Chapter 18 Lexical Functions: Description of Lexical Relations in a ...

—Chapter 18. Lexical Functions— 88
assurance maladie lit. (illness insurance) = (medical insurance) and assurance vie (life insurance)
are collocations: in the first case you insure against illness, in the second case you insure your
life. (Other cases of the same type are assurance incendie lit. (fire insurance) vs. assurance
logement lit. (apartment insurance).) Or else Fr. auto-école vs. driving school; or Fr. [un]
condamné à vie lit. (condemned to life) = (person condemned to life in prison) vs. [un] condamné à
mort lit. (condemned to death); cf. life sentence vs. death sentence. In all these collocations the
problem is created by a semantic actant expressed idiosyncratically (it is shown in boldface). The
technique used in MTT to describe such phenomena is to use the Government Pattern, in which
all such idiosyncrasies are explicitly stated. Thus, the collocations of this type are covered by
GPs rather than by LFs. (See Chapter 17, 5, p. 00ff.)
6.3 Lexical Functions in Linguistic Representations
As far as the participation of LFs in linguistic representations is concerned, the standard and the
non-standard LFs are treated differently.
The standard LFs are considered to be Deep Lexical Units; therefore, they appear in the
DSynt-Structure of the sentence under processing. Thus, during synthesis, the standard LF f is
selected based on its semantic source in the initial SemS. For instance, for the expression high
temperature of the liquid we have the correspondence (16):
(16) (temperature )
(liquid)
1 2
1
(!)
(very)
TEMPERATURE
"
I
LIQUID
SemS DSyntS
ATTR
Magn
The LF Magn is computed according to LF-Sem-Rule 2, see above, 5.1.5. (The adjective HIGH is
computed later—at the SSynt-level as an element of the value Magn(temperature); it is taken from
the lexical entry of TEMPERATURE and inserted into the SSyntS of the sentence.)
The non-standard LFs are not Deep Lexical Units and they do not appear in any
representation. They are simply used in the lexicon to ensure the correct lexical choice in the
process of synthesis. For instance, for the expression leap year we have the correspondence (17):