The Lexicon in Text Generation

1. I n t r o d u c t i o n 1 In this paper I will review the state of the text generation lexicon. I have two primary goals: 1) to give the reader an idea of what is currently being done, by setting out some of the alternatives designers of generation lexicons have faced, the choices they have made, and the implications of these choices for the types of lexical phenomena they have been able to represent. 2) to suggest what a generation lexicon could do, i.e. what range of lexical phenomena is relevant to the generation task. These issues will be addressed more or less in parallel throughout this paper, with more attention to the first goal in the first two sections, and to the second in the last three sections.