Deep Lexical Semantics

Abstract

The link between words and the world is made easier if we have conceptualized the world in a way that language indicates. In the effort I will describe, we have constructed a number of core formal theories, trying to capture the abstract structure that underlies language and enable literal and metaphorical readings to be seen as specializations of the abstract structures. In the core theories, we have axiomatized composite entities (or things made out of other things), the figure-ground relation, scalar notions (of which space, time and number are specializations), change of state, causality, and the structure of complex events and processes. These theories explicate the basic predicates in terms of which the most common word senses need to be defined or characterized. We are now encoding axioms that link the word senses to the core theories, focusing on 450 of words senses in Core WordNet that are primarily concerned with events and their structure. This may be thought of as a kind of “advanced lexical decomposition”, where the “primitives” into which words are “decomposed” are elements in coherently worked-out theories.