence of high-frequency tokens with prototype status. As far as grammatical aspect is concerned, the converging evidence indicates that the LVS category is compatible not only with the durative aspect, but also with the perfective as well as the resultative and directional lexical aspect. The attraction of grammatical aspect to the verb of LVS is graded rather than absolute, with some mutual selection patterns more typical than others. The two grammatical aspects as marked by the durative -zhe and the perfective -le are non-interchangeable.


2013 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 385-407 ◽  
Author(s):  
SU NAM KIM ◽  
TIMOTHY BALDWIN

AbstractThis paper presents a study on the interpretation and bracketing of noun compounds (‘NCs’) based on lexical semantics. Our primary goal is to develop a method to automatically interpret NCs through the use of semantic relations. Our NC interpretation method is based on lexical similarity with tagged NCs, based on lexical similarity measures derived from WordNet. We apply the interpretation method to both two- and three-term NC interpretation based on semantic roles. Finally, we demonstrate that our NC interpretation method can boost the coverage and accuracy of NC bracketing.


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