Generación y desambiguación de sentidos en el ámbito nominal: aportes al Léxico Generativo

Abstract

The relation between the generative and interpretative views of lexical meaning hasn’t been fully explored in current theoretical models about polysemy. The Generative Lexicon (Pustejovsky 1995, 2006, 2011) proposes that lexical-grammatical items operate mechanisms on the word semantic structure in order to generate one particular sense in context. Here, we use the term sense generation indicator (SGI) to refer to these elements that operate the generative mechanisms and, at the same time, are textual evidence that allow to interpret the word in context. This work aims to identify and analyze SGI types and to describe them. We study them in a textual corpus of nouns that presents regular polysemy between a locative sense and a non-locative sense. The following hypotheses are tested: i) the items that operate the generative mechanisms are of two kinds: specific for certain senses, and general to the whole nominal category, each having a different “strength” for disambiguation; (ii) the interaction between SGI with different strengths is a decisive factor for the perception of the nouns as ambiguous and this supports the dynamic quality of the lexical meaning; (iii) regarding the general SGI, from the viewpoint of the generation of lexical meaning, the expression in context of a certain lexical relation is relevant, while from the methodological perspective of disambiguation it is the particular lexical item used in a particular linguistic context the one that enables a particular reading (i.e., certain hypernym, co-hyponym, or meronym).