Chapter 18 Lexical Functions: Description of Lexical Relations in a ...

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—Chapter 18. Lexical Functions— 88 assurance maladie lit. (illness insurance) = (medical insurance) and assurance vie (life insurance) are collocations: in the first case you insure against illness, in the second case you insure your life. (Other cases of the same type are assurance incendie lit. (fire insurance) vs. assurance logement lit. (apartment insurance).) Or else Fr. auto-école vs. driving school; or Fr. [un] condamné à vie lit. (condemned to life) = (person condemned to life in prison) vs. [un] condamné à mort lit. (condemned to death); cf. life sentence vs. death sentence. In all these collocations the problem is created by a semantic actant expressed idiosyncratically (it is shown in boldface). The technique used in MTT to describe such phenomena is to use the Government Pattern, in which all such idiosyncrasies are explicitly stated. Thus, the collocations of this type are covered by GPs rather than by LFs. (See Chapter 17, 5, p. 00ff.) 6.3 Lexical Functions in Linguistic Representations As far as the participation of LFs in linguistic representations is concerned, the standard and the non-standard LFs are treated differently. The standard LFs are considered to be Deep Lexical Units; therefore, they appear in the DSynt-Structure of the sentence under processing. Thus, during synthesis, the standard LF f is selected based on its semantic source in the initial SemS. For instance, for the expression high temperature of the liquid we have the correspondence (16): (16) (temperature ) (liquid) 1 2 1 (!) (very) TEMPERATURE " I LIQUID SemS DSyntS ATTR Magn The LF Magn is computed according to LF-Sem-Rule 2, see above, 5.1.5. (The adjective HIGH is computed later—at the SSynt-level as an element of the value Magn(temperature); it is taken from the lexical entry of TEMPERATURE and inserted into the SSyntS of the sentence.) The non-standard LFs are not Deep Lexical Units and they do not appear in any representation. They are simply used in the lexicon to ensure the correct lexical choice in the process of synthesis. For instance, for the expression leap year we have the correspondence (17):
(17) (year) (include) 1 2 —Chapter 18. Lexical Functions— 89 1 (366) (day) YEAR ! ATTR LEAP The meaning (that includes 366 days) is specified in the lexical entry for YEAR as a non-standard LF with the value LEAP: YEAR … that has 366 days : leap This non-standard LF allows for the transition SemS ⇒ DSynt in (17); as a result, the LU LEAP appears in the corresponding DSyntS. 6.4 Universality of LFs One of the most important features of LFs is their linguistic universality: they can be used to describe both semantic derivation and restricted lexical cooccurrence (= collocations) in any human language. Interestingly, they correspond to meanings that receive special treatment in natural language: to what is called grammatical meanings, i.e., inflectional and/or derivational meanings (grammemes and derivatemes). Thus, the LFs provide lexical expressions for meanings out of a ‘privileged’ set, which under different circumstances are expressed morphologically. I cannot go into greater detail here, but I think that it could be useful to illustrate LFs in languages other than English. Therefore, I present below some examples taken from thirteen different languages. 1. English Magn(rain) = heavy Magn(argument) = convincing, strong, weighty, Oper1(trip) Oper1(deal) = take [ART ~] = strike [ART ~] < knock-down Magn(applause) = thunderous, deafening, boisterous, whirl-wind, … Oper1(apologies) = offer [~s] Magn(resistance) = dogged, ferocious, fierce, stiff, ... Oper1(resistance) = offer, put up [~] 2. French Magn(pluie (rain)) = forte (strong), violente (violent) < torrentielle (torrential)) Oper 1(voyage (trip)) = effectuer (carry out), faire (make) [ART ~] Magn(argument (argument)) = fort (strong), convaincant (convincing), massue lit. (club) Oper 1(accord (deal)) = arriver (arrive), parvenir (achieve) [à ART ~]
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Means noun ((δ) = (means [for L]))
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Here are some examples of LFs. —C
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