ITRI-96-01 Pragmatic Congruence through Language-Specific Mappings from Semantics to Syntax Judy Delin , Donia R. Scott and Anthony Hartley May, 1996 Abstract We present a study of the mappings from semantic content to a range of syntactic expressions with the aim of isolating the precise locus and role of pragmatic information in the text generation process. From a corpus of English, French, and Portuguese instructions for consumer products, we demonstrate the range of expressions of two semantic relations, Generation and Enablement [Goldman1970] in each of the three languages, and show how the available choices in each language are constrained syntactically, semantically, and pragmatically. The study reveals language-specific principles for syntactic choice, underlining the importance of empirical studies of this nature for informing multilingual NLG. A shorter version of this paper is published in the Proceedings of COLING’96. Dept. English Studies, Univ. Stirling, Stirling FK9 4LA U.K. Information Technology Research Institute Technical Report Series ITRI, Univ. of Brighton, Lewes Road, Brighton BN2 4AT, UK TEL: 44 1273 642900 EMAIL: FAX: 44 1273 642908 NET: