Lingvisticæ Investigationes - Volume 19, Issue 1, 1995

Is Morphology the Syntax of Words?This article deals with the place of morphology in relation to the syntactic component of grammar. Its main purpose is to show, thanks to the study of some empirical data, that the general principles of the X-bar theory are unsuited to describe the inner structure of constructed words in French.From this study emerges the fact that the construction of lexical units pertains to specific rules which must take place inside an autonomous lexical component.

This paper deals with the expression of static localization in Basque. It proposes an analyzis of two spatial inflectional cases — genitive and inessive — bringing to the fore that their interpretation heavily relies on functional notions. The fact that Basque makes use of two distinct genitives (respectively locative and possessive) reveals the existence of an underlying categorization of entities into three classes. We show that the distribution of these genitives calls for the functional notions of "usual attachment" and "location function". This last notion allows us to better characterize the entities that can be conceptualized as "places". As regards the inessive case, we show that its interpretation can as well be explained in terms of functional notions such as containment, support and meronomic relations.

In this paper we present the state of development of DIGRAMA, a system of electronic dictionaries and grammars of Portuguese. We describe briefly the general characteristics of the system, concentrating then on the analysis of two dictionary modules: DIGRAS and DIGRAF. The former is a dictionary of simple words, the latter is a dictionary of inflected forms. To each lexical entry of DIGRAS has been associated a code corresponding to the formal description of the morphological properties of the entries. This information constitutes the basis for a program of automatic generation of inflected forms. DIGRAF is made up of all the inflected forms from the words of DIGRAS.

For a few years, many authors dealing with semantics have emphazised on the notion of movement in their theories. Some of these researchers (like Jackendoff 1983 and 1990) think that the notions of movement and location in space are the basis of the meaning of all the verbs, while others, including J. Miller (1985), assert that movement is the cornerstone of semantics. In this paper, we present both points of view and compare them with our vision of movement in semantics. Our position is based on our doctoral research, which is a contribution to the study of the semantics of the Spanish verbs of Mexico City. After the study of the 312 verbs of our corpus (using a "modified" version of Coseriu's structural semantics), we observed that movement, even if it has central place in semantics, cannot be used alone to identify the meaning of verbs, nor can it be the basis of the meaning of all the vocabulary of a language.

This paper presents a software who's goal is to ease automatic analysis of natural language by solving two analysis problems:— resolution of syntactic ambiguities;— identification of fixed forms.In order to fulfil this goal, it appears that using negative rules make this system really powerful and easy to use, as long as sentences are represented by a graph structure.There are three main points to this paper:— the graph structure of the sentence;— the use of negative rules;— the identification of fixed forms based upon a new categorization of those forms.It's important to stress the industrial dimension of this work: actually, two systems are already using in software, namely a translating system for concept and a grammatical corrector for newspapers.

The analysis of pronominal anaphora in dét. N1 de (dét.) N2 requires on the one hand a preliminary study of anaphora and of the relations supported by de, and on the other hand, an examination of referential functioning of propositional constructions. The analysis of the relations supported by de is seldom enough to determine whether the whole structure, or just a part of it, is favoured. Thus, