| Summary: | In this study, I enquire into word-formation semantics and the way context specifies the reading of derived words. In particular, I use the apparatus of Frame Semantics and offer a treatment of lexical stereotype negation that is expressed in English by the prefixes 'non- '(e.g. 'nonanswer', 'noncolor') and 'un- '(e.g. 'unpolitician', 'un-diva'). In order to account for this phenomenon, I introduce a formal treatment of lexical rules in Frame Semantics, making use of the formalism of attribute-value matrices. I also use corpus-extracted data to enquire into the way context impacts on scope properties. I motivate an analysis under which the “absence” of a characteristic of the base lexeme is treated as a change in the value of an attribute of the base lexeme. The treatment of lexical stereotype negation can advance our understanding of modification in word-formation semantics and lead to a more balanced analysis and understanding of all major categories.
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