Lexicon-Grammar and the syntactic analysis of French

Maurice Gross (1)

1 LADL - Laboratoire d'automatique documentaire et linguistique

A lexicon-grammar is constituted by the elementary sentences of a language. Instead of considering words as basic syntactic units to which grammatical information is attached, we use simple sentences (subject-verb-objects) as dictionary entries. Hence, a full dictionary item is a simple sentence with a description of the corresponding distributional and transformational properties.
The systematic study of French has led to an organization of its lexicon-grammar based on three main components:
- the lexicon-grammar of free sentences, that is, of sentences whose verb imposes selectional restrictions on its subject and complements (e.g. 'to fall', 'to eat', 'to watch'),
- the lexicon-grammar of frozen or idiomatic expressions (e.g. 'N takes N into account', 'N raises a question'),
- the lexicon-grammar of support verbs. These verbs do not have the common selectional restrictions, but more complex dependencies between subject and complement (e.g. 'to have', 'to make' in 'N has an impact on N', 'N makes a certain impression on N').
These three components interact in specific ways. We present the structure of the lexicon-grammar built for French and we discuss its algorithmic implications for parsing.

Mots clés: syntax; lexicon; parsing; syntaxe; lexique; analyse syntaxique

Domaines: Linguistique; Traitement du texte et du document

Maurice Gross. Lexicon-Grammar and the syntactic analysis of French. International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING), 1984, Stanford, California, United States. pp.275-282. ⟨halshs-00277659⟩