Publications

Authors:

Jezek, E.; Melloni, Chiara

Title:

Nominals, Polysemy, and Co-predication

Year:

2011

Type of item:

Articolo in Rivista

Tipologia ANVUR:

Articolo su rivista

Language:

Inglese

Format:

A Stampa

Referee:

Sì

Name of journal:

JOURNAL OF COGNITIVE SCIENCE

ISSN of journal:

1598-2327

N° Volume:

12

Page numbers:

1-31

Keyword:

Nominals; Polysemy; Complex Types; Event Structure; Qualia Structure; Co-predication

Short description of contents:

In this paper, we examine the event/result meaning contrast displayed by Italian nominals derived from creation and redescription verbs, such as costruzione ‘construction, building’ and traduzione ‘translation’. The goal of our research is twofold. First, we intend to verify whether the intriguing pattern of polysemy exhibited by these nominals may be analyzed as a special case of complex type, with the two constituents of the type analyzed as process and result-state, as proposed in Pustejovsky (1995). Second, we want to clarify what factors might be causing the difficulty in co-predication (i.e. simultaneous access to both subtypes, commonly regarded as the test for complex types) that these nominal typically exhibit. Results of this study can be summarized as follows: the result-state interpretation (i.e. construction as ‘the state of being constructed’) appears not to be generally accessible to these nominals, and co-predication appears to be licensed only under specific syntactic and semantic conditions. We claim that both behaviors follow from the inherent properties of the event associated with these nominals, which encodes a peculiar temporal relation between the subevents. Based on this insight, we propose a revised modelling of the lexical representation of creation and redescription nominals within the Generative Lexicon (GL) framework, informed by empirical evidence. The results of our study help to provide a better understanding of the phenomenon of lexical polysemy and the interplay between aspectual and lexical properties of Action Nominals.

Note:

Journal of Cognitive Science is an official journal of the International Association for Cognitive Science (IACS, http://ia-cs.org) and published biannually by the Institute for Cognitive Science at Seoul National University, located in Seoul, Korea. The Association currently consists of member societies of different countries such as Australia, China, Japan, Korea, and European Union. However, paper submission by anyone in the whole world is welcome at any time. Its main concern is to showcase research articles of highest quality and significance within the disciplines of cognitive science, including, but not limited to, philosophy, psychology, linguistics, artificial intelligence, neuroscience, aesthetics, anthropology, and education, insofar as it is deemed to be of interest to those who pursue the study of mind. In particular, we would like to encourage submissions that cross the traditional disciplinary boundaries.

Web page:

http://j-cs.org/issues/issues.php

Product ID:

64339

Handle IRIS:

11562/379412

Deposited On:

November 17, 2012

Last Modified:

February 23, 2023

Bibliographic citation:

Jezek, E.; Melloni, Chiara, Nominals, Polysemy, and Co-predication «JOURNAL OF COGNITIVE SCIENCE» , vol. 12 , 2011 , pp. 1-31

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