A unified approach to lexical ambiguity of dot objects
Abstract
Nouns like "book" can be viewed as multiple meaning words in English and French. These kinds of nouns have been characterized as logical polysemic words by (Pustejovsky 95a). Their treatment by Pustejovsky lacks of a weel-defined formalisation. The treatment that is proposed in this article is strongly based on two recent proposals within the type lambda-calculus framework, (Pinkal and Kohlhase 2000) and (Asher and Pustejovsky 2000). The lexical ambiguity of nouns like "book" is expressed as a set of three main characteristics : various selective contexts, copredications and a quantificational puzzle. The treatment presented here takes advantage both of Pinkal and Kohlhase's and Asher and Pustejovsky's proposals in order to account for the linguistic properties of lexically ambiguous nouns.