Lexical Functions and the Translation of Collocations
Kerry G. Maxwell, Dirk Heylen · 1994
This paper discusses the lexicographical concept of Lexical functions (Mel'chuk and Zholkovsky, 1984) and their potential exploitation in the development of a machine translation lexicon designed to handle collocations. We show how lexical functions can be thought to reflect crosslinguistic meaning concepts for collocational structures and their translational equivalents, and therefore suggest themselves as some kind of language-independent semantic primitives from which translation strategies can be developed.