AbstractsBiology & Animal Science

This dissertation sets out to examine the conceptual domains of CHANGE and POSSESSION by selecting two main verbal classes, namely entity-specific change-ofstate verbs for the domain of CHANGE and contribute verbs for that of POSSESSION. The most important step consisted in finding a theoretical framework capable of accounting for the intricate syntactic behavior of these two classes and of giving equal importance to the contribution of both lower-level and high-level configurations. After reviewing eight of the most representative Construction Grammar (CxG) models (e.g. Fillmore's Case Grammar, Lakoff's CxG, Langacker's Cognitive Grammar, Goldberg's CxG, Croft's Radical Construction Grammar, Boas's frame semantic approach, Embodied Construction Grammar and Fluid Construction Grammar), we have inclined the balance in favor of the Lexical Constructional Model or LCM (Ruiz de Mendoza & Mairal 2008, 2011; Mairal & Ruiz de Mendoza 2008, 2009), which proposes a fruitful collaboration between the linguistic and the computational fields. The present research also shows that the internal and external constraints formulated by the LCM constitute useful analytical tools for the integration of entityspecific change-of-state and contribute verbs into constructions, such as the intransitive resultative (e.g. Competition can deteriorate into rivalry), the caused-motion (e.g. They burnt the house to the ground), the way construction (e.g. [�] Olympic bronze medallist Eliud Kipchoge of Kenya blistered his way to a new American All-Comers Record [�]), and the dative construction (e.g. We paid out pensions to ten million people and Child Benefit to every family in the land). For example, the Lexical Class internal constraint explains why a verb like stagnate cannot fuse with the way construction (cf. *He stagnated his way to the top of the Party), which involves literal (e.g. The wounded soldiers limped their way across the field) or figurative motion (e.g. Sally drank her way through a case of vodka). The resultant expression to the top of the Party, which suggests a change of position on a social scale, is incompatible with the verb stagnate, which indicates cessation of motion or progress. On the other hand, external constraints refer to cognitive operations such as metaphors and metonymies. Low-level metaphors can also interact, thereby giving rise to double-source metaphoric amalgams as in High expectations [�] have gradually eroded to the general disappointment, which combines two metaphors, i.e. A (NEGATIVE) CHANGE OF STATE (OF AN ABSTRACT ENTITY) IS EROSION and A CHANGE OF STATE IS A CHANGE OF LOCATION. A second major goal of this dissertation concerns the validity of linguistic hypotheses which are tested against a multipurpose NLP system known as FunGramKB (Periñán & Arcas 2004, 2005, 2006; Periñán & Mairal 2009, 2010, to name a few). We also provide a computational implementation of semantic knowledge by showing how linguistic information is modeled in three distinct modules, viz. the Ontology, the Lexicon, and the…