Unni Cathrine Eiken February 2005

with it. Selectional constraints allow a predicate to specify semantic restrictions on its arguments
(Jurafsky and Martin 2000, p. 512). This accounts for the intuition that only a certain class of
words can occur in a specific argument position to a given predicate. In the case of a verb such
as avhøre (interrogate, take statement from) a possible selectional restriction for the first
argument could be that it must represent a human. Jurafsky and Martin formulate it like this:
interrogate restricts the constituents appearing as the first argument to those whose underlying
concepts can actually partake in an interrogation (Jurafsky and Martin 2000, p. 512, slightly
modified).
More nuanced intuitions of selectional restrictions can be obtained by combining the knowledge
of distribution in context and that of semantic restrictions placed on arguments by the predicate.
This thesis applies a practical approach in order to find properties of the selectional restrictions
of predicates within a limited thematic domain. Without aiming at formulating a comprehensive
list of the selectional restrictions that apply within the domain in question, it is possible to obtain
a list of examples that illustrate certain properties of the selectional restrictions. This is an
extensional approach; by examining the structure of a set of arguments that all occur in the same
contextual environment, for example as the first argument of a certain predicate, it is possible to
draw certain conclusions about the selectional restrictions placed by the predicate. The aim of
this project is not to define the selectional restrictions of the predicates in the data set, but rather
collect a list of examples of valid restrictions for the domain and examine these. It is obvious
that selectional restrictions also vary over different thematic domains; the allowed first
arguments of a predicate will be very different in a formal text than in a fairy tale for children.
This is again the intuition outlined in the first section of this chapter; words are used in different
ways depending on the thematic domain they exist in. The distribution that classes of
semantically similar arguments show within a limited domain may therefore very well be seen
as a type of selectional constraint. To exemplify this, consider the domain used in the present
work; newspaper texts concerning a criminal case. Considering the constructed phrases in
(2-17), the first two are valid for the domain in the sense that they exemplify structures which
are found in the data set, while the third is in violation of the selectional constraints assigned by
the verb within this particular thematic domain. In the event of a killing within the domain in
question, it can be expected that a perpetrator or a man has the thematic role of actor, but it has
not been seen in the data material that a student can initiate this action.
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