Lexical representation and modification within the noun phrase

Abstract

Formal semanticists of natural language have traditionally worked with/nrelatively impoverished lexical representations and have generally been/nconservative in drawing the line between those aspects of interpretation which/nare determined by lexical information and composition rules, and those which/nare determined contextually, leaving a substantial amount of work to context./nWhile this strategy is justifiable if one considers the job of the semanticist to/naccount only for what is strictly entailed, it has also in some sense greatly/nsimplified this job, resulting in rather impoverished lexical representations/nand relegating many problems to the so-called pragmatics wastebasket, if in a/nrelatively orderly fashion./nNonetheless, in this paper I discuss two kinds of problems, both related to/nmodification within the noun phrase, which show why richer lexical/nrepresentations similar to those proposed in Generative Lexicon theory/n(Pustejovsky 1995) should be of interest to formal semanticists.