Exploiting linguistic iconism for article selection in machine translation

Classifiers in Japanese-to-English machine translation

“…Because ascriptive noun phrases are nonreferring they cannot be the antecedent of other noun phrases. Zelinsky-Wibbelt (1992) distinguishes between GENERIC and IDENTIFYING, which appear to be equivalent to our GENERIC and REFERENTIAL. Zelinsky-Wibbelt's examples do contain ascriptive noun phrases, for example a human being in 'A spectator is a human being', instead they appear to be treated as adjective phrases in the rules (for example in their rule 14 (p. 797 op cit) where the complement of the copulative predicate with a generic subject is an evaluative adjective phrase).…”

Unifying tense, aspect and modality across languages

“…With this lexically vague concept while is very untypical of the grammatical category of nouns as content bearers within our cline of grammatical categories. Yet, grammatically the noun while has the autonomous qualities of nouns (Zelinsky-Wibbelt, 1988;Zelinsky-Wibbelt, 1992). It constrains the relational meanings of verbs, it can be determined and modified, and it can have co-referential functions, as it has in ( 9) (Hopper and Traugott, 1993, 104):…”