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<Paper uid="P84-1109">
  <Title>ANOTHER LOOK AT NOMINAL COMPOUNDS</Title>
  <Section position="4" start_page="0" end_page="509" type="metho">
    <SectionTitle>
II BACKGROUND
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> A. Approaches in Linguistics The early study of Lees (1963) classified NC's on purely grammatical criteria, and it failed to provide constraints that could explain how NC's are semantically interpreted.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> In s number of more recent studies, such as Levi (1978)9 there has been an attempt to view NC's as governed by tight semantic constraints. Thus, according to Levi, any novel NC realizes a pattern where either: a) the head noun is a deverbal naminalizstion and its modifier is interpreted as an argument of the related verb; or b) the two nouns are related by one of exactly nine deletable predicates (&amp;quot;is the cause of&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;is for&amp;quot;, etc.).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> This reductionist attempt has been criticized, most notably by Downing (1977), on the  grounds that the interpretation of NC's crucially involves pragmatic knowledge, and that numerous cases of NC's (such as thalidomide parents) will resist any analysis in terms of a closed set of relations. These criticisms have led theorists like Selkirk (1982) to adopt the position that only &amp;quot;verbal compounds&amp;quot; (those constructed on a pattern &amp;quot;argument + nominalization&amp;quot;) are amenable to linguistic characterization; all other NC's would have to be explained in separate extralinguistic theories.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> C. Approaches in NLP Several systems have been developed in an NLP framework to deal with the problem of interpreting NC's; two recent exempIes are reported in Finin (1980) and McDonaId (i982).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> In both systems, the individual nouns of an NC are first mapped onto conceptual representations where concepts are characterized by a set of &amp;quot;roles&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;slots&amp;quot;, and are arranged in an abstraction hierarchy. Interpreting a compound then amounts to forming a derived concept on the basis of the constituent concepts; in most cases, this is done by interpreting one of the concepts as a slot filler for the other. For example, the interpretation of steel adapter would involve inserting the concept associated with steel into a RAW-MATERIAL slot within the representation of adapter. But the authors do not examine in any detail the question of eventual constraints on this interpretation process, such as the effect of word order.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="5"> Another crucial issue which has not been explored in sufficient detail, is the nature of, and the justification for the particular set of slots which is assigned to a given concept. Finin is somewhat more explicit on this question. Some nouns have slots which represent standard case roles. Role nominals, on the other hand, are nouns which refer to a particular case role of another concept; for example, food refers to the object role of eat, and this fact provides the key to the interpretation of cat food. This notion will be examined in detail below. But Finin also resorts to other types of slots (e.g.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="6"> &amp;quot;raw-material&amp;quot;) which are not discussed.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
  <Section position="5" start_page="509" end_page="510" type="metho">
    <SectionTitle>
III PREDICATIVE NOUNS
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> A. Root Nouns with Arguments The fact that several classes of non-derived nouns strictly subcategorize phrases which are semantically interpreted as arguments has received very little attention in the literature. This phenomenon would deserve an extensive study, and we can only give here some relevant examples, together with an indication of the semantic categories between which the relation expressed by the noun effects a mapping: (3) a. measure nouns map: objects onto quantities examples: speed (of), temperature (of), volume (of), size (of) b. &amp;quot;area&amp;quot; nouns map: objects onto subparts examples: top (of), side (of), bottom (of), center (of), core (of) c. collective nouns map: individuals onto sets examples: group (of), set (of) d. representational nouns map: objects onto representations of objects null examples: picture (of), diagram (of), sense (of) e. other examples location (of), goal (of), brother (of), king (of) Most if not all of these argument-taking nouns can have their argument satisfied by a modifier noun in an NC:  (a) a. oil temperature b. box top c. tank group d. circuit diagram e. component location  A treatment in terms of predicate/argument patterns for this type of NC seems far superior to Levi's (1978) use of the semantically empty &amp;quot;deletable predicate&amp;quot; HAVE (&amp;quot;the component HAS a location&amp;quot;). Although these NC's are excluded from Selkirk's (1982) class of verbal compounds, they are amenable to the same type of semantic description. null B. Action and State Nominalizations Most studies on NC's have recognized the fact that deverbal nominalizations exhibit a semantic behavior closely related to that of the verb, and subcategorize elements that can occur as modifier nouns in NC's. As mentioned above, these are in fact the only cases that Selkirk (1982) deems characterizable at the level of linguistic competence.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> 8ut there seems to be no reason why deadjectival nominalizations should be handled in a different way. In examples (5) and (6), an action and a state are nominalized, with the argument  occurring either in a prepositional phrase or as a modifier in an NC: (5) a. Someone removes the pump.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> b. removal of the pump c. pump removal (6) a. Uranium is scarce.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> b. scarcity of uranium c. uranium scarcity  We are not claiming that there is exact synonymy between the (b) and (c) examples, but only that they exhibit the same predicate/ argument pattern. Action nominals can take various types of arguments in NC's, and sometimes several of them simultaneously:  (7) a. pump failure (subject) b. Montreal flight (source, goal) (8) a. poppet chatter tendency</Paragraph>
