Les Groupes Nominaux Productifs et les Noms Composés Lexicalisés

Our project is to describe French, using a finite vocabulary and a finite set of grammar rules. As far as noun phrases are concerned, we have to decide which noun phrases are to be treated by grammar rules, and which ones should be put in a lexicon. We present four criteria that have been used to build the electronic dictionary for compound nouns, (DELAC), which contains over 100,000 entries. The first two criteria (not compositional meaning, and institutionalized terms) yield purely lexicalized entries; the last two criteria (distributional restrictions and exceptional transformational analysis) concern certain noun phrases which could probably be treated by grammar rules; we prefer to put them in a lexicon for methodological reasons.