Towards a Compositional Analysis of German Light Verb Constructions (LVCs) Combining Lexicalized Tree Adjoining Grammar (LTAG) with Frame Semantics

Jens Fleischhauer, Thomas Gamerschlag, Laura Kallmeyer, Simon Petitjean


Abstract
Complex predicates formed of a semantically ‘light’ verbal head and a noun or verb which contributes the major part of the meaning are frequently referred to as ‘light verb constructions’ (LVCs). In the paper, we present a case study of LVCs with the German posture verb stehen ‘stand’. In our account, we model the syntactic as well as semantic composition of such LVCs by combining Lexicalized Tree Adjoining Grammar (LTAG) with frames. Starting from the analysis of the literal uses of posture verbs, we show how the meaning components of the literal uses are systematically exploited in the interpretation of stehen-LVCs. The paper constitutes an important step towards a compositional and computational analysis of LVCs. We show that LTAG allows us to separate constructional from lexical meaning components and that frames enable elegant generalizations over event types and related constraints.
Anthology ID:
W19-0407
Volume:
Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Computational Semantics - Long Papers
Month:
May
Year:
2019
Address:
Gothenburg, Sweden
Editors:
Simon Dobnik, Stergios Chatzikyriakidis, Vera Demberg
Venue:
IWCS
SIG:
SIGSEM
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
79–90
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/W19-0407
DOI:
10.18653/v1/W19-0407
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jens Fleischhauer, Thomas Gamerschlag, Laura Kallmeyer, and Simon Petitjean. 2019. Towards a Compositional Analysis of German Light Verb Constructions (LVCs) Combining Lexicalized Tree Adjoining Grammar (LTAG) with Frame Semantics. In Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Computational Semantics - Long Papers, pages 79–90, Gothenburg, Sweden. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Towards a Compositional Analysis of German Light Verb Constructions (LVCs) Combining Lexicalized Tree Adjoining Grammar (LTAG) with Frame Semantics (Fleischhauer et al., IWCS 2019)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/W19-0407.pdf