Abstract

This paper 1 decribes a computational treatment of the semantics of relational nouns. It covers relational nouns such as 'sister.and 'commander; and focuses especially on a particular subcategory of them, called function nouns ("speed; "distance", "rating"). Relational nouns are usually viewed as either requiring non-compositional semantic interpretation. or causing an undesirable proliferation of syntactic rules. In contrast to this, we present a treatment which is both syntactically uniform and semantically compositional. The core ideas of this treatment are: (1) The recognition of different levels of semantic analysis; in particular, the distinction between an English-oriented and a domain-oriented level of meaning representation. (2) The analysis of relational nouns as denoting relation-extensions.

Citations