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Semantic Inheritance in the Lexical Paradigms of Old English Strong Verbs

Paper · 2023 · Luisa Fidalgo Allo

Summary

The study asks how meaning is passed down within Old English word families built on strong verbs. In each family, derived verbs share form and sense with a base verb. All 328 lexical paradigms of primitive strong verbs were taken from the Nerthus lexical database, revised, and analysed. That is 1,509 verbs: 328 primes and 1,181 derivatives. Verb senses were grouped into WordNet-style synsets. The primitive's synsets act as the root, and each derived sense is attached to it, or to other derived senses, through a typed semantic link. The method is worked through step by step on the paradigm (ge)berstan. Every derivational link turned out to fit one of six relations: four lexical entailments (troponymy, -troponymy, backward presupposition, cause) plus synonymy and opposition. Synonymy is the most common, followed by troponymy and cause. The result matters because it turns loose talk of "related meanings" in a word family into a countable, typed network. It also shows how far derived senses drift from the base.

Key points

  • The data comes from Nerthus (Martín Arista et al. 2016): 328 strong-verb paradigms comprising 328 lexical primes and 1,181 derived verbs.
  • The theoretical frame is WordNet (Princeton 2010), whose verb section has 13,767 synsets. It follows Fellbaum's split of entailment by whether the two events overlap in time:
    • troponymy and -troponymy involve temporal inclusion;
    • backward presupposition and cause do not.
  • Synonymy is the most frequent relation, followed by troponymy and cause. Backward presupposition, -troponymy and opposition are the rarest.
  • Pairs linked by synonymy or troponymy stay semantically close. Pairs linked by backward presupposition, opposition or -troponymy diverge more in meaning specification.
  • Opposition tends to appear between state or change-of-state verbs. The author also suggests that semantic relatedness may go together with syntactic closeness, but this needs further study.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. Each word family is modelled as a small graph rooted in the base verb's senses, with every derived sense attached by exactly one typed edge, so drift in meaning becomes measurable instead of impressionistic.
  • I2. A polysemous verb is sometimes split into its own synset rather than merged, because merging would hide a real troponymy or cause link to another sense.
  • I3. Ambiguous senses are resolved in a fixed fallback order: first the context of the whole paradigm, then etymology, then an external reference grammar.
  • I4. When transitivity is uncertain, the intransitive reading is chosen by default, justified by a known diachronic trend toward transitivization.
  • I5. Entailment types are sorted by temporal inclusion (overlap versus strict precedence or causation), which tells us how two events are ordered in time.

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

  • I1 (world): Derivational families such as break/outbreak/breakthrough could be compiled as typed edges in the verb-class knowledge layer, so an unfamiliar derived verb inherits a known relation to its base.
  • I2 (world): When building WordNet-derived synsets, a sense should stay separate if merging would erase a causative or manner edge that later inference needs.
  • I3 (learn): Lexical repair rules could use the same documented priority chain, logging which tier decided each case so that every choice stays explainable.
  • I4 (frames): Role assignment for verbs with unclear valency could use an explicit, justified default (anticausative first) that is recorded in the frame's explanation trace.
  • I5 (world): Troponymy edges imply that the events co-occur, while presupposition and cause edges imply that one precedes the other, which can seed event ordering in the text's world model.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Institutions

🎓Universidad de La RiojaLogroño · Spain24 works · 125 citations

 Fields, topics and concepts

📚 Shelves 2The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Arts and Humanities · 16,039 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 15,891 works

🧭 Topics 2Research subjects and languages the work is about.English · 2,263 worksHistorical linguistics & language change · 249 works

Cite

Cite as Luisa Fidalgo Allo. 2023. Semantic Inheritance in the Lexical Paradigms of Old English Strong Verbs. SELIM 28.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.17811/selim.28.2023.1-17

@inproceedings{allo2023semantic,
  title = {{Semantic Inheritance in the Lexical Paradigms of Old English Strong Verbs}},
  author = {Luisa Fidalgo Allo},
  booktitle = {SELIM 28},
  year = {2023},
  doi = {10.17811/selim.28.2023.1-17},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.17811/selim.28.2023.1-17}
}

References

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