The Analysis Of Verbal Lexical Items And Translation Mismatches In English And Spanish: A Theoretical Framework (2000)

Supervisor: Maria A. Martí i and Hortènsia Curell Gotor

This thesis presents a theoretical model of the linguistic knowledge that is susceptible to formalization. This formalization should permit the computational treatment of the lexical component in a Lexical Knowledge Base (LKB). With this aim, a theoretical framework has been established which allows the formalization and in which entries can be treated in a generalised fashion. One of the underlying premises to our model is the belief that syntax and semantics cannot be separated and that through the description of the relation between these two models a high grade of abstraction has been acquired that would otherwise not be possible. As the objective is to estabish a link between these two linguistic elements, a revision of the term diathesis alternation has been proposed. In our model, this term is used to link semantically related syntactic structures under the assumption that the same interpretation can be expressed in various different ways.