Semantic interpretation of copulative sentences

In the paper, we propose our approach to the study of the semantics of copulative “be” in Natural Language Understanding. In particular, we analyse the way in which the meaning of sentences containing a copula depends on the generic vs specific vs attributive readings of the subject NP and of the predicate nominal NP (when the second is present). Moreover, we propose a semantic net formalism for the representation of these meanings, whose purpose is to maintain ambiguities as local as possible, and to account for an incremental interpretation process, so that the initial ambiguous representation (which features all possible meanings for the copula) may be worked on whenever new pieces of information allow further disambiguation. Finally, we describe the interpretation process, that uses information conveyed by the input sentence in order to determine the final meaning of the copula.