Multilingual generation: The role of telicity in lexical choice and syntactic realization

Bonnie J. Dorr, Mari Broman Olsen

Abstract: Multilingual generation in machine translation (MT) requires a knowledge organization that facilitates the task of lexical choice, i.e. selection of lexical units to be used in the generation of a target-language sentence. This paper investigates the extent to which lexicalization patterns involving the lexical aspect feature [+telic] may be used for translating events and states among languages. Telicity has been correlated syntactically with both transitivity and unaccusativity, and semantically with Talmy's ‘path’ of a motion event, the representation of which characterizes languages parametrically.