The distributional properties extra

The distributional properties extracted from linguistic corpora for a word are regarded by many as the principle contribution to its meaning. While largely sympathetic to this view, we argue that lexical representations which are built from evidence of distributional behavior alone are unable to fully explain the rich variation in linguistic meaning in language. Lexical meaning is modulated in context and contextual semantic operations have an impact on the behavior that words exhibit: this is why a context-sensitive lexical architecture is needed in addition to empirical analysis to make sense of corpus data. As a case study that shows how distributional analysis and theoretical modeling can interact, we present a corpus investigation aimed at identifying mechanisms of semantic coercion in predicate-argument constructions, conducted within the Generative Lexicon (GL) model.