Schedule of Topics

January 30

• Topic: Introductory ideas; administrivia; an empirical exercise involving "break", "buy", and "sell"
• Reading(s):
  • None

February 6

• Topic: Dictionaries and senses
• Reading(s):
  • Atkins et al. (1986), "Explicit and implicit information in dictionaries"
  • Miller (1986), "Dictionaries in the mind"
  • Resnik (in prep), "Word sense ambiguity"
  • Jurafsky and Martin (2000), "Lexical semantics"
  • Kilgarriff (1997), "I don't believe in word senses"

February 13

• Topic: Taxonomic organization of word meaning
• Reading(s):
  • Miller (1998), "Nouns in WordNet"
  • Fellbaum (1999), "The organization of verbs and verb concepts in a semantic net"
  • Pustejovsky and Boguraev, "Lexical knowledge representation and natural language processing"

February 20

• Topic: Foundational issues in lexical representation
• Reading(s):
  • Saint-Dizier (1999), "An introduction to the lexical semantics of predicative forms"
  • Chomsky (1965), Aspects of the Theory of Syntax, chapters 2 and 4
  • Jackendoff (1978), "Grammar as evidence for conceptual structure"

February 27

• No class: snow day.

March 6

• Topic: More on lexical representation
• Reading(s):
  • Pustejovsky (1991), "The generative lexicon"
  • Jackendoff (2002), Foundations of Language, chapter 11, "Lexical Semantics"

March 13

• Topic: Levin and diathesis alternations
• Reading(s):
  • Beth Levin (1993), "Introduction: the theoretical perspective"
  • Levin and Rappaport Hovav (1995), "The causative alternation: a probe into lexical semantics and argument structure"
  • Gail McKoon and Talke Macfarland. 2002. Event templates in the lexical representations of verbs. Cognitive Psychology 45:1, 1-44

March 20

• Topic: Implicit arguments
• Reading(s):
  • Levin (1993), section on indefinite object alternation
  • Resnik (1996), "Selectional constraints: an information-theoretic model and its computational realization"
  • Olsen and Resnik, "Implicit object constructions and the (in)transitivity continuum"
  • Mauner et al. (2002), "The lexical source of unexpressed participants and their role in sentence and discourse understanding"

March 27 (No class: spring break)

• Optional reading(s): Hopper and Thompson (1980), "Transitivity in grammar and discourse"

April 3

• Topic: Project Proposals
• Reading: Read each other's project proposals

• Topic: Argument structure
• Reading(s):
  • F. Palmer (1994), Grammatical roles and relations, chapter 1, "Introduction"
  • F. Palmer (1994), Grammatical roles and relations, chapter 2, "Roles and relations"
  • Levin, B. and M. Rappaport Hovav (1996) ``From Lexical Semantics to Argument Realization''

April 10

• Topic: More on roles and argument structure
• Reading(s):
  • Dowty (1991), "Thematic proto-roles and argument selection"
  • Grimshaw (1999), Argument Structure, ch 1, "principles of argument-structure representation"
  • Grimshaw (1999), Argument Structure, ch 2, "The structure of A-structure"

April 17 (class at special time/location)

• Topic: Connections to syntactic theory
• Reading(s):
  • Hale and Keyser (2002), "Prolegomenon to a Theory of Argument Structure", chapters 1-3.

April 24

• Topic: Middles and reflexives
• Reading(s):
  • Kemmer (1994), "Middle voice, transitivity, and the elaboration of events"
  • Lidz, "The argument structure of verbal reflexives"

May 1

• Topic: Constructions
• Reading(s):
  • Optional but recommended:
    Adele Goldberg, Constructions: a new theoretical approach to language , Trends in Cognitive Science, May 2003.
  • Adele Goldberg, Patient Arguments of causative verbs can be omitted: the role of information structure in argument distribution", Language Sciences 34/4-5. 503-524.
  • Adele Goldberg and Ray Jackendoff (2002), "The English resultative as a family of constructions" (draft manuscript)
  • (Possibly: Levin reply to Goldberg (2000)?)

May 8

• Topic: Verb acquisition -- the bootstrapping debate
• Reading(s):
  • Syntactic bootstrapping paper TBD (probably Gleitman)
  • Semantic bootstrapping paper TBD (probably Pinker)
  • Grimshaw, "Lexical Reconciliation" paper?