LANGUAGE IN INDIA

Strength for Today and Bright Hope for Tomorrow

Volume 17:1 January 2017
ISSN 1930-2940

Managing Editor: M. S. Thirumalai, Ph.D.
Editors: B. Mallikarjun, Ph.D.
         Sam Mohanlal, Ph.D.
         B. A. Sharada, Ph.D.
         A. R. Fatihi, Ph.D.
         Lakhan Gusain, Ph.D.
         Jennifer Marie Bayer, Ph.D.
         G. Baskaran, Ph.D.
         L. Ramamoorthy, Ph.D.
         C. Subburaman, Ph.D. (Economics)
         N. Nadaraja Pillai, Ph.D.
         Renuga Devi, Ph.D.
         Soibam Rebika Devi, M.Sc., Ph.D.
Assistant Managing Editor: Swarna Thirumalai, M.A.

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Resolving Polysemy in Malayalam Verbs

Mohan Raj, S.N., Sachin Kumar, S., and S. Rajendran

Abstract

Polysemy in verbs in a challenging problem. Verbs are the most polysemous words among all the grammatical categories. The polysemy leads to word sense ambiguity. As for as verbs are concerned resolving polysemy amounts to word sense disambiguation (WSD). The paper makes use of the methodology proposed by Rumshisky Anna (2008). The result of the method is encouraging. Further improvement can be done by making use of other knowledge sources like wordNet, dictionary and onto-thesaurus.

Keywords: Polysemy, Malayalam, verbs

Introduction

High degree of polysemy prevails in natural language and so whatever utterance we come across is liable to be interpreted in multiple ways. But the high degree of ambiguity does not hamper our understanding the concerned utterance. Mostly the context nullifies the multiple interpretations and assign a single interpretation to the given expression. It is the context which helps a native speaker to interpret an utterance or sentence correctly. Any automatic way of interpreting the sense of a lexical item expects the contexts to select or activate the correct sense out of the competitive senses of the concerned lexical items. All major word classes exhibit lexical ambiguity and the contextual factors relevant for the concerned word resolves the meaning of the targeted word. For example, the meaning assigned to an adjective may be determined by the semantics of the head noun; the meaning of a polysemous noun may be determined by the governing verb or a modifier; and the meaning of a verb may be determined by their argument structure or by the dependents and other elements of their syntactic frame.

This is only the beginning part of the article. PLEASE CLICK HERE TO READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE IN PRINTER-FRIENDLY VERSION.


Mohan Raj, S.N.
snmohanraj@gmail.com


Sachin Kumar, S.
sachinnme@gmail.com


S. Rajendran
rajushush@gmail.com

Amrita Vishwa Vidhyapeetham
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Ettimadai
Coimbatore 641112
Tamil Nadu
India
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