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A MOVE construction like that of occurrence c1 (completive construction) is necessarily used to translate any event concerning the transmission of information ("... Il Sole 24 Ore reported ..."). Accordingly, the filler of the OBJ(ect) slot in the occurrences (here, c1) that instantiates the MOVE transmission template is always a symbolic label (c2) which refers to another predicative occurrence, i.e., that bearing the informational content to be spread out ("... Mediobanca had called a meeting ..."). We can note that the enunciative situation can be both explicit or implicit. For example, the completive construction can be used to deal with the problem of the correct rendering of causal situations where the general framework of the antecedent consists of an (implicit) speech situation. Let us examine briefly the following example: "Peter has a fever since he is flushed," where "being flushed" is not the "cause" of "having a fever," but that of an implicit enunciative situation where we claim (affirm, assert, etc.) that someone has a fever. Using the completive construction, this example is easily translated using the four occurrences of Figure 19.

c1)   MOVE SUBJ (SPECIF sole_24_ore financial_daily): (milan_)
           OBJ #c2
           date-1: 15_october_93
           date-2:
c2)   PRODUCE SUBJ    mediobanca_
              OBJ     (SPECIF summoning_1 (SPECIF board_meeting_1
                           mediobanca_ special_))
              TOPIC   (SPECIF plan_1 (SPECIF cardinality_ several_)
                           capital_increase_1)
              date-1: circa_15_october_93
              date-2:

FIGURE 18 An example of NKRL coding.

c3)   MOVE          SUBJ  human_being_or_social_body
                    OBJ   #c4
c4)   EXPERIENCE    SUBJ  peter_
                    OBJ   fevered_state_1
c5)   EXPERIENCE    SUBJ  peter_
                    OBJ   flushing_state_1
                    [obs]
c6)   (CAUSE c3 c5)

FIGURE 19 An implicit enunciative situation.

We can remark that, in Figure 19, c6 is a binding occurrence. Binding structures -- i.e., lists where the elements are conceptual labels, c3 and c5 in Figure 19 -- are second-order structures used to represent the logico-semantic links that can exist between predicative templates or occurrences. The binding occurrence c6 -- meaning that c3, the main event, has been caused by c5 -- is labeled using one (CAUSE) of the four operators that define together the taxonomy of causality of NKRL. The presence in c5 of a specific determiner -- a temporal modulator, "obs(erve)" -- leads to an interpretation of this occurrence as the description of a situation that, at that very moment, is observed to exist.

We give now, Figure 20, a (slightly simplified) NKRL representation of the narrative sentence: "We have to make orange juice": this example, introduced by Hwang and Schubert in a paper for the 13th Joint Conference on Artificial Itelligence (1993), illustrates, in fact, several interesting semantic phenomena.

Figure 20 describes the standard NKRL way of representing the "wishes, desires, intention" domain. To translate the idea of "acting in order to obtain a given result," NKRL makes use of:

c7)    BEHAVE       SUBJ (COORD informant_1 (SPECIF human_being (SPECIF cardinality_ several_)))
                    [oblig, ment]
                    date1: observed date
                    date2:

c8)    *PRODUCE     SUBJ (COORD informant_1 (SPECIF human_being (SPECIF cardinality_ several_)))

                    OBJ  (SPECIF orange_juice (SPECIF amount_ ()))
                    date1: observed date + i
                    date2:
c9)    (GOAL c7 c8)

FIGURE 20 Wishes and intentions in NKRL.

  1. An occurrence (here c7), instance of a basic template pertaining to the BEHAVE branch of the H_TEMP hierarchy, and corresponding to the general meaning of focusing on a result. This occurrence is used to express the "acting" component -- i.e., it identifies the SUBJ(ect) of the action, the temporal coordinates, etc.
  2. A second predicative occurrence, here c8, an instance of a template structured around a different predicate (e.g., PRODUCE in Figure 20) and used to express the "intended result" component.
  3. A binding occurrence, c9, which links together the previous predicative occurrences and which is labeled by means of GOAL, another operator included in the taxonomy of causality of NKRL.

Please note that "oblig" and "ment" in Figure 20 are, like "obs" in Figure 19, "modulators," i.e., particular determiners used to refine or modify the primary interpretation of a template or occurrence as given by the basic "predicate -- roles -- argument" association. "ment(al)" pertains to the modality modulators. "oblig(atory)" suggests that "someone is obliged to do or to endure something, e.g., by authority," and pertains to the deontic modulators series. Other modulators are the temporal modulators, "begin," "end," "obs(erve)," see also Figure 19. Modulators work as global operators that take as their argument the whole (predicative) template or occurrence. When a list of modulators is present, as in the occurrence c7 of Figure 20, they apply successively to the template/occurrence in a Polish notation style to avoid any possibility of scope ambiguity. In the standard constructions for expressing wishes, desires, and intentions, the absence of the "ment(al)" modulator in the BEHAVE occurrence means that the SUBJ(ect) of BEHAVE takes some concrete initiative (acts explicitly) in order to fulfil the result; if "ment" is present, as in Figure 20, no concrete action is undertaken, and the "result" reflects only the wishes and desires of the SUBJ(ect).


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