“I like work: I can sit and look at it for hours” - Type clash vs. plausibility in covert event recovery

Abstract

A range of event-subcategorizing verbs can combine with entity-denoting nouns, like begin the newspaper. The interpretation of such sentences typically involves the recovery of covert events (CE) which are not realized on the surface, as in .begin reading the newspaper.. We report on an ongoing study that scrutinizes two assumptions made by traditional accounts: (a) that the triggering of CEs can be ascribed to the object’s ontological type; and (b), that one or two CEs can be retrieved for each noun. Preliminary evidence against both assumptions is presented.

Alessandra Zarcone

Professor of Language Technologies and Cognitive Assistants

Computational linguist with a background in NLP and in psycholinguistics, working on AI, NLP and human-machine interaction.