Options at the Lexicon Level

Preferences arise at various levels we illustrate below:

(1)

Lexical:
dog canine

(2)

Lexical and Syntactic Level:
The bomb exploded at 3am * Something exploded the bomb at 3am

(3)

Collocational:
heavy smoker * big smoker
set the table * put the table

(4)

Stylistic:
pal friend
explain explicate

(5)

Pronominalization:
John he

(6)

Definite Description:
I saw a snake on the path. The snake stared at me...

(7)

Lexical Anaphora:
Buy 1 pound of carrots, potatoes and flank beef. Peel the carrots and the potatoes... Peel the vegetables...
They built a new house. They made it in no time

(8)

Grammatical Constraint:
a- I promised Marie to go
b- * I told Marie to go for sure
c- I told Marie (that) I would go for sure

(9)

grammatical ellipsis:
John ate a candy and Paula ate a candy. John ate a candy and Paula did too.

(10)

stylistic - genre
ASSERTIVE-ACT
a- announce formality high - frequency 5
b- state formality high - frequency 3
c- say simplicity high - frequency 8

In the next paragraph, we give some examples of preferences used in combining entries at the sentence level: lexicon-based and combination-based.