Towards a Representation of Idioms in WordNet
Christiane Fellbaum · 1998
this paper, we consider the possibility of extending WordNet to accommodate figurative meanings in the English lexicon. While much has been written on figurative language, there is no agreement on the boundary between literal and non-literal language, see e.g. (0). Criteria that are commonly accepted include semantic non-compositionality and syntactic constraints on internal modification (such as adjective and adverb insertion) and movement transformations. Our purpose here is not to attempt a clear delimitation or definition of non-literal language, but to examine how extended senses of words and phrases from different syntactic and lexical categories-or conforming to none of the standard categories-are compatible with the network structure of a relational lexicon like WordNet and its particular way of representing words and concepts. Our discussion will focus on, but not be limited to, idiomatic verb phrases.