We propose a strongly lexicalist treatment of translation equivalence where mismatches due to diverging lexicalization patterns are dealt with by means of translation links which capture crosslinguistic generalizations across sets of semantically related lexical items. We show how this treatment can be developed within a unification-based, multilingual lexical knowledge base which is integrated...

Typological diversity among the natural languages of the world poses interesting challenges for the models and algorithms used in syntactic parsing. In this paper, we apply a data-driven dependency parser to Turkish, a language characterized by rich morphology and flexible constituent order, and study the effect of employing varying amounts of morpholexical information on parsing performance. T...

Multiple (simple) context-free tree grammars are investigated, where “simple” means “linear and nondeleting”. Every multiple context-free tree grammar that is finitely ambiguous can be lexicalized; i.e., it can be transformed into an equivalent one (generating the same tree language) in which each rule of the grammar contains a lexical symbol. Due to this transformation, the rank of the nonterm...

To what extent do Modern Greek, Polish, Swedish and American English similarly lexicalize action concepts, and how similar are the semantic associations between verbs denoting natural actions? Previous results indicate cross-linguistic stability between American English, Swedish, and Polish in verbs denoting basic human body movement, mouth movements, and sound production. The research reported...

Some metaphorical mappings between source and target are obvious and appear in collocation patterns in natural language data. However, other metaphors that structure abstract processes or complex topics are trickier to investigate because the target domain is lexically divorced from the source. Using metaphors for the economy as a case study, this paper introduces new techniques to find metapho...

The expression of motion verbs differs between languages. The path of motion, such as crossing or entering, is more prominently featured in path-based languages such as Spanish than in manner-based languages such as English. Here, we revisit the data from a study on manner and path biases in verb lexicalization (Havasi & Snedeker, 2004), and create a hierarchical Baysian computational model to ...

Language is a system of verbal elements that makes communication of meaningspossible in the manners the users intend by employing certain linguistic deviceswhich are partly language-specific. Once communicating cross-linguistically, thereis always a risk of negative transfer of techniques or processes from the firstlanguage (L1) to the foreign language (L2). The current study investigates the“e...