Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

It is generally accepted that in the semantic interpretation of compound nominals there is a set of possible relationships that could apply between the nominal constituents. This, however, has not been reflected adequately in the literaUire, which favours very deterministic processing or analyses performed on a pragmatic level. This study extends the existing set of relationships described by Levi (1978), postulating a set of rules to predict a subset of these relationships for a particular compound using a unification-based formalism with typed featurestructures. The system shows that by operating on a purely semantic level a small set of valid predicates for the meaning of the whole compound can be obtained.