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ErgSemantics_TimeExpressions

DanFlickinger edited this page Jun 30, 2015 · 9 revisions

ESD Test Suite Examples

Abrams arrived Tuesday morning.
Abrams arrived June 3rd.

Linguistic Characterization

Time expressions in English exhibit a wide range of idiosyncracies, both lexical and syntactic, but also conform to several sub-regularities which the grammar captures in the form of lexical rules. Two of these lexical rules have semantic effects, illustrated in the examples above. Both rules relate a lexical entry for a name of a month or a day-of-week to a derived entry which supplies two quantifiers, to bind the instance variables of the name's predicate and the neighboring word's predicate, and also a two-place `of_p' relation linking the inherent arguments of these two predicates.

One lexical rule, used for e.g. Tuesday in Tuesday morning, relates a lexical entry for the name of a day of the week to the derived entry supplying quantifiers and the `of_p' relation, so that when it combines with the word for a part of a day, such as morning or night, a well-formed semantics emerges which is very similar to the paraphrase in on the morning of Tuesday, the second.

Similarly, a second lexical rule, for e.g. June in June third, relates a lexical entry for the name of a month of the year to the derived entry supplying the quantifiers and the `of_p' relation, ready to combine with the semantics of the word for a day of the month, to produce a semantics which corresponds closely to the alternative phrasing the third of June.

Motivating Examples

The following are examples involving this phenomenon:

  • The morning of Tuesday, the third, was cloudy.

  • The third of June was cloudy.

ERS Fingerprints

Analyses of these two types of time expressions are characterized by (1) the EP of_p', which is a relation between two individuals, one for a named day or month, and the other for a day of the month or part of a day; and (2) two quantifiers, a def_implicit_q' for the named entity, and a `def_explicit_q' for the day of month or part of a day.

  of_p[ARG1 x1, ARG2 x2]
  dofm_or_mofy_rel(ARG0 x2)
  def_explicit_q(ARG0 x1)
  def_implicit_q(ARG0 x2)

Note that the `of_p' also identifies its label with that of the relation whose ARG0 is its ARG1, as with other intersective modifiers.

Interactions

The primary motivation for this lexical rule analysis is to minimize the differences between the semantics of these expressions and their variants with an overt of-PP, as illustrated above.

Reflections

It might be worthwhile to further minimize the differences between the pairs of paraphrases, by replacing the def_implicit_q' predicate with proper_q'.

Open Questions

Expert External Commentary

Grammar Version

  • 1214

References

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