Principle-based parsers, such as PAPPI (Fong, 1991), require appropriate sophisticated lexicons. One generally accepted condition on the nature of lexical entries is that lexical-semantic representations, or templates, should reflect the realization of the verbs' arguments in syntax, including available alternations. In contrast to Levin and Rappaport Hovav's (1998) increasingly complex semantic representations, we argue for a small inventory of elementary templates that undergo neither augmentation nor reduction. Instead, we show how restrictions on the co-occurrence of templates account for the syntactic behavior of verb classes, specifically their (in)ability to participate in alternations such as the middle, inchoative, and resultative.
For the colloquium series schedule, see the UMD Computational Linguistics Colloquium Series web page at http://umiacs.umd.edu/~resnik/cl_colloquium/. If you are interested in meeting with the speaker, please contact Philip Resnik (resnik@umiacs.umd.edu).