Méthode D'analyse des Connecteurs du Français en Vue D'un Traitement Automatique

The subject of this article is the analysis of clauses of aim, cause, consequence and condition in French in view to the automatic processing. Our theoretical framework is that of lexicon-grammar. This study differs from the usual grammatical analyses. Here, the complex sentence is studied on the model of the simple sentence, defined as an operator accompanied by its arguments. The conjunctive phrase is our starting point for this study, and it is then shown that the noun around which it is formed, is of predicative type and has the main clause and the subordinate as arguments. This is a predicate «of second order».Automatic processing requires extremely accurate notation of syntactic and semantic properties if ambiguity and polysemy are to be correctly handled. Those descriptions based on syntactico-semantic features are insufficient, which is why the concept of « class of objects » is brought in. There are as many types of relations as there are semantic types of predicate. This is the reason why a semantic typology of predicates is sketched out, integrating lexical, syntactic and semantic components. It is shown that each semantic type can have its own appropriate lexical means of expression and specific syntactic behaviour.