In this paper, we discuss issues connected to the phenomenon of linguistic FOCUS or INFORMATION DISTRIBUTION in the sentence in the context of the multi-lingual machine translation project EUROTRA. We shall present, some of the arguments why a consideration of FOCUS phenomena is important for the determination of linear order and for semantic interpretation. We shall proceed, in sections 2 and 3 of the paper, to mention the main lines of development in the dicussion of FOCUS phenomena in Computational Linguistics and in Linguistics respectively. Section 4 contains an illustration of a pilot implementation covering some aspects of FOCUS phenomena in EUROTRA-D.
展开▼
