Modeling Lexicon-Syntax Interaction with Catenae

The paper discusses the interaction between the lexicon and syntactic relations in texts. It considers the encoding of the language units by means of catenae. It also shows that catenae representation together with valence information can provide a good way of handling Multiword Expressions and compounds1 in the lexicon and syntax. The paper introduces a strategy for mapping noun/verb compounds with their counterpart syntactic phrases2. Thus, the investigation presents two research directions: (1) realization of lexical units from lexicons to texts, and (2) relations between identical semantic units with differing morphosyntactic properties. Although the provided examples come from Bulgarian, the proposed mechanism is language independent.