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Proper Names and Polysemy: From a Lexicographic Experience

In the framework of the SI-TAL (Integrated Systems for the Automatic Treatment of Language) project the lexical coverage of IWN has been extended by adding, besides two grammatical categories not encoded in EWN (i.e. adjectives and adverbs), a set of proper names which are taken into consideration in this paper. This decision was also due to the high degree of incidence of proper names observed in the corpus selected within SI-TAL for semantic annotation. In this paper we would refer more widely about the relations involving the pn in particular codifying the relation between the pn and the senses (literal, derived and extended). We consider the pn as the basis for many extensions of meaning. In fact, many types of derivates and sense extensions are generated, by means of lexical rules that operate as “generative factors”. Novel usages of a word form can be derived through productive application of a lexical rule; therefore we propose to represent these lexical rules codifying new semantic relations in the database. We want to give prominence to the polysemy of pn to confirm the linguistic manifestation(s) of the faculty for generative categorization and compositional thought ” (Pustejovsky, 2001).