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] (`having an inherent end' as in win vs. run) may be used for translating events and states among languages. The work reported here is part of an ongoing effort to build a computational model that characterizes knowledge at the syntaxsemantics interface [18, 37, 38, 39, 65, 66]. Telicity has been correlated syntactically with both transitivity [65, 66, 69] and unaccusativity [38, 39], and semantically with Talmy's `path' of a motion event [62, 63, 64], the representation of which characterizes languages parametrically. Taking as our starting point the syntactic/semantic classification in Levin's English Verb Classes and Alternations [37], we examine th...

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