When GL meets the corpus: a data-driven investigation of semantic types and coercion phenomena

In this paper we present an analysis of corpusderived V-Object combinations aiming to provide a data-driven characterization of Semantic Types (STs) and improve our understanding of how types behave compositionally, i.e. how they enter compositional processes and are modulated by them. As a theoretical framework, we adopt the enriched compositional rules and the type system as presented in Pustejovsky (2007). Our main concerns are twofold: i. ) first of all, we will show with a specific case-study how a data-driven investigation can shed light on the organization of the type system and on semantic compositional operations affecting types; ii. ) starting from the results of this investigation, we intend to propose a general methodology for lexical modeling in which the Generative Lexicon (GL) theory and corpus analysis are deeply interwoven in a process of mutual feeding. In fact, we argue that, if on the one hand corpus data can help to anchor the study of lexical dynamics and type system on empirical evidence, on the other hand GL can provide the crucial interpretative key for corpus data. 1 Theoretical background One of the major developments of the GL theory in recent years has been the integration of the type system into a theory of argument selection where what counts for compositional rules is the correspondence between the type selected by the predicate and the type of the argument(s) (Pustejovsky 2001, 2007). Types may be of three main sorts: simple-, unifiedand dot-types. Simple types correspond to natural types, e.g. lion, rock, water, etc. Unified types extend simple types with telic and/or agentive dimensions, and essentially correspond to types of artifactual entities and/or entities inherently endowed with a specific functionality, e.g. knife, beer, teacher, etc. Finally, dot types correspond to intrinsically polysemous types (e.g. school, book, etc.), obtained through a complex type-construction operation on natural and unified types. This tripartite type system also applies to verbs and adjectives, which express simple, unified or dot predicative functions depending on the type of the argument they select. What triggers semantic operations such as coercion is precisely the syntagmatic clash between selecting and selected type. When it occurs, this clash may fail completely to assign an interpretation to the combination (as in the case of *the rock died) or it may give rise to two kinds of coercion operations: exploitation and introduction. In the first case, some component of the lexical meaning is accessed and exploited, whereas in the second case, some new conceptual material is introduced contextually. Globally, the theory now predicts 9 possible domain-preserving operations on types, as reported in Table 1. Next to operations on types, GL syntagmatic processes also include co-composition phenomena between V and argument, which license new interpretations of the predicate in context. Since both operations of typing and co-composition may take place simultaneously on the same syntagmatic sequence, the picture of what goes on where in a word combination, as far as the construction of its meaning goes, is not an easy one to reconstruct.