Andrews, Avery D. (2006). Semantic composition for NSM, using LFG + Glue. In Keith Allan (Ed.), Selected papers from the 2005 Conference of the Australian Linguistic Society. http://www.als.asn.au. PDF (open access)
The NSM program has a lot to say about the meanings of individual words, but virtually no work has been done on the problem of how to assemble these meanings to produce meanings for utterances, which is the problem of semantic composition that is the major focus of formal semantics. In this paper I begin to fill this gap by making some definite proposals for doing semantic composition in NSM using the ‘glue logic’ that has been proposed as a method of semantic assembly for the syntactic theory of LFG.
Although many different generative syntactic theories could provide a basis for semantic composition in NSM, LFG is a reasonable choice, because it combines to a relatively high degree the properties of being formally explicit, easy to learn, and applicable to a typologically diverse range of languages, and the architecture of LFG + Glue provides a clean separation between issues of semantic composition on the one hand, and syntactic realization on the other.
I will examine some issues that arise in composing explications for some of the valence options of the verbs warn and go, showing that naive substitution is insufficient, but that the typed lambda calculus can deal with the problems adduced. We will also see that the problem of composing explications should not be deferred indefinitely, since attempting to compose explications can expose deficiencies which aren’t evident when the explications are viewed in isolation. I will conclude with a brief discussion of some of the problems afforded by phenomena of quantifier scope.
Research carried out in consultation with or under the supervision of one or more experienced NSM practitioners
