The Disambiguation of the English Verbs Send and Open : a Study Based on the Object Oriented Method
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Title: The disambiguation of the english verbs send and open : a study based on the object oriented method Author: Anna Drzazga Citation style: Drzazga Anna. (2012). The disambiguation of the english verbs send and open : a study based on the object oriented method. Praca doktorska. Katowice : Uniwersytet Śląski University of Silesia THE DISAMBIGUATION OF THE ENGLISH VERBS SEND and OPEN - A STUDY BASED ON THE OBJECT ORIENTED METHOD Anna Drzazga Advisor: Prof. dr hab. Wiesław Banyś Katowice, 2012 Uniwersytet Śląski DEZAMBIGUIZACJA ANGIELSKICH CZASOWNIKÓW OPEN i SEND W RAMACH UJĘCIA ZORIENTOWANEGO OBIEKTOWO Anna Drzazga Praca napisana pod kierunkiem: Prof. zw. dr hab. Wiesława Banysia Katowice, 2012 CONTENTS INTRODUCTION...............................................................................................................................4 1. Selected modern theories of lexical semantic analysis.......................................................... 8 1.1 .The Meaning-Text Theory and the Explanatory Combinatory Dictionary..................... 8 1.2. James Pustejovsky’s Generative Lexicon and Frame Semantics..................................... 39 1.3. The Object Oriented Approach proposed by Wiesław Banyś...........................................61 1.3.1. Application of the Object Oriented Approach to the disambiguation of verbs 76 2. Some of the available analyses of the English causative verbs and the presentation of causativity in the WordNet............................................................................................................. 85 3. Analysis of the causative verbs open and send.....................................................................103 3.1. Disambiguation of the verb open.........................................................................................103 3.1.1. Presentation of the lexical entry in Webster’s New World Dictionary of American Language and Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary of Current English..................... 103 3.1.2. Polish equivalents of the verb open presented on the basis of PWNOXFORD English-Polish Dictionary........................................................................................................ 106 3.1.3. The syntactic-semantic patterns of the verb open based on the analysis of the corpus material and dictionary entries................................................................................... 110 3.1.4. A final word on the analysis and translation of the verb open................................. 169 3.2. Disambiguation of the verb send.........................................................................................184 3.2.1. Presentation of the lexical entry in Webster’s New World Dictionary of American Language and Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary of Current English..................... 184 3.2.2. Polish equivalents of the verb send proposed by PWNOXFORD English - Polish Dictionary (PWNO)..................................................................................................................187 3.2.3. The syntactic-semantic patterns of the verb send based on the analysis of the corpus material and dictionary entries................................................................................... 191 3.2.4. A final word on the analysis and translation of the causative verb send ............... 250 4. General conclusions....................................................................................................................267 A PPEN D IX ...................................................................................................................................... 270 1. The table of object classes that co-occur with the verb..o p e n ...................................270 2. The table of object classes that co-occur with the verb send: ...................................303 3. The tables recapitulating the analysis of the verb open and sen d ...............................348 ABBREVIATIONS AND SYMBOLS....................................................................................... 355 REFERENCES................................................................................................................................356 SUMMARY IN POLISH .............................................................................................................. 364 3 Introduction The 21st century is the era of computers, which have entered all spheres of human life. They are machines which are programmed to sequentially and automatically carry out a sequence of arithmetic or logical operations. The development of computer technology and the Internet has influenced all walks of human life in that it enables people to work more efficiently and quicker. Modern world requires of people to be able to perform a lot of tasks at a very short time or even simultaneously, so computers are indispensable means to achieve success not only at work, but also in personal life. The overpowering tendency of always being in a hurry, so characteristic of the first decade of the 21st century, has also had its impact on lexicography. To make the work of lexicographers easier, scientists have been conducting a research, whose aim is to work out a bilingual electronic dictionary. Thus, computer-aided translation, which is a form of translation where a human translator renders texts from one language into another using special computer software designed to support and facilitate the translation process, has become very popular recently. Some advanced computer- assisted translation solutions, like e.g. controlled machine translation (CMT), are widely known among professional translators. Unfortunately, the programmes available on the market fail to yield accurate translations right away, mainly because automated processing of any human language is far more complex than it has originally been assumed. To translate one language into another, the grammar of both languages has to be understood, including the grammar of word forms (morphology) and the grammar of sentence structure (syntax). As far as syntax is concerned, one has to understand the semantics and the lexicon, as well as something of the pragmatics of language use. In this way, what was originally just an effort to translate between languages developed into a scientific discipline which focuses on understanding how to represent and process a natural language using computers. 4 The starting point to work out a dictionary which would enable translators an accurate translation of words is the creation of a set of efficient tools, which not only would facilitate the translation process, but which would enable the translator to face the problem of word polysemy, which certainly gives many of them sleepless nights. Word sense disambiguation (WSD) in the process of automatic translating texts should focus on the generation of appropriate translational equivalents in the target language. The present thesis is an attempt at the comparative English-Polish study of two verbs: open and send in order to provide their appropriate Polish translational equivalents. The Object Oriented Approach (0 0 A), proposed by Wiesław Banyś (2002, 2005), employed to conduct the analysis of the verbs and their sense disambiguation makes use of information technology, computational linguistics, and web corpora, which places it among the most advanced modern lexicographic conceptions. Our thesis consists of two basic parts. The first one, theoretical, is devoted to the presentation of selected modern theories of lexical semantic analysis which display some common features with the approach employed throughout the empirical part of our comparative study. In Chapter 1.1. we describe the Meaning-Text Theory (MTT) put forward by Igor Melćuk, Alexander Zholkovskij and Jurij Apresjan in 1965. The description focuses on the presentation of lexical functions and the Explanatory Combinatorial Dictionary (ECD), the key concepts of the theory. In order to show how the ECD works in practice, at the end of the chapter we provide the Dictionarie ’s entry for the verb teach. Chapter 1.2. is devoted to the presentation of the Generative Lexicon first outlined by James Pustejovsky in 1991. Four levels of semantic representation (argument structure, event structure, qualia structure and lexical inheritance structure) are described. Frame Semantics constitutes a part of Chapter 1.2., where we discuss such notions as frame, script and prototype. 5 Chapter 1.3. concentrates on the presentation of the theoretical assumptions of the Object Oriented Approach, which constitutes the theoretical framework within which our comparative study is carried out. Chapter 1.3.1. is an attempt to show the application of the Object Oriented Approach to the disambiguation of verbs in general. A step by step presentation of all the stages of the process of disambiguation of a verb that a lexicographer conducts in order to arrive at proper translational equivalents is demonstrated. All the stages of the analysis are supported by examples taken from the empirical part of the thesis. In Chapter 2 we devote some space to a presentation of some available analyses of the English causative verbs, as both the verbs open and send are causative ones. We also make an attempt to show how the WordNet - a lexical database of English - deals with the problem of causative verbs on the example of the verb open. The results of the process of disambiguation of the verbs open and send are included in the empirical part of our thesis,