2002 OnTheSemanticsOfTroponymy

• (Fellbaum, 2002) ⇒ Christiane Fellbaum. (2002). “On the Semantics of Troponymy.” In: (Green et al., 2002).

Subject Headings: Semantic Relation, Verb, ISA, Troponymy, Thesaurus, WordNet

Quotes

1. Introduction: Relations in the lexicon

• The lexicon contains all those concepts to which speakers of a language attach a label (a word).
• If one examines the lexicalized concepts in relation to one another, it becomes clear that they differ in systematic ways that are characterizable in terms of similarities or contrasts. These consistent differentiations among concepts are what we call semantic relations.
• Relations are very real, though speakers may be unaware of them and may be unable to articulate them (as it the case with most metalingistic knowledge). But there are situations when one must consciously confront semantic relations. Building a lexical resource presents such a situation.

2. Semantic Relations in Lexicons and Thesauri

• The structure of a lexical entry in a dictionary reflects the relatedness of words and concepts: The target word is usually defined in terms of related word and some differentiae.
• The super-/subordinate relation, or hyponymy (or hyperonymy or ISA) relation works well to characterize the meaning of nouns, as does meronymy, the part-whose relation.
• Defining meaning in terms of such relations reflects the paradigmatirc organization of the lexicon. Many dictionaries also supply syntagmatic relations between the target and other words by means of illustrative sentences. Syntagmatic relations constrain the contexts in which a word may be used and can be seen as a complementary way of representing speaker's lexical knowledge.
• A third type of knowledge, world or encyclopedic knowledge, cannot be expressed in terms of relations, as it lists information about the concept behind the word in language not bound to formulas such as definiendum-definitions.
• A thesaurus lists words in semantically related groups. It is intended for users who have a certain concept in mind, and are looking either for alternative words to express this concept or for words that express similar concepts. Because its purpose is to suggest words that may be substitutable for each other, a thesaurus is necessarily organized paradigmatically. But the semantic relations between the members of a word group are not made explictly, nor are all words within a group related in the same way.
• The lexical database [WordNet]] (George A. Miller, 1990; Fellbaum, 1998) resembles a thesaurus in that it represents word meanings primarily in terms of conceptual-semantic and lexical relations. Relations among groups of cognitively synonymous words are given straightforwardly, without being woven in the definitions, as in conventional lexicography. But unlike a standard thesaurus, the relations are transparent and explicitly labeled; moreover, they have been deliberately limited in number. The resultant structure is a large semantic network for nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs.
• The bulk of WordNet, as indeed of any lexicon of English, is comprised of nouns; there are far more distinct noun forms than verbs or adjectives in the language. In constructing a semantic net of nouns, hyponymy and meronymy relations could be applied in a straightforward manner (but see George A. Miller, 1998, for details). By contrast, adjectives in many cases denote values of attributes, and can be interrelated via antonymy, as in the case of pairs hot-cold and long-short, where the antonyms express values of head and length, respectively. Most adjectives, like icy and elongated, have no salient antonyms; they are linked to core adjective like cold and long through a relation of semantic similarity (K. J. Miller, 1998).
• Unlike nouns and adjectives, verbs do not seem obviously related in a clearly discernible and consistent manner. The complex semantic of verb relations, in particular the one we dubbed "troponymy", will be the focus of this chapter.

2.1 Troponymy

• To distinguish this apparent hyponymy relation among verbs from the superordinate relation among nouns, we have called it troponymy (Fellbaum & Miller, 1991). Rather than expressing "kind", troponymy, which links verbs like run, ride, fly to the core verb move, or hit, scrub, kick to the basic contact verb touch, seems to express a manner elaboration. The formula capturing this relation, to run/ride/fly is to move in some manner appear to be appropriate.
• Like the ISA relation among nouns, troponymy builds hierarchical structures, or "trees", with the semantically most inclusive verb at the root and increasingly specified verbs form the branches and leaves. While noun hierarchies can be very deep (15 levels or more), verb hierarchies tend to be flatter and "bushy" rather than tall and tree-like. Most verb hierarchies do not exceed 3 or 4 levels.

References

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	Author	volume	Date Value	title	type	journal	titleUrl	doi	note	year
2002 OnTheSemanticsOfTroponymy	Christiane Fellbaum			On the Semantics of Troponymy			http://books.google.com/books?id=hbdRjdwUGjgC&oi=fnd&pg=PA23