[Lexicog] Slots and slot fillers (nee "Nouns")

[Mike Maxwell]

Thanks for all the comments.  I suspect this is more common with these 
particular words in the Puget Sound area than elsewhere, because 
everyone there has had the experience of "waiting a ferry" (and some of 
them are probably doing that today, since this is a holiday).  I'll try 
to reply with a few thoughts.

David Tuggy wrote:
 > Sounds like a new sense of "a ferry" is being gradually
 > conventionalized (at least for that speaker and those
 > in his circle): "the cycle, and the associated period
 > of time, from one ferry trip to the next."  And/or a
 > new (transitive?) sense of "wait" = "wait for/out Obj".

It may be that "ferry" is being conventionalized as meaning a period of 
time.  I'm not sure what the significance of this fact is, but most such 
nouns that sound slightly odd as measures of time, sound better if you 
add a quantifier:

    I got on board the bus exhausted, and slept three stops
    past where I was supposed to get off.

--sounds better to me than

    I got on board the bus exhausted, and slept a stop
    past where I was supposed to get off.

As for there being a new sense of "wait", I don't think so--I think all 
of us would agree that

    I waited three days.

was just fine, and I think the "waiting a ferry" simply fits into this 
construction.  For that matter, any durative verb can, I think, be 
substituted for "wait".  (David made a lot of other comments, to which 
I'm tempted to reply, but this msg is too long already...)

Mike Cahill wrote:
 > I've never heard "I waited a ferry" or a similar expression,
 > and it sounds non-native to me. But could some cases of "waited"
 > be an erosion of "Awaited?"

The speaker was a native of the Seattle area.  (I don't imagine they 
have these here ferries in Teaxas, or even in Ohio, Mike, so I'm not 
surprised you haven't heard this...)  As for "awaited" --> "waited", the 
meaning was (I'm pretty sure) different.  It wasn't that we were just 
awaiting a ferry, we had gotten into the line of cars in time for the 
ferry we intended to take--there just wasn't room for all the cars, so 
we waited a duration of time = a ferry boat cycle.

Patrick Hanks wrote:
 > "How long did you wait?"
 > -- "Oh, about two trains."
 > Sounds very odd -- really borderline.

Sounds fine to me...you wouldn't be British, would you?

Ron Moe wrote:
> Is there any reason why we can't mark the semantic class of lexemes as well
> as the morphological or syntactic class?  If a parser can look at 
 > neighboring words and note the syntactic class of those words,
 > is there any reason why it can't note the semantic class as well?

For parsers, you can do anything you want.  In the bad ol' days, there 
were even things called "semantic parsers", which were domain-specific 
parsers that eschewed syntactic rules in favor of semantic 
generalizations ("eat" can be followed by a phrase identifying a food, 
etc.).

The problem lies in defining what a semantic class is.  From a 
theoretical point of view--and this is what I was really asking 
about--the problem is that there is no clear criteria for such a class. 
  Given the right situation--like Puget Sound ferries and lines of cars 
waiting for them--most any NP can be given a temporal adverbial 
interpretation (and maybe other sorts of adverbial interpretations).

Finally, I want to say that this example started me wondering about 
subcategorized complements vs. adjuncts, and whether the distinction is 
valid.  It is a notoriously hard distinction to make in many languages, 
including English.  Given the proper motivation, many NPs can appear in 
positions where they would not normally be expected.  Examples include 
cognate objects ("I dreamed a dream", "I slept a good sleep"), affected 
objects (which perhaps behave more like indirect objects, e.g. "I bought 
me a Mustang"), and the sorts of adverbials I mentioned.

At the same time, many languages do make a definite distinction between 
transitive and intransitive verbs (e.g. ergative languages).

I best give up now...

    Mike Maxwell


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