The next part in this book concerns linguistic issues for lexical semantics. The main issues addressed are based on the notion of Generative Lexicon (Pustejovsky, 1991) and its consequences for the construction of lexicons.

The first chapter, “Linguistic constraints on type coercion,” by James Pustejovsky, summarizes the foundations of the Generative Lexicon which he defined a few years ago. This text investigates how best to characterize the formal mechanisms and the linguistic data necessary to explain the behavior of logical polysemy. A comprehensive range of polymorphic behaviors that account for the variations in semantic expressiveness found in natural languages is studied.

Within the same formal linguistic paradigm, we then have a contribution by Sabine Bergler, “From lexical semantics to text analysis,” which illustrates several issues of the Generative Lexicon using data from the Wall Street Journal. This chapter addresses in depth an important issue of the Generative Lexicon: what kind of methods can be used to create Generative Lexicon lexical entries with precise semantic content for the Qualia roles of the Generative Lexicon, from linguistic analysis. Special attention is devoted to the production of partial representations and to incremental analysis of texts.

The next chapter, “Lexical functions, generative lexicons and the world” by Dirk Heylen, explores the convergences and divergences between Mel'čuk's analysis of lexical functions and the generative lexicon approach. The author then proposes an interesting and original knowledge representation method based on lexical functions mainly following Mel'čuk's approach.