On Defining Adjectives - Part III

Conceptual primitives in the English lexicon

“…There are two major parts of this conceptual knowledge which have to be captured: the concepts themselves and the relations that link these concepts to one another in the lexicon. I have examined the latter elsewhere (see Evens and Smith, 1978;Evens, et al, 1980;Smith and Evens, 1977;Smith, 1980). This paper focuses on the set of concepts needed in the representation of the conceptual knowledge of a native speaker of English.…”

“…The second type is one which follows a rather rigid text structure utilizing so-called defining formulae, set phrases such as "of, or belonging to," with a following NP. These will be referred to here as defining formulae and are the subject of another study (Smith, 1980). These defining formulae encode conceptual information, but of a different nature from the rest of the definition or of cross-reference type definitions.…”

Semantically significant patterns in dictionary definitions

“…Some of the defining formulae discussed in Smith (1981) and Ahlswede (1985b) seem to be limited to statlve adjectives. "Of or relating to", one of the most common, is one of these: fla. ballistic of or relating to ballistics or to a body in motion according to the laws of ballistics.…”

“…Michiels (1981Michiels ( , 1983 analyzed the Longman Dictionary of C0ntemporary Englis h (LDOCE), taking advantage of the fact that that dictionary was designed to some extent to facilitate computer manipulation. Smith (1981) studied the "defining formulae" -significant recurring phrases -in a selection of adjective definitions from We bster[s Carolyn White (1983) has developed a program to create entries for Sager's Linguistic String Parser (1981) from WY. Chodorow and Byrd (1985) have extracted taxonomic hierarchies, associated wlth feature information, from LDOCE and W7.…”

Semantic relations in information science

“…Evens, Litowitz, Markowitz, Smith & Werner (1980) surveyed the sets of lexical-semantic relations that had been studied by researchers in anthropology, linguistics, psychology and computer science before 1980. Lists of semantic relations can be found in & 1988a, Myaeng & McHale (1992), Neelameghan (1998Neelameghan ( & 2001, Neelameghan & Maitra (1978), Smith (1981), and Sowa (1984Sowa ( & 2000. Vickery (1996) provided a brief summary of the history of associative relationships in information retrieval over the past few decades.…”