Compositional semantics of German prefix verbs
Maria Klara Wolters · 1997
A compositional account of the semantics of German prefix verbs in HPSG is outlined. We consider only those verbs that are formed by productive synchronic rules. Rules are fully productive if they apply to all base verbs which satisfy a common description. Prefixes can be polysemous and have separate, highly underspecified lexical entries. Adequate bases are determined via selection restrictions. 1 The Problem Determining the semantics of unknown words which can be derived from lexicon entries is highly desirable for natural language understanding (Light, 1996). In this paper, I sketch a compositional account of the semantics of German prefix verbs derived from a verbal base, concentrating on those verbs that can be generated by a productive word formation rule. Like (Witte, 1997), I assume that the meaning of most of these verbs can be derived compositionally by unifying the semantic representations of its constituents. Example: (1) durch + laufen ('through + to run') ) durchlaufe...