Linguistic Modeling for Multilingual Machine Translation

120 CHAPTER 11. LEXICAL FUNCTIONS
aktionsart
argument transfer
support verb
Other variants of SVCs dier wrt the Aktionsart they assign to the whole
process. Since the eld of Aktionsarten is very large and the number of Aktionsarten
apparently unlimited (cf. [Svedova80], [Schwenk91]), our treatment
concentrates on Aktionsarten which may be paraphrased with the help of verbs
like to start, to continue, to stop etc:::, without excluding other Aktionsarten
a priori. 2
(181)
akt=neut neutral Angst haben
`to be afraid'
akt=incho inchoative (ingressive) Angst bekommen
`to become afraid'
akt=term terminative (egressive) Angst verlieren
`to lose one's fear'
akt=contin continuitive bei der Behauptung bleiben
`to stick to one's claim'
As explained above, the predicative structure of SVCs are determined by the
non-verbal, predicative part of the SVC. This element assigns semantic roles
and denes the selectional restrictions on the arguments. These are copied
onto the frame specication of the SV the moment the SV subcategorizes for
the predicative noun. This operation is known as the argument transfer
(cf. [Grimshaw and Mester88]), a syntactic variant of the morphological argument
inheritance. Contrary to argument inheritance, the arguments are not
necessarily realized as complements to the verb but may be realized as complements
to the predicative noun if the syntactic completeness requirements of
the verb do not require a special argument to be lled (cf. [Kuhn94])
The verb and the predicative noun assign default case and pform to the arguments
and to the predicative element. These values are not percolated from
the noun to the verb since they represent syntactic restrictions which are dierent
depending on whether the arguments of the SVC are realized syntactically
under the predicative noun or under the SV.
The lexical entry of a SV and its morphological derivatives is exemplied in
(182). The entry already contains all variable linking necessary to copy the
arguments of the predicative noun(role=pred) onto the argument slots of the
SV.
2 Note my notion of continuitive Aktionsart subsumes the so-called iterative Aktionsart
e.g. John multiplied his attacks against Mary. ([Danlos et al.90] pg.20). Iterativity and
continuity refer to the same kind of operators. What continuity is for an unbounded process
iterativity is for a bounded process. We therefore can limit the number of Aktionsarten to 4.