Specifying the discourse-semantics of grammatical theme for multilingual text generation : preliminary findings

Abstract

This paper is an attempt to specify the discourse-semantics of grammatical Theme for multilingual text generation. In order to do so, we use previous empirical investigations, which have specified its higher-level contextual sources of control (Lavid 1994), to propose a discourse-semantic resource-chaining strategy-which will be useful for thematic control at the text-planning level. However, the discourse-semantic specifications provided at this level are insufficient to control the fine-grained distinctions available at the lexicogrammatical level in different languages. In order to bridge this gap a preliminary interface is presented here in the form of a system network which abstracts from the lexicogrammatical options available in different computational grammars and realizes text-building categories.