Inférences textuelles et constructions à verbes supports
Textual Inferences and Support Verb Constructions

Summary/Abstract: To understand natural language, automatic systems must have the ability and possibility to know what is inferred, and if so, how it is inferred, and from what in a text. The linguistically determined implications imposed by a predicate on its propositional arguments, appearing in a text as textual inferences, are, with other elements, such as knowledge of the world, speakers’ assumptions about language usage, situational stereotypes, implicatures, etc., one of the necessary elements for a system to be considered as understanding natural language. In this paper, Wiesław Banyś focuses on an important part of textual inferences, one which has been given hardly any scholarly attention so far, namely the relations between a particular category of textual inferences constituted by phrasal implicatives in the sense of Karttunen (2012) and a particular category of multi-word expressions constituted by support verbs. Banyś first gives a brief introduction to the current state of the art of the description of the two general categories: inferences, including a particular type of inferences: paraphrases (sec. 1), and multiword expressions with a particular type of these constructions: support verbs (sec. 2), which allows us to present the relations between support verbs and paraphrases (sec. 3). He then moves on to a discussion of implicatives, including phrasal implicatives (sec. 4), and presents a sketch of the description of some types of support verb constructions from the point of view of their implicative power (sec. 5). The analyses of the type presented are to be continued and need to be extended to all constructions of the type analysed and are at the same time part of a much more general project. They constitute the beginning of a systematic implementation to be done on French and Polish material, in correlation with the English, of the combinatorics of truth values, “implicative signatures”, of predicates, whether verbal, adjectival or nominal.

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