Lingvisticæ Investigationes - Volume 13, Issue 2, 1989

Certain deverbal nouns can be analyzed as predicates. We present here a classification of those deverbal nouns which are in relation with the support verb avere: i.e. the sequence avere V-n (e.g. avere la speranza) corresponds to a simple verb (sperare). This work is part of a larger research effort concerning the construction of a Lexicon-Grammar of italian.

In this paper I analyze the significance of two theorems of formal grammar theory for generative grammar: Peters and Ritchie's theorem about undecidability of membership for transformationnal languages and Parikh's theorem about existence of inherently ambiguous context-free languages. My analysis supports a general thesis which concerns not only the application of the whole formal grammar theory to generative grammar, but any application of mathematics to grammar. This thesis is the following: one cannot expect that mathematics helps to discover any deep and interesting property of human language but, on the other hand, a mathematical study of the descriptive and notional apparatus of grammars is a compulsory methodological preliminary. In other words mathematical linguistics provides a theory of control for the devices, the concepts and the aims of grammatical theories. This is so because mathematical linguistics, and formal grammar especially, is developed to study linguistics facts already represented. And this representation 1) is far from being neutral or "objective" and 2) forces grammars to be algorithms.Section 5 of the paper is a discussion of the features, bounded to the representation, which are implicitly admitted in the major part of grammatical approaches. Readers who remember the content of Peters and Ritchie's theorem and Parikh's theorem can omit the beginings of sections 3 and 4. Section 2 is a very sketchy overview of contemporary mathematical linguistics.

We present a semantic analysis of the French alternative conjunction soit ... soit (either ... or). Study of its selectional restrictions reveals some interesting semantic features which are either shared by the other alternating conjunctions {e.g. ou) or specific to it. For the first set of features, we focus on selectional restrictions related to synonymous terms which determine either simultaneity or a superordinate relation; for the second, we analyze selectional retrictions related to the restrictive terms, the interrogative mood and the metalinguistic use of soit... soit.

In most studies of French, Parisian French is considered as a more or less "institutional norm." Examining some aspects of Québec French (especially frozen sentences), we give evidence that a complete description of French must take into account linguistic varieties which have their own lexico-syntactic characteristics.

Unlike much theoretical linguistics, both the comparative perspective and the automatic aspect of Machine Translation reveal that there cannot be a clear-cut borderline between grammar and lexicon. The interdependence of grammatical computation and lexical storage has become extremely obvious during the research and development work in the METAL-project. After outlining the history of this project, section 1 of this paper sketches the system's projected application environment. The systern's main lexical tools are discussed in section 2, and section 3 deals with its main grammatical techniques. The final section raises a number of problems and issues for further research. Some of these are well-known but still await a satisfactory solution given the present (1987) state of the project. Others are raised much less often and derive from the technical nature of the texts that METAL is intended to translate.

It is proposed that, in French causative constructions, the clitic is attached to the verb which governs it and that the embedded verb cannot govern its complements after having been preposed. The clitics en and y, when associated with positions which are subcategorized by the embedded verb, can be attached to the embedded verb prior to its preposing. After V has been preposed, these clitics can be attached optionally to faire which governs them. However, the clitics associated with complements which are not subcategorized by the embedded verb must be attached to faire. The difference between the placement of en and y, and the placement of accusative and dative clitics is caused by the type of category assigning the case to the positions associated with these clitics.

The analysis of 2000 nominal predicates supported by the Vsup =: estar in Portuguese confirmed Z.S. Harris' hypothesis that there are nouns which form the nucleus of sentences: sentences with support verbs. In a support structure, the support verb — in our case estar — carries flexional morphemes: it does not have a characteristic distribution nor much meaning on its own, and it is the supported noun that selects the other constituents (in the same way as ordinary verbs do). In fact, predicative nouns (nominalizations or autonomous nouns) can be analysed and classified as ordinary verbs. Like verbs, they have subjects and complements: the arguments of N. We could therefore integrate those 2000 nouns into the Lexicon-grammar of Portuguese. Since they behave as the main element in sentence structures, they were described by the same type of matrices (Tab 1, Tab 2) that were used for verbs, but in this case the entries are nouns.

There are many misunderstandings concerning the French periphrasis venir de + infinitif, mostly called passé récent. Certain aspects of its use like the combination with time adverbials hardly have been examined. The use of the periphrasis is restricted in several ways: it can't be used in the compound tenses and in the passé simple, it also doesn't take state verbs as complement and it can hardly be accompanied by a negation.Time adverbials can specify whether the event point (E), whether the reference point (R). Time adverbials specifying E have to situate E at a small distance of R. The maximal quantity of this temporal distance is imposed by pragmatic rules. So, the adverb récemment (recently) is not always "recent" enough to be used in combination with the passé récent.