A generic framework for Arabic to English machine ... - Acsu Buffalo

3.5. WHY WE USE RRG AS THE LINGUISTIC MODEL
3.5.2 The lexical representation of verbs and their arguments
The approach to the depiction of the lexical meaning of verbs which we will adopt is
lexical decomposition, which involves paraphrasing verbs in terms of primitive elements
in a well-defined semantic metalanguage. As a simple example of the mechanism of
lexical decomposition, ‘kill’ can be paraphrased into something like ‘cause to die’, and
then ‘die’ can be broken down into ‘become dead’, Thus the lexical representation
of ‘kill’ would be something like ‘x causes [y become dead]’ (Van Valin and
LaPolla 1997). A system of lexical representation should include a way of expressing the
fact that the subject of ‘die’ and the object of ‘kill’ are the same argument semantically.
There are many verbs pairs like this, and in many cases the relationship between them
is overt. Examples include ‘sink’, as in ‘the boat sank’ and ‘the torpedo sank the boat’,
where boat is the subject of intransitive ‘sink’ and the object of transitive ‘sink’ (Van Valin
and LaPolla 1997). Another example is the predicate ‘cool’, which can take three forms,
one adjectival and two verbal: ‘The soup is cool’, ‘the soup is cooling’ and ‘the wind
cooled the soup’. Thus, there seems to be a pattern of intransitive verbs whose subjects
are identical to the objects of their transitive counterparts. There are cases, however,
when the intransitive-transitive alternates do not have the same lexical form, as in ‘die’
and ‘kill’, or ‘receive’ and ‘give’. An adequate theory of lexical representation should
be able to capture these relationships, and lexical decomposition provides a promising
method for doing it. There are many theories of lexical decomposition, which differ
in terms of how fine-grained they are. It is necessary to find the right level of detail,
one which allows the expression of certain important generalizations but which also has
representations whose differences have morphosyntactic consequences. Thus, arriving
at a decompositional system is a compromise between the demands of semantics (make
all necessary distinctions relevant to meaning) and those of syntax (make syntactically
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