Subject Erasing and Pronominalization in 1talian Text Generation

Abstract

Certain Romance languages such as Italian, Spanish and Portuguese allow the subject to be erased in tensed clauses. This paper studies subject erasing in the framework of a text generation system for Italian. We will prove that it is first necessary to try to pronominalize the subject. Therefore, we are led to study the synthesis of subject and complement personal pronouns. In Romance languages, personal pronouns raise many syntactic problems, whose solution is complex in a generation system. We will see that pronominalization plays a fundamental role in the order in which the elements of a clause are synthesized, and consequently in the synthesis of this clause. Moreover, the synthesis of a clause must take into account the fact that subject erasing and the synthesis of complements are phenomena which depend on each other. The complex algorithm that must be used for the synthesis of a clause will be illustred in various examples.