D6, SFB 732 (Universität Stuttgart, 2010-2013)

Principal Investigators: Sebastian Padó, Sabine Schulte im Walde
Researchers: Alessandra Zarcone, Jason Utt
Associated Ph.D. Student: Gabriella Lapesa

• Funding information here

Project D6 was concerned with a particular phenomenon of incremental specification in context, namely the interpretation of verb-object pairs. While some verb-object pairs are interpreted compositionally ("simple composition", as in begin a holiday), the understanding of others involves covert events that are not realised on the surface ("enriched composition": for example, begin a song, in neutral context, implies begin singing a song). The interpretation of such pairs involves two specification steps: (1) the decision between simple and enriched composition; (2) in enriched composition, the specification of the covert event.

The project used psycholinguistic and computational techniques to elucidate the as of yet neglected role of lexical-semantic context factors, which had only been described in a simplified way so far. We will investigated (a) the interpretation of borderline cases and (b) the semantic relations within the set of covert events for given verb-object pairs. Practical results included a corpus-based model and a distributional characterization of constructions with covert events.

• The Metonymy 2011 workshop (Stuttgart, 15th-16th September 2011) was part of the project activities.