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

[Patrick Hanks]

Mike --- 3 thoughts and an aaargh:

FIRST THOUGHT: You say (or imply) that "waited an hour" and "waited a ferry"
are both adverbials of duration -- at least on Puget Sound -- and this seems
right to me. Semantically, they surely cannot be direct objects.

SECOND THOUGHT: "We waited an hour" is synonymous with "We waited for an
hour" -- but "we waited a ferry" is not synonymous with "we waited for a
ferry".

THIRD THOUGHT: What other verbs take this sort of duration adverbial? "Wait"
and "sleep", OK, but what else? Suppose you had been so hungry that you
bought
sandwiches and ate them the whole time you were waiting.  You could not then
have
said to your host, "We ate a ferry", referring to the duration of your
sandwich eating.

FOURTH THOUGHT: Constraints, preferences, coercions ... Aaargh. This looks
like a highly local local coercion. ("local" both in the sense
"verb-specific" and in the sense "specific to Puget Sound (and maybe other
ferry-side locations)". I couldn't say "I wiated a train" with this meaning.
Could you?

Patrick


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Mike Maxwell" <maxwell at ldc.upenn.edu>
To: <lexicographylist at yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Monday, May 29, 2006 5:09 PM
Subject: Re: [Lexicog] Slots and slot fillers (nee "Nouns")


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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