We present a study of the mappings from semantic content to syntactic expression with the aim of isolating the precise locus and role of pragmatic information in the generation process. Prom a corpus of English, French, and Portuguese instructions for consumer products, we demonstrate the range of expressions of two semantic relations, generation and enablement (Goldman, 1970) in each language, and show how the available choices are constrained syntactically, semantically, and pragmatically. The study reveals how multilingual NLG can be informed by language-specific principles for syntactic choice.
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