Linguistic Modeling for Multilingual Machine Translation

68 CHAPTER 7. DETERMINATION
deixis
generic reference
predicative reference
c. Il s'est casse la jambe.
he himself has broken the leg
`He has broken his leg.'
d. Il a perdu la memoire.
he has lost the consciousness
`He lost consciousness.'
Denite articles, demonstrative pronouns and possessive pronouns may beemployed
in order to mark the identication of the extracted discourse entity with
another discourse entity related to discourse or the hearer's knowledge system.
In our feature system, this opposition is marked as shown in (105), where the
way familiarity isachieved (e.g. previous mentioning/repetitive action/ inaleniable
relation) is in the current state of the system not yet completely calculated.
Only if familiarity isachieved via a pointing operation (deixis) in text or situation
is the kind of deictic operation specied as being proximal or distal.
The latter may be further specied as near or far if the language reects this
distinction 1 . If no deictic operation is involved the value of deix is nil.
(105)
An elephant
The elephant
This elephant
That elephant
Der Elefant da
Der Elefant dort
ref={'T'=ref,ref=unfam,deix=nil}
ref={'T'=ref,ref=fam,deix=nil}
ref={'T'=ref,ref=fam,deix=prox}
ref={'T'=ref,ref=fam,deix={dist=_}}
ref={'T'=ref,ref=fam,deix={dist=near}}
ref={'T'=ref,ref=fam,deix={dist=far}}
If the discourse entity (e.g. elephant) does not refer to an instance of the denoted
concept, it may refer to the concept (or its prototypical representative), or it
refers to a second discourse entity in order to form a predicative relation of the
`is a' type. The rst case is called generic reference, while the second is called
predicative reference, represented by the following feature structures:
(106)
The elephant lives in :::
He is an elephant.
ref={'T'=nonref,nonref=generic}
ref={'T'=nonref,nonref=pred}
Generic propositions denote what is normal or typical for members of a class.
In most languages, these propositions are restricted to special verbal tense and
aspect. Progressive aspect and aorist on one hand and generic interpretations
1 The suggested structuring of features allows for a matching of the bipartition (cf. German:
diese/jene, it:questo/quella hy:zhe ge/na ge, English: here/there) onto a tripartition
which is equally employed as for example in Spanish and German aqui/alli/alla, hier/da/dort
(cf. [Ehrich82], [Hottenroth82]).