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

[Mike Maxwell]

Patrick Hanks wrote:
> When doing corpus-based analysis of verb meaning and use in English, I'd
> love to have a semantically driven parser that could distinguish adverbials
> of manner/attitude from instrumental adverbials, regardless of the number of
> words involved in each. This is because the type of adverbial can sometimes
> affect the meaning of the verb, thus:
> 
> treat someone {with respect / respectfully}   = ATTITUDE
> treat someone (with chemotherapy/chemotherapeutically) = MEDICAL
> 
> -- where the number of words in the adverbial is immaterial and its semantic
> value is what matters.  But I suppose that is too much to hope for.

My favorite adverbial story is about the time we were late to a 
barbecue, because we had gotten stranded on the other side of Puget 
Sound waiting in a line of cars for another ferry.  When we finally 
arrived, our host said, "Ah, you waited a ferry!"

It was obvious what he meant.  Less obvious was how this would be 
handled in a theory of syntax.

The construction is not limited to 'wait', e.g. given the appropriate 
circumstances, one might say "You slept a whole ferry", just as well as 
you might say "You waited through an entire ferry" or "You slept through 
an entire ferry" or "You slept too long".  If "a ferry" were the direct 
object, then why can it be omitted and a PP or adverbial appear in its 
place?  You don't see that kind of substitutability with ordinary 
transitive verbs.

Rather, what appears to me to be happening is that you can use any 
phrase that is susceptible to being interpreted as an adverbial of the 
relevant sort.  But that means treating the appearance of an NP in a 
semantic way, not through syntax.  (And I don't think that a rule like
   AdvP --> {NP, PP, Adv}
or some such is an answer--it's more like a statement of the problem.)

I could go on, but since this is a lexicography list, not a syntax list, 
I'll refrain...

    Mike Maxwell


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