@InProceedings{iordachioaia-vanderplas-jagfeld:2016:GramLex,
  author    = {Iordachioaia, Gianina  and  van der Plas, Lonneke  and  Jagfeld, Glorianna},
  title     = {The Grammar of English Deverbal Compounds and their Meaning},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Workshop on Grammar and Lexicon: interactions and interfaces (GramLex)},
  month     = {December},
  year      = {2016},
  address   = {Osaka, Japan},
  publisher = {The COLING 2016 Organizing Committee},
  pages     = {81--91},
  abstract  = {We present an interdisciplinary study on the interaction between the
	interpretation of noun-noun deverbal compounds (DCs; e.g., task assignment) and
	the morphosyntactic properties of their deverbal heads in English. Underlying
	hypotheses from theoretical linguistics are tested with tools and resources
	from computational linguistics. We start with Grimshaw’s (1990) insight that
	deverbal nouns are ambiguous between argument-supporting nominal (ASN)
	readings, which inherit verbal arguments (e.g., the assignment of the tasks),
	and the less verbal and more lexicalized Result Nominal and Simple Event
	readings (e.g., a two-page assignment). Following Grimshaw, our hypothesis is
	that the former will realize object arguments in DCs, while the latter will
	receive a wider range of interpretations like root compounds headed by
	non-derived nouns (e.g., chocolate box). Evidence from a large corpus assisted
	by machine learning techniques confirms this hypothesis, by showing that,
	besides other features, the realization of internal arguments by deverbal heads
	outside compounds (i.e., the most distinctive ASN-property in Grimshaw 1990) is
	a good predictor for an object interpretation of non-heads in DCs.},
  url       = {http://aclweb.org/anthology/W16-3811}
}