Generative lexicon

Generative lexicon (GL) is a theory of linguistic semantics which focuses on the distributed nature of compositionality in natural language. The first major work outlining the framework is James Pustejovsky's 1991 article "The Generative Lexicon".[1] Subsequent important developments are presented in Pustejovsky and Boguraev (1993), Bouillon (1997), and Busa (1996). The first unified treatment of GL was given in Pustejovsky (1995). Unlike purely verb-based approaches to compositionality, generative lexicon attempts to spread the semantic load across all constituents of the utterance. Central to the philosophical perspective of GL are two major lines of inquiry: (1) How is it that we are able to deploy a finite number of words in our language in an unbounded number of contexts? (2) Is lexical information and the representations used in composing meanings separable from our commonsense knowledge?

  1. ^ James Pustejovsky (December 1991). "The generative lexicon". Computational Linguistics. 17 (4): 409–441. ISSN 0891-2017. Wikidata Q81546543.