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<Paper uid="W91-0210">
  <Title>Lexical Structures for Linguistic Inference</Title>
  <Section position="7" start_page="109" end_page="109" type="concl">
    <SectionTitle>
5 Conclusion
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> In this paper we considered violations of selectional restrictions for verbs of different semantic fields.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> First, we discussed musical terms as they occur in an electronic &amp;quot;notes&amp;quot; conference and found that violations of the selectional restriction for the direct object (restricted to &amp;quot;music&amp;quot;) in fact describe a systematic set of &amp;quot;aspects&amp;quot; of music, indeed allowing us to formulate coercion rules that make it possible to speak of the required semantic inferences ill general terms. Coercion rules are a generative device, illustrating one of the dynamic aspects of the Generative Lexicon formalism, which aims to represent world knowledge that is reflected in the syntactic and semantic behavior of words. The inference rules used in a generative lexicon are reminiscent of common sense reasoning but nmch more tightly constrained (and therefore limited).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> We illustrated on the musical terms that interesting differences in the acceptance of violations of the selectional restrictions for the object position can be represented (and explained) by abstractions that often hold in other domains. For instance we confirmed that the notion of &amp;quot;packager&amp;quot;, occurring with mass terms ill general, plays all important role in the musical domain as well.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> This approach is advantageous compared to purely syntactic/semantic or purely common sensical approaches because it identifies certain pragmatic considerations needed to describe syntactic/semantic behavior (notoriously missing or assumed in syntactic or formal semantic theories) yet constrains the immense space for pragmatic inferences according to the lexical definitions and a small set of generative devices, thus leaving to common sense reasoning proper only truly novel uses of language.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> The semantic domain of reporting verbs served to illustrate that not only can we resolve selectional violations within this paradigm, but that from the very compositional meaning of a reporting verb with its subject, we can automatically derive pragmatic constraints on the topic of the complement clause, thus limiting even here the work of the pragmatic inferencer.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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