Special issue: Natural Language Processing and its Applications

This study addresses the lexical representation of French VN and Swedish NV-are agentive nominal compounds. The objective is to examine their semantic structure and output meaning. The analysis shows that, as a result of their semantic structure, the compounds group into some major output meanings. Most frequently, the N constituent corresponds to an Undergoer in the argument structure of the V constituent, and the compound displays an Actor role, which more precisely denote entities such as Persons, Animals, Plants, Impersonals, Instruments or Locatives, specified in the Telic role in the Qualia. We propose that the Agentive role can be left unspecified with regard to action modality. In conclusion, our study proposes a unified semantic account of the French and Swedish compounds, which can have applications for NLP systems, particularly for disambiguation and machine translation tasks.