November 7th at 18:00, in ILLC Seminar Room (F1.15)
The interpretative variability of noun-noun combinations raises a number of issues concerning their constituents' contribution and mode of composition. Faced with these problems it is often emphasized that their proper treatment requires a delicate balance between (semantic and syntactic) constraints and (pragmatic) flexibility. Although many proposals acknowledge the central role of context and world knowledge to determine their meaning, the challenge they pose to the classical interpretation(s) of the principle of compositionality have received little attention. In this talk, we proceed by carefully evaluating where things go wrong, on possible ways to fix them and on what we can learn from them.