The Telic Relationship in Compounds

The treatment of nominal compounds raises several problems for NLP. On the one hand the relationship between the head noun and the modifier can be implicit, such as in petrol gauge, where the gauge is an instrument that measures an amount of fuel. On the other hand this relationship can be ambiguous such as in release signal which can either refer to a signal which is activated when the release begins or to a signal that indicates that the release is on its way. It is thus necessary to have a representation language powerful enough to make these various interpretations explicit. The aim of this paper1 is to use the Generative Lexicon (Pustejovsky 1995) to offer a detailed analysis of the telic relationship in nominal compounds both in French and in Turkish. We first focus on general properties of this kind of compound (taking our examples from French but the explanations provided to account for the general properties here discussed hold for Turkish too) and then we suggest that lexicalization both in French and Turkish directly follows from the aspectual properties of the complement (or the predicate recoverable from it) encoded within the telic and from the position of the argument they instantiate.