  </Section>
  <Section position="6" start_page="510" end_page="511" type="metho">
    <SectionTitle>
IV ROLE NOMINALS
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> A. Nominalizations Deverbal nominalizations can refer not only to the action expressed by the verb, but also to the agent (driver), instrument (lubricant), patient (employ-~-~and result (assembly) of this action. Except maybe for results, the term &amp;quot;role nominal&amp;quot; seems appropriate, since the nominalization refers to the filler of one of the roles of the verb. Although these nouns are not, strictly speaking, predicative, they generally permit to form NC's in which the other is interpreted as an argument of the underlying verb:  (9) truck driver = one who drives trucks (I0) engine lubricant = something with which engines are cated ill) 18H employee = one who is employed by IBH  lubri(12) pump assembly = the result of assembling a pump With agent and instrument nominals (9, i0), there is a strong tendency to assign an &amp;quot;habitual&amp;quot; aspect to the underlying verb and generic reference to its object; this kind of interpretation is awkward when the argument appears in a PP: (I)) ?a driver of trucks B. Root Nouns  The term &amp;quot;role nominal&amp;quot; is due to Finin (1980) who uses it to cover not only nominalizations of the type described above, but also any noun which can be semantically interpreted as referring to a role of a given verb, whether or not this verb happens to be morphologically related. This claims amounts to saying that, semantically, we have relations such as the following:  (14) a. pilot:fly :: driver:drive b. gun:shoot :: lubricant:lubricate c. food:eat :: employee:employ  A related claim underlies Zholkhovskij &amp; Hel'cuk's (1971) use of certain &amp;quot;lexical func- null tions&amp;quot;: (15) a. Sl(bUy) = buyer b. S3(buy) = seller c. Sloc(battle) = battlefield d. Sinst(See) = eyes  where Si, $1o c and Sinst are defined as functions t~t yield the typical name of, respectively, the i- arrant, the location a-nd the instrument. Fillmore (1971) also makes a comparable proposal, when he suggests that the lexical entry of knife should include (16) as a component:  (16) use: I of &lt;V 0 1 A&gt; where V=cut C. On the Definition of Role Nominals  Mow exactly should we understand the notion of role nominals? Finin's statement that they refer to an underlying case role of a verb is not accurate: they refer to role fillers, not to the roles themselves. Assuming that they denote a set of role fillers, we can ask if this set is: a. the set of all possible fillers for the role; or b. a set of typical fillers for that role; or c. any set of possible fillers for the role. Possibility (a) seems to describe correctly numerous cases of deverbal nouns. For example, it seems clear that anyone who is employed is an employee. However, with agents and instruments, there is a tendency to reserve the role nominal for habitual fillers: one hesitates to apply the term writer to a person who only wrote a letter. Horeover, with this definition, knife would not be a role nominal for cut, since it is perfectly possible to cut bread with a sword. The notion would then loose much of its power, since we need it to explain why bread knife is interpreted as &amp;quot;a knife used as an instrument for cutting bread&amp;quot;.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> On the other hand, definition (c) seems too weak: even if a sword can be used to cut bread, bread sword is odd in a normal context (contextual factors will be discussed below). Thus, definition (b) seems the most appropriate. D. 3uatifyin9 Role Assignments For those role nominals where there is no morphological evidence of relatedness with the underlying verb, one is forced to rely mostly on intuitions. However, the risk of arbitrariness can be reduced by looking for further evidence from other linguistic phenomena.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2">  i. Evaluative Adjectives When Fillmore (1971) introduced his notion of role nominal, he was attempting to characterize the behavior of evaluative adjectives, not the behavior of NC's. He noted that a ~ood ~, where X is a role nominal, means: a. if X is an agent: one who performs the associated activity skilfully (s good driver, a good pianist); b. if X is an instrument: a thing which permits the associated activity to be performed easily (a good knife, a good broom); cdeg In other cases, it seems that the resultant meaning is less predictible (good food has certain properties concerning nutritiousness and taste; a good house is comfortable, built to last, etc.).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> As far as we can tell, the evaluation domain for agents and instruments is precisely the activity which is relevant for the understanding of NC'B. Thus while good driver evaluates the driving, car driver specifies its object; moreover, in ~ood car driver, car falls within the evaluation domain: car drivers and truck drivers are evaluated on different scales. Evaluative adjectives can thus be used as a further source of evidence in the description of role nominals.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
  <Section position="7" start_page="511" end_page="512" type="metho">
    <SectionTitle>
2. Denominal Verbs
