Cross-Linguistic Semantics for Complex Nominals in the Generative Lexicon

this paper, we focus on the divergence between compound noun constructions in English and Italian; a domain which presents problems that are symptomatic of more general problems concerning translation between Germanic languages and Romance languages. The compound noun constructions in question are forms in which a nominal head has a noun or verb as its modifier. Examples in English are bread knife and race car. While in English the compound noun construction is highly productive and appears to allow a wide potential range of interpretations, in Italian it is extremely restricted in use. As pointed out by Beard (1996), Italian, like French generally avoids compounds. Most of the compounds that are possible involve an underived verb (e.g. portadocumenti (document holder), segnalibro (bookmark), spaventapasseri (scarecrow), etc.). In place of the compound construction, Italian utilizes post-modifying prepositional phrases to construct complex nominals. For example, consider the correspondences below in (1). (1) a. bread knife b. credit card c. race car d. hay fever coltello da pane carta di credito macchina da corsa febbre da fieno e. bullet hole f. lemon juice g. glass door h. silicon breast foro di pallottola succo di limone porta a vetri seni al silicone In these examples, the modifying noun relates to the purpose (1 a,b,c), the origin (1 d,e,f), or the constitution (1 g,h) of the head noun. In English, the form of the semantic relation that holds between the modifying noun and the head noun is unspecified and left implicit, while in the corresponding Italian complex nominals, it is partially specified by the preposition which introduces the modifying noun. This divergence gives rise to a significant problem for machine translation from English to Italian. In order to g..