Linking Reflexive Verb Structure to Verb Meaning in a Cross-Lingual Lexical Setting

Language typology studies have shown that reflexive verb structures are widely represented in diverse languages. In this paper reflexive verb constructs in Bulgarian, French and Hungarian are compared and described on a paradigmatic level. A classification is provided where key Bulgarian reflexive verb constructs, distributed in semantic classes, are used as a seed data set for defining corresponding verb constructs in French and in Hungarian. Such a systematic semantic interpretation of reflexive constructs provides a considerable amount of linguistic knowledge about the possible relations between the predicates and their arguments. The semantic representational framework, used for building descriptors at a conceptual level, is the Unified Eventity Representation (UER), which provides adequate tools for overall structuring of semantic linguistic knowledge, unifying in an innovative way relevant approaches from linguistics and design principles from object-oriented programming.