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> Another phenomenon which is relevant to the question of role nominals and NC's is the creation of denominal verbs. Clark &amp; Clark (1979) examine this very productive process, in which a verb formed by zero-affixation is understood &amp;quot;in such a way that the parent noun denotes one role in the situation, and the remaining surface arguments of the denominal verb denote other roles in the situation&amp;quot; (p. 787). For example, Max subwayed downtown means that Max went downtown on a subway. Intuitively, it appears obvious that the knowledge involved in this interpretation process is very closely related to whatever permits interpreting the NC downtown subway as &amp;quot;the subway that goes downtown&amp;quot;.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> An important aspect of C &amp; C's work is to show that the formation of denominal verbs is heavily dependent on contextuai knowIedge. Thus if you and me both know that Phii has iong had the crazy habit of sticking trombones into the nose of bypassers, I can inform you that PhiI has just tromboned a poiice officer. Notice that in the same context, 9opd trombone wouId presumably mean a trombone that is easy to stick into someone's nose.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> In such cases, the interpretation is based on particular, situational knowledge. NC's can also be based on this type of knowledge. For example, if that same Phil uses different types of trombones for men and women, we might speak of his women trombones, to mean trombones of the type that Phil sticks into the nose of female bypaasers.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> But C &amp; C claim that, more frequently, denominal verbs are based on ~eneric knowledge about concrete objects, knowIedge which is accessibIe to aii speakers in a Iinguistic community. This claim is to be linked with Downing's (i977) remark that aithough NC's are sometimes &amp;quot;deictic&amp;quot;, they are most often based on generic or permanent reIationships.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> Obviously, the relevant knowledge (whether particular or generic) is at least as much about the world as about language. In fact, it is clear that both types condition each other. For example, objects that are used as vehicles will tend to be verbalized on the syntactic pattern of movement verbs; and in the absence of other evidence, one is likely to infer from its syntax that The fairy pumpkined the kids to Narnia alludes not to an &amp;quot;satin 9 pumpkin&amp;quot; but to a &amp;quot;transportation pumpkin&amp;quot;.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="5"> In order to predict the range of meaning of large classes of denominal verbs, C &amp; C propose to encode some generic knowledge in the lexicon, by means of &amp;quot;predominant features&amp;quot; such as: (17) a. x is the agent of Act (to pilot y) b. x is the instrument of Act (to pump y) c. x is the result of Act (to group y) d. x is the location of y (to can y) e. x is the locatum of y (to cover y) f. x is the time of Act (to weekend in y) It is quite apparent that these features are meant to capture the same type of facts as role nominsIs. It is easy to find NC's which paraIiel each ciass of verb singled out by them:  (17') a. aircraft piiot b. oii pump c. tank group d. oil can e. pump cover f. Montreal weekend  We believe that the semantic mechanisms that are at work in the interpretation of NC's, denominal verbs and evaluative adjectives are basically similar. By using independent evidence from these phenomena, and an adequate generalization of the notion of role nominal, one can go s long way toward uncovering the relevant semantic mechanisms.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="6"> The notion of role nominal, as we understand it, is at the interface between linguistic and extralinguistic knowledge. Nouns may have severaI different roies, depending on the contingencies of the entities that they denote; in those cases context usuaiiy makes one roie more saiient. In fact, context may even impart a noun with an unusuai roie, as we have seen. However, we beiieve that in ordinary texts, such as technieai  manuals, NC's that are analyzable in terms of role nominals are most often based on the usual, generic roles of the nouns. But this can only be shown through a large scale description of the relevant NC's.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="7"> E. A Tentative Scheme Since the knowledge we have to encode is tied to world knowledge, there is a risk that it could become overwhelmingly compiex. However, we will minimize this risk, by limiting the scope of our inquiry to a suitably restricted subianguage. Technical manuals are interesting in this respect because they exhibit at the same time a tightIy constrained universe of interpretation, and an exceptional productivity in compounding.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="8"> As to the semantic framework, we will not use case grammar, even if our discussion of role nominals was couched in the terms of this theory for expository purposes. As is well-known, case grammars raise a number of difficult problems. For example, the distinction between agent and instruments is problematic. At the morphological level, both can give rise to -er nominalizations; at the syntactic level, both can appear in subject position, and in with NP environments (cf. co-agents); and at the semantic level, both notions are frequently undistinguishable, especially in texts dealing with machines, such as technical manuals. Since action verbs can generally occur with an agent, an instrument, or both, it does not seem necessary to include two slots for each verb in the dictionary: general rules should predict the relevant facts.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="9"> Another problem is that if we want the notion of role nominal to be general enough, a role nominal should be able to refer to entities which are not case slots, at least in the usual sense of this term. Result nominals, for instance, do not refer to a case slot as such.