next up previous contents
Next: Nominals Up: Davis' multiple-inheritance lexical semantics Previous: Polysemy

Necessary Extensions

  Some advantages of Davis' formalisation over Jackendoff's are listed below.
  1. Relation arguments are associated with specific, consistent entailments.
  2. It takes advantage of inheritance to capture relationships among semantic relations and to effectively group relations together in various ways (where one relation can belong to several `groups' via multiple inheritance).
  3. The formalism can be directly inserted into the grammar formalism of HPSG, leaving in place a framework for parsing sentences and building up a representation of their semantics.
For these reasons I will build on Davis' formalisation, augmenting it with certain representational elements. Several additions have been motivated in the previous section on the basis of Jackendoff's proposals. I will suggest several more here which do not derive from Jackendoff's work but from the issues to be examined in this thesis. My goal in proposing these extensions is to extend the functionality of the representation language to allow for modeling of interactions between lexical semantic information in compositional semantics, as well as the interactions with syntactic realisation.