Author: Marta Coll-Florit
Programme: Doctoral Programme on the Information and Knowledge Society
Language: Catalan
Supervisors: Dr Salvador Climent and Dr Irene Castellón
Faculty / Institute: Internet Interdisciplinary Institute (IN3)
Subjects: Language and Linguistics
Key words: Verbal semantics, Aspect, Mode of action, Cognitive linguistics, Psycholinguistic experiments, Corpus linguistics, Computational representation
Area of knowledge: General Linguistics
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Resum
This thesis presents a new model of aspectual classification and representation which is valid for theoretical approaches as well as for applied models, such as computational lexicography. The main contributions of this work can be summarized in three basic points. First, it accounts for different constraint degrees in the interaction between lexical aspect and sentential context, while shedding light on the gradual nature and inherent prototypicity effects of Aktionsart, thus offering a contiguous circle of aspectual categories which opens new ways of understanding the shift between categories. Secondly, aspectual polysemy, and more specifically the relationship between Aktionsart and selectional restrictions, is accounted for, allowing the formulation of new criteria in order to distinguish verbal senses, which is one of the main needs of natural language processing resources. Finally, and more interestingly, this model has been validated empirically by means of corpus linguistic techniques and psycholinguistic experiments.