Preference semantics, ill-formedness, and metaphor

  • Authors:

  • Dan Fass;Yorick Wilks

  • Affiliations:

  • University of Essex, Colchester, Essex, England;University of Essex, Colchester, Essex, England

  • Venue:
  • Computational Linguistics - Special issue on ill-formed input
  • Year:
  • 1983

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Abstract

This paper is about the relationships between Preference Semantics (PS) and ill-formedness, and between Preference Semantics and metaphor. Two types of "preference", declarative and procedural, are distinguished. The PS framework is examined with respect to notions of well- and ill-formedness, and two criteria for ill-formedness are distinguished, both of which are possessed by PS: an absolute criterion that corresponds to conventional notions of well- and ill-formedness, and a relative criterion that does not.Four possible strategies are described for representing ill-formed input in general, and metaphors in particular. The strategies and the semantic representations produced by them are compared regarding their correspondence to human understanding (admittedly superficial given the shallowness of the PS representation) and their ability to produce correct sentence translations. We conclude that, because of the ambiguity of many individual and extended metaphors, two broad types of metaphor representation strategy are needed. A control mechanism is described that uses both these major types of strategy and that permits the temporary semantic representation of metaphorical ambiguity.