Taking Scottish Gaelic as its empirical base, the book provides a detailed working out of a semantic system of argument classification which moves away from lexically-driven thematic roles in the traditional sense and towards a more constrained, syntactically motivated, set of primitives. The Problem of Polysemy Edited by James Pustejovsky, Brandeis University, and Branimir Boguraev, Natural Language Program, Apple Computer Inc., California Lexical ambiguity presents one of the most intractable problems for language processing studies and, not surprisingly, it is at the core of research in lexical semantics. Originally published as two special issues of the Journal of Semantics, this collection focuses on the problem of polysemy, from the point of view of practitioners of computational linguistics. Moltmann presents a range of new empirical generalizations with data from English and a variety of other languages involving plurals, mass nouns, adnominal and adverbial modifiers such as as a whole, together, and alone, nominal and adverbial quanitfiers ranging over parts, and expressions of completion such as completely and partly. She develops a new theory of part structures which differs from traditional mereological theories in that the notion of an integrated whole plays a central role and in that the part structure of an entity is allowed to vary across different situations, perspectives, and dimensions.
Prototype theory makes a crucial distinction between central and peripheral sense of words.
Geeraerts explores the implications of this model for a theory of semantic change, in the first full-scale treatment of the impact of the most recent developments in lexicological theory on the study of meaning change. He identifies structural features of the development of word meanings which follow from a prototype-theoretical model of semantic structure, and incorporates these diachronic prototypicality effects into a theory of meaning change. Lawrence Erlbaum Assoc.