This is an informal talk on representing verbs in the English lexicon. I'll be discussing a `localist' approach to lexical representation, closely modeled after Jackendoff's use of Lexical Conceptual Structures (LCS's). (*) The talk will touch on issues such as polysemy, the place of prepositions in the representations, and especially, intra-language lexicalization patterns. I'll suggest, for example, that `give' and `speak' should be given similar LCS's, and that this is consistent with the existence of phrases such `give a speech (or talk)'.

(*) As found, for instance, in Semantics and Cognition, 1983.

Furnished with an English text and its equivalent in 13 foreign languages, we set out to determine the potential for improving the quality of translation results by an Interlingual (IL) approach to machine translation (MT) as compared to transfer-based systems. In this paper, we analyze the errors made by two commercial transfer-based MT systems, provide an observational classification of the errors, and group the errors according to whether or not an Interlingual approach would improve system output. Then, for several examples, we identify the prerequisites for an IL representation, and provide a sample IL representation as a "straw man" for discussion at the workshop. The idea is to 1) look at cases that might prove to be particularly complex with respect to meaning representation, and 2) to illustrate cases in which an IL system could compensate for weaknesses in transfer-based systems.