Semantic Composition for NSM, Using LFG+Glue
Avery D. Andrews · 2006
The Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) program of Anna Wierzbicka and her colleagues has a lot to say about the meanings of individual words, but virtually no work has been done on the problem of how to assemble these meanings to produce meanings for utterances, which is the problem of semantic composition that is the major focus of formal semantics. In this paper I begin to fill this gap by making some definite proposals for doing semantic composition in NSM using the ‘glue logic ’ that has been proposed as a method of semantic assembly for the syntactic theory of LFG. Although many different generative syntactic theories could provide a basis for semantic composition in NSM, LFG is a reasonable choice, because it combines to a relatively high degree the properties of being formally explicit, easy to learn, and applicable to a typologically diverse range of languages, and the architecture of LFG+Glue provides a clean separation between issues of semantic composition on the one hand, and syntactic realization on the other. I will examine some issues that arise in composing explications for some of the valence options