A Generative Perspective on Verb Alternations

Verb alternations have been researched extensively in linguistics, but they have not yet received a systematic treatment in natural language generation systems; consequently, generators cannot make informed choices among alternatives. As a step towards overcoming this discrepancy, we review some linguistic work on several prominent alternations, revise and extend it, and suggest a set of rules that allow the series of alternated forms to be produced from a single base form of the verb, the lexical entry. The framework has been implemented in the Moose sentence generator, which can thus choose a particular verb alternation in order to accomplish generation goals such as placing emphasis on the most important element of the sentence.