Semantic subclasses of temporal nouns

The purpose of this paper is to illustrate and justify semantic coding of temporal nouns in Russian for Russian-to-English Machine Translation to facilitate syntactic parsing of Russian sentences and their subsequent translation into English. The paper deals only with the semantic classification, based on A. A. Kholodovich's theory of subclasses. The temporal nouns are selected for justification of four subclasses: cyclic, supercyclic, subcyclic, and noncyclic. The codes are to be stored in the dictionary. The parsing rules based on the cooccurrence restrictions between these four subgroups facilitate syntagmatic bracketing of noun groups as an input for the transfer and synthesis into English. The purpose of this paper is to group temporal nouns into subgroups and analyze the cooccurrence of privileges and restrictions among the temporal subgroups. These restrictions are given within the Kholodovich concept of the nucleus and its optimal environment. It is assumed that the reader is acquainted (1) with the various ways a temporal noun can be identified, and (2) the main temporal figurae assigned to temporal adverbs (see Appendix). We shall use morphological, syntactic, transformational, and pure semantic criteria for subclassification of temporal nouns. In the subclassification proposed here we shall use three main criteria: (1) the concept of primary vs. secondary, (2) the concept of a cycle vs. noncycle, and (3) the concept of subcycle and supercycle. When we take such words as god 'year' and noch' 'night', we can contrastively observe the following features. The Russian word god 'year' indicates a one-cycle duration, during which the earth revolves once around the sun. In this word there is no additional concommitant semantic feature. We shall refer to such a noun as a 'cyclic temporal noun'. in noch 'night', on the other hand, we have less than a cycle, and besides we have an additional semantic feature, namely, that the sunlight is not seen. We shall refer to such a noun as a 'subcyclic secondary temporal noun'. The opposite of the cyclic and subcyclic nouns will produce what we call 'noncyclic' and 'supercyclic nouns', for example, two words such as vechnost' 'eternity' and molodost' 'youth'. In the first we have no cycles to talk about. Such a noun has no boundaries. The word molodost' involves more than one cycle. It refers to a particular stage in the development of a living creature, especially a human being. The type vechnost' is a 'noncyclic primary temporal noun'. The type molodost' 'youth' is a 'supercyclic secondary temporal noun', If we put the above-mentioned criteria (cycle and subcycle) on a matrix, we shall see the distribution displayed in Figure 1. We may now try to analyze them within the framework of the N1 of N2 noun government structure. We will examine the relations between the 296 / Georgetown University Round Table on Languages and Linguistics 1989 temporal nouns themselves and the relations between the temporal and nontemporal nouns. It may happen that we shall see an utterance like utro (N1) voskresnogo dnja (N2) 'the morning (N1) of the Sunday (N2)' where both the N1 and N2 positions are occupied by temporal nouns. In such a case we should examine the cooccurrence privileges between any pair of the these subclasses. On the other hand, if N1 or N2 is occupied by a nontemporal noun, we would like to know what nouns occur in the vicinity of the temporal noun. Figure 1. Temporal nouns. Criteria: Primary Secondary Types of nouns: cyclic noncyclic subcyclic supercyclic