Selectional preferences and semantic similarity in adjectives
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- In this thesis, I study the variables that affect the selection between semantically similar adjectives in English, such as ``big''/``large'', ``high''/``tall'', and ``fast''/``quick''. Currently, there is no general model for predicting the selection between adjectives that compete on a given meaning. The proposals that do exist focus on specific pairs of adjectives rather than the selection between them across the board. I attempt to bridge this gap by integrating models of lexical competition with theories of adjective semantics. I propose a novel distinction between an indicative property of an adjective and its focal dimensions. The former is the core meaning of the adjective, and it is an abstract property with undetermined variables. The latter are possible value assignments for these undetermined variables, which can saturate the indicative property in different ways depending on which ones are selected. I show how these two meaning components interact to yield the selectional preferences expressed by adjectives. Motivated by this theoretical analysis, as well as well-known approaches to pragmatics, I raise the hypothesis that semantically similar adjectives should express a distributional pattern in which the rarer one conveys a more specialized meaning than the more frequent one. I operationalize this hypothesis using the Rational Speech Acts framework, and demonstrate through a series of quantitative studies how it predicts the empirical distribution of adjectives.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic resource; remote; computer; online resource |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Place | California |
| Place | [Stanford, California] |
| Publisher | [Stanford University] |
| Copyright date | 2022; ©2022 |
| Publication date | 2022; 2022 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Korat, Omer |
|---|---|
| Degree supervisor | Potts, Christopher, 1977- |
| Thesis advisor | Potts, Christopher, 1977- |
| Thesis advisor | Condoravdi, Cleo A, 1962- |
| Thesis advisor | Lassiter, Daniel |
| Degree committee member | Condoravdi, Cleo A, 1962- |
| Degree committee member | Lassiter, Daniel |
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Linguistics |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|---|
| Genre | Text |
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Omer Korat. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Linguistics. |
| Thesis | Thesis Ph.D. Stanford University 2022. |
| Location | https://purl.stanford.edu/kg395yy5786 |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2022 by Omer Korat
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license (CC BY).
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