Lingvisticæ Investigationes - Volume 15, Issue 1, 1991

RIASSUNTOLa ricerca sul linguaggio naturale condotta in Intelligenza Artificiale si è sviluppata, malgrado le apparenze, in modo alquanto indipendente dal la-voro dei linguisti. Da un lato sono stati elaborati modelli computazionali delle facoltà di lunguaggio che si configurano come largamente autonomi rispetto a quelli sviluppati in linguistica. D'altro lato, l'implementazione dei sistemi è stata influenzata da soluzioni pragmatiche connesse all'efficacia computazionale delle regole indipendenti dal contesto, alla necessità di evitare componenti trasformazionali inversi e ad una concezione rappresenta-zionale del significato. Il presente articolo propone l'interesse dei lavori lin-guistici di Z. S. Harris e M. Gross ai fini dello sviluppo di un'analisi sintat-tica automatica che sia a controllo diffuso e incentrata sul comportamento idiosincratico delle unità lessicali. Essa è anche inquadrata nel tentativo di gettare luce sulla natura del processo denotazionale.SUMMARYIn spite of the claim on the interactions between artificial intelligence (AI) and linguistics, AI research on natural language has developed independently from the work of linguists. On one hand, computational models of the faculties of language which are independent from the models developed in linguistics have been worked out. On the other hand, the AI system design has been oriented towards practical solutions, whose main motivations where to use context-free rules, to avoid an inverse transformational component, and to represent meanings by some data structures. This paper is about the linguistic works of Z.S. Harris and M. Gross to develop automatic distributed control parsing which takes seriously into account the indiosyncratic behaviour of the lexical items. The general framework for the discussion is the procedural nature of the denotational process.

The aim of this paper is to identify which syntactic structures allow the interpretation of meaningless or expletive negation and under what conditions formal negation appears in the syntax of natural languages, with especial reference to Central Catalan.I shall describe two syntactic environments: (a) the negation which occurs at the subordinate clause of a comparative structure of inequality, and (b) the negation which occurs at the subordinate clause in the subjunctive tense-mood of certain predicates. In both structures I shall assume that there is a lexical item at the main clause which subcategorizes, among other possible complements, for a que (than, that) clause. At D-structure there is, furthermore, a NegP which is the complement of this conjunction. At the level of LF no expletive is specified, because the logical specifications of the lexical items which subcategorize for these subordinate clauses absorb the value of the negative operator.

En soulignant l'intrication fondamentale du Lexique et de la Grammaire, les évolutions récentes de l'approche transformationnelle d'inspiration Harrissienne ont permis de repousser la dichotomie (longtemps réputée indiscutable) entre syntaxe et sémantique.Dans cette perspective, et à tire d'illustration, nous étudions ici un petit fragment du lexique français (l'expression de la segmentation).Afin de rendre compte de sa cohérence structurelle, nous proposons d'abord une analyse systématique et approfondie des propriétés syntaxiques et distributionnelles de ce fragment. Puis, nous montrons comment cette analyse permet d'appréhender les limites de l'explication syntaxique, et invite à rendre au lexique une place que l'analyse distributionnelle avait exagérément réduite. Il apparaît en effet que l'interprétation de l'expression repose en dernier lieu sur la reconnaissance d'une relation NOM-NOM, à l'intérieur de la phrase simple, et que cette relation de dépendance échappe à toute explication en termes de contraintes sélectionnelles.

In French, the status of on, which is only used as a subject, is quite different from that of other pronouns like je, tu, il... This article deals with various aspects of the syntactical and semantical nature of on.

In this paper we describe the syntactic characteristics of two classes of frozen comparatives adverbs in Portuguese. These adverbs have been noted como C, where como is a conjunction of comparison, and C a fixed string of lexical items.After discussing the notion of frozen adverb, we argue in favour of the adverbial status of como C. These forms are often optional, and they modify a verbal or an adjectival sentence in the same way adverbs do. The syntactic behaviour of como C allowed us to propose that the fixed string C is issued from the reduction of recurrent terms in the second member of a comparative structure. Such reductions are analogous to those observed in free comparatives, but the lexical recovery of reduced elements is less arduous than in the free case, since the range of lexical choices is narrower.

Se passive constructions can alter the coreference conditions of certain Spanish verbs that admit a sentential complement in object position.