Extended relations

Jackendoff also makes use of subordinating functions which can be freely added to conceptual structures to capture additional entailments or to incorporate information contributed by, for example, an adjunctive modifier. We have already seen the use of one such function, exch, in dav5b above. These functions take as argument an eventuality X, which is subordinated to an eventuality Y. Those discussed by Jackendoff are listed below, with the corresponding features introducing subevents as used by Davis listed to the right.

• BY X is the means to accomplish Y. (MEANS)
• FROMX is the reason why Y occurs. (CAUSE)
• FOR X is the intended result of the action in Y. (EFFECT)
• WITH The event/state X accompanies the event/state Y. (ACC-EV)
• EXCH Y occurs in exchange for X. (EXCH)

These subordinating functions broaden the applicability of Jackendoff's representations. His conceptual structures are not only used to capture the `core' lexical semantics of a verb, but can be extended to include the contributions of sentential modifiers to the meaning of a sentence as a whole. Davis' representations, independent of other mechanisms, only reflect the semantics of the main verb of a sentence plus the contribution of its arguments. Thus the subevents associated with the features above can only be subevents entailed by the semantics of a represented verb. This is natural since Davis' goal is to explain the linking of the semantic arguments to syntactic positions, and not primarily to provide a representation from which semantic entailments can be derived. Some mechanism for extending Davis' relations with semantic information not directly relevant to linking and capturing subevents introduced by phrases not participating in the core semantics of the matrix verb in a sentence -- i.e. for accounting for adjuncts which augment the semantic relation expressed by a sentence -- must be implemented.