Polysemy and metaphor in perception verbs: a cross-linguistic study

4.2. Pustejovsky’s generative lexicon 
Pustejovsky’s (1995) Generative Lexicon proposes that, within the 
characterisation of the semantics of the lexical item – a verb in our case –, it is possible 
to include the information that the arguments of the verb imply, and therefore, to show 
how the overall meaning of the sentence is formed.
Pustejovsky postulates a generative framework for the composition of lexical 
meanings. He proposes a new way of viewing decomposition by looking at the 
generative or compositional aspects of Lexical Semantics, rather than decomposition 
into a specified number of primitives. He rejects ‘weak compositionality’ models, where 
compositionality is achieved by enumeration of senses, and the number of lexical senses 
(lexical listings) is proportional to the number of interpretations in the language.
Instead, he introduces a ‘strong compositionality’ model, where, while still preserving 
Frege’s principle of compositionality, the number of lexical senses remains roughly 
constant relative to the space of possible interpretations in the language. In his model, 
Pustejovsky wants to provide a formal statement of language that is both expressive and 
109
As argued in Ibarretxe-Antuñano (1999d), the meaning ‘to partake’ is not only dependent on 
the inclusion of the adverb hardly. This only supports or gives more emphasis to one of the intrinsic 

---

B. Iraide Ibarretxe-Antuñano 
Polysemy and metaphor in perception verbs 
119
flexible enough to capture the generative nature of lexical creativity and sense extension 
phenomena.
In this model, there are four levels of representation; that is, the semantics of a 
lexical item 
α is a structure of four components: 
(5)
α
= < A, E, Q, I> 
Before this model is adapted to our data, a brief description of each component is 
provided. 
(i)- ARGUMENT STRUCTURE (A): specification of number and type of logical 
arguments, and how they are realised syntactically. There are four types of arguments 
for lexical items: 
-‘True arguments’ (ARG
n
): syntactically realised parameters of the lexical item. 
-‘Default arguments’ (D-ARG): parameters that participate in the logical 
expressions in the qualia, but not necessarily expressed syntactically. 
-‘Shadow arguments’ (S-ARG): parameters that are semantically incorporated 
into the lexical item. They can be expressed only by operations of subtyping or discourse 
specification. 
-‘True adjuncts’: parameters which modify the logical expression, but are part of 
the situational interpretation and are not tied to any particular lexical item’s semantic 
representation. 
(ii)- EVENT STRUCTURE (E): definition of the event type of a lexical item and 
a phrase. Making use of the constructions introduced by van Benthem (1983) and Kamp 
(1979), Pustejovsky interprets an ‘extended event structure’ as a tuple < E, 
≤ , <, °, ⊆, * 
>, where E is the set of events, 
≤ is a partial order of part-of, < is a strict partial order, ° 
is overlap, 
⊆ is inclusion and * designates the ‘head’ of an event. He argues that an 
event structure with structured subevents can be represented in an event structure tree, 
which represents the specific events and their types (E
n
), together with the ordering 
restriction over these events (RESTR
110
). 
characteristics of the sense of touch, namely yes
>. This view is extended in the discussion in 
Chapter 7. 
110
For a complete description of each restriction, see Pustejovsky (1995:67ff.). 

---

B. Iraide Ibarretxe-Antuñano 
Polysemy and metaphor in perception verbs 
120
(iii)- QUALIA STRUCTURE (Q): models of explanation. It provides the binding 
of the A and E parameters. The Qualia specifies four essential aspects of a word’s 
meaning: 
-‘Constitutive’: the relation between an object and its constituent parts. 
-‘Formal’: that which distinguishes it within a larger domain. 
-‘Telic’: its purpose and function. 
-‘Agentive’: factors involved in its origin or ‘bringing about’. 
In the qualia roles it is very important to bear in mind that on the one hand, every 
category expresses a qualia structure, giving in this way a uniform semantic 
representation compositionally from all elements of a phrase; and on the other, that not 
all lexical items carry a value for each qualia role, allowing the specification or 
application of the qualia relative to particular semantic classes. 
(iv)- LEXICAL INHERITANCE STRUCTURE (I): identification of how a 
lexical structure is related to other structures in the type lattice, and its contribution to 
the global organisation of a lexicon. 
The argument, event and qualia types must conform to the well-formedness 
conditions that are defined by the type system and by the lexical inheritance structure 
when undergoing operations of semantic composition. These four levels are connected 
by means of generative devices, which provide the compositional interpretation of words 
in context. There are three main devices described in Pustejovsky (1995:61): 
(i)-TYPE COERCION: where a lexical item or phrase is coerced to a semantic 
interpretation by a governing item in the phrase, without change of its syntactic type.
(ii)-SELECTIVE BINDING: where a lexical item or phrase operates specifically 
on the substructure of a phrase, without changing the overall type in the composition. 
(iii)-CO-COMPOSITION: where multiple elements within a phrase behave as 
functors, generating new non-lexicalised senses for the words in composition. Here there 
are also included cases of underspecified semantic forms becoming contextually 
enriched, such as ‘manner co-composition’, ‘feature transcription’, and ‘light verb 
specification’. 
With the definition of the functional behaviour of lexical items at these four 
different levels of representation, Pustejovsky tries to characterise the lexicon as an 

---

B. Iraide Ibarretxe-Antuñano 
Polysemy and metaphor in perception verbs 
active and integral component in the composition of sentence meaning. Through 
different expressive mechanisms, this model aims to group different word senses into a 
single ‘meta-entry’ or, following Pustejovsky and Anick (1988) ‘lexical conceptual 
paradigms (lcps)’, which will encode regularities of word behaviour dependent on 
context. These ‘lcps’ will constrain what a possible word meaning can be through the 
mechanism of well-formed semantic expressions. Pustejovsky uses the lcps in order to 
account for that inherent ‘something’ in the semantics of nominals that makes them able 
to project any of the separate senses of the noun in distinct syntactic and semantic 
environments. He argues that lcps do not represent different senses but aspects of the 
same meta-entry. For example, in the case of window as a physical object and as an 
aperture, Pustejovsky represents them by means of a dotted type
111
of the form: 
α: σ
1
α:σ
2
lcp (
α): σ
1
. 
σ
2
where 
lcp = {
σ
1
. 
σ
2
, 
σ
1
, 
σ
2
} 
that is to say for the case of window: 
window_lcp = {physobj . aperture, physobj, aperture} 
Under Pustejovsky’s approach metaphorically extended meanings are not 
included as part of the language; these cases are explained pragmatically instead. 
Briscoe and Copestake (1991) try to incorporate this in their approach. They argue that 
whereas other approaches postulate for a cognitive account of conceptual transfer 
(Lakoff and Johnson 1980) or for a general pragmatic account of the ‘cue-validity’ 
(Nunberg 1979), these phenomena can be accounted by rule-governed lexical processes, 
giving lexical licenses or rules which conventionalised and language specific aspects of 
these general conceptual transfers are expressed and which serve as language-specific 
filters on the general process. 
121
111
A ‘dotted type’ is the logical type relation between the polysemous senses of a lexical item. 
(See Pustejovsky 1995: 93, for a more detailed description). 

---

B. Iraide Ibarretxe-Antuñano 
Polysemy and metaphor in perception verbs