Underspecification of 'meaning': the case of Russian imperfective aspect

Sonnenhauser, Barbara (2004): Underspecification of 'meaning': the case of Russian imperfective aspect. Second Workshop on Text Meaning and Interpretation, Barcelona, Spain, 25. - 26. Juli 2004. Hirst, Graeme (Hrsg.): In: Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Text Meaning and Interpretation, DL Hosted proceedings United States: Association for Computational Linguistics. S. 89-96

Abstract

One main problem for NLP applications is that natural language expressions are underspecified and require enrichments of different sorts to get a truth-conditional interpretaton in context. Underspecification applies on two levels: what is said underdetermines what is meant, and linguistic meaning underspecifies what is said. One instance of this phenomenon is aspect in Russian, especially the imperfective one. It gives rise to a variety of readings, which are difficult to capture by one invariant meaning. Instead, the imperfective aspect is sense-general; its meaning has to be specified in the course of interpretation by contextual cues and pragmatic inferences. This paper advocates an account of the different imperfective readings in terms of pragmatic principles and inferential heuristics based on, and supplied by, a semantic skeleton consisting of a 'selectional theory' of aspect. This framework might serve as basis for a rule-guided derivation of aspectual readings in Russian.

• Dokumententyp: Konferenzbeitrag (Paper)
• Fakultät: Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaften > Department 2 > Slavische Philologie
• Themengebiete: 400 Sprache > 490 Andere Sprachen
• Ort: United States
• Sprache: Englisch