Sunday, June 19, 2016

Nominalizations and Zombie Nouns

I was in Stanford for some of the DELPH-IN meeting and we had the traditional conversation about nominalizations once again.



Is it useful to connect `destruction' with `destroy'? Should this be a lexical resource? How? Should we classify them (or some) nominalizations or deverbals? Which?

I have been working on this stuff for a while. First with Olya Gurevich (and Dick and Tracy), then  in Portuguese, with Livy Real (and Claudia and Alexandre). 

It looks like there's still plenty to do.

But Knowledge Representation aside, as Helen Sword says, nominalizations are `zombie nouns'.

Persepolis seems beautiful, even after destroyed by Alexander in 332 B.C.
 (By the way Alexander  the Great also destroyed Thebes and Tyre, the last one by building a bridge causeway!!!)