Vers une structuration de dictionnaires servant à la Tao

We have investigated the contrastive French-German aspects of about 50 simple nominal and compound adjectival predicates, and designed their entries for an electronic dictionary for computer-assisted translation. Their co-occurrence with support verbs expressing different aspectual semantic functions is coded; in the case of the nouns, their co-occurrence with determiners is also coded, as is the syntactic and semantic specification of their arguments in terms of semantic classes called “object classes”. As an illustration of the envisaged translation methodology based on lexicon-grammar, the syntactic tagging of different formal types of simple and compound predicates, and the semantic tagging of their arguments, are demonstrated with reference to a German newspaper text and its French translation. intex will be used not only for identifying and translating compound words or multi-word expressions, but also — as an additional, but necessary tool — for finding object classes together with their appropriate predicates and support verbs, because object classes are clearly syntactically defined.