An Account of Selection Restrictions in Role and Reference Grammar

Abstract

The goal of this paper is to explore how selection restrictions can be easily incorporated in the Ontology in the form of conceptual schemata like thematic frames (TFs) and meaning postulates (MPs). These, in turn, will be connected to the RRG logical structures via conceptual logical structures, which are abstract representational mechanisms that bridge the gap between the cognition-oriented TFs and MPs in the Ontology, and the particular lexico-syntactic idiosyncrasies represented in logical structures (Periñán and Mairal, “Bringing”). As for selection restrictions, or selectional preferences, they are stated in TFs and MPs when they exert constraints typically related to the cognitive situations displayed by the events. The domain of POSSESSION is employed to illustrate this kind of preferences within an ontology.