Generation Of Noun Compounds In Hebrew: Can Syntactic Knowledge Be Fully Encapsulated?
Yael Dahan Netzer, Michael Elhadad · 1998
Hebrew includes a very productive noun-compounding construction called smixut. Because smixut is marked morphologically and is restricted by many syntactic constraints, it has been the focus of many descriptive studies in Hebrew grammar. We present the treatment of smixut in HUGG, a FUF-based syntactic realization system capable of producing complex noun phrases in Hebrew. We contrast the treatment of smixut with noun-compounding in English and illustrate the potential for paraphrasing it introduces. We specifically address the issue of determining when a smixut construction can be generated as opposed to other semantically equivalent constructs. We investigate several competing hypotheses -- smixut is lexically, semantically and/or pragmatically determined. For each hypothesis, we explain why the decision to produce a smixut construction cannot be reduced to a computation over features produced by an outside module that would not need to know about the smixut phenomenon. We conclude t...