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="10"> There is in fact no evidence that the interpretation rules for NC's crucially involve case roles rather than argument places, and our descriptions will be couched in terms of a predicate/argument notation. This notation is perfectly compatible with the use of an ontology that is richer than standard predicate logic.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="11"> For example, if we agree with 3ackendoff's (198)) claim that &amp;quot;place&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;paths&amp;quot; constitute basic cognitive categories, we can define &amp;quot;typed&amp;quot; variables with the appropriate range. In our descriptions below, p will denote a path variable, that is, a variable ranging over entities denoted by complex expressions constructed out of ,! ,, path functions (into, from, toward, via, etc.) ,! ,, and places . Similarly, we will use e as an &amp;quot;event&amp;quot; variable, as in Moore (1981) ~d Hobbs (1984).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="12"> A role nominal will contain within its lexical entry one or more statements of the form &amp;quot;x such that P(x)&amp;quot;. We do not think that diacritic markers such as &amp;quot;typical function&amp;quot; are required; rather, notions such as typicality, should be a consequence of the semantic rules which interpret lexical entries.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="13"> We give below a few examples of the type of lexical specification for role nominals with which we want to experiment. At this stage of our work this should be taken as nothing more than a first approximation. The material enclosed in brackets represents selectional restrictions.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="14">  (21) hinge x such that ATTACH(x,y,z) (22) brace x such that SUPPORT(x,y) (23) witness x such that SEE(x,e) (24) line x such that CONDUCT(x,y,p) &lt;fluid(y)&gt;</Paragraph>
  </Section>
  <Section position="8" start_page="512" end_page="513" type="metho">
    <SectionTitle>
IV CONSTRAINING INTERPRETATION RULES
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> The preceding sections have discussed two aspects of the lexical semantics of nouns that are relevant for the analysis of NC's: argument-taking nouns and role nominals. Assuming that the lexicon contains this type of information, we can now ask how it is used by semantic interpretation rules.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> More specifically, the picture that emerges is that lexical entries provide predicate/argument patterns which contain variables; these variables have to be bound to the semantic material associated with some other noun. We must then ask what are the rules that govern this binding process.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2">  A. Relative Order of the two Nouns I. Predicative Nouns Selkirk (1982) claims that the modifier noun can satisfy an argument of the headnoun but not vice-versa. Finin (1980) claims that argument satisfaction (or slot filling) is possible in both directions. Finally, McDonald (1982) takes the intermediate position that satisfaction of the head by a modifier is much more frequent. Now, consider the following pairs of examples: null  (25) a. oil temperature b. ??temperature oil (26) a. uranium scarcity b. ??scarcity uranium (27) a. pump removal b. ??removal pump (28) a. student invention b. ??invention student  It is clear that the (b) examples, if interpretable st all, cannot easiIy realize the pattern found in the (a) examples. However, there is a very productive process which permits an action nominal to occur to the left of its argument; this pattern is most productive with inanimate headnouns:  (29) a. repair man b. ?man repair (30) a. cooling device b. device cooling (3l) a. bleed valve b. ??valve bleed c. valve bleeding (32) a. jacking point b. ??point jacking  In the first three (a) examples, the headnoun is interpreted as a subject argument (agent or instrument). In (28a), point is interpreted as a iocation (where one jacks something). In all of the (a) examples, the action nominai is interpreted as denoting a permanent roie or function of the headnoun.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> When order is reversed, meaning and, eventually, acceptability are affected. In the (b) examples, the action nominal is not interpreted as expressing a permanent function of the other noun. Thus, if one can manage subject interpretations in (29b) and (31c) -- &amp;quot;a repair done by men (not robots)&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;a valve which bleeds something&amp;quot; --, it will not follow that the men are repair men or that the valve is a bleed valve. The pattern &amp;quot;argument + predicative noun&amp;quot; has some pecularities of its own; for example, why is (32b) unacceptable no matter the role assignment that one makes? Or why is girl swimmin 9 unacceptable? In the latter case, it cannot be, as suggested by Selkirk (1982) that subject arguments are prohibited in general: pump failure is fine. It may be that subjects are ruled out for -ing nominals, unless they express a result (cf. consumer spending).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> But on the whole, the pattern where the predicate comes first is much more constrained, since it permits oniy action nominaIs, and produces a semantic resuit very simiiar to =oie nominais. Thus, a cooIing device and cooier denote very simiIar entities; the same is true of jacking system and jack. Notice that in exampies such as: ()3) air temperature monitoring system monitorin 9 system forms a constituent, even if air temperature is understood as the object of of the monitoring; this is confirmed by the fact that (34) receives a similar interpretation: (34) monitoring system for air temperature It seems that this modification pattern has the effect of creating a role nominal out of its two constituents.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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