The Semantics of Lexical Underspecification
James D. Pustejovsky · Folia Linguistica · 2017
Abstract In this paper, I examine the mechanisms responsible for enabling underspecified lexical forms to acquire a determinate and unique Interpretation in the composition of the sentence. In particular, I study the behavior of several classes of lexical items exhibiting degrees of systematic or logical polysemy. These words present an interesting challenge to conventional treatments of polysemy and füll specification in natural language semantics. Extending the analysis of these classes presented in Pustejovsky (1994, 1995), I elaborate the formal mechanisms responsible for capturing the syntactic and semantic behavior of nouns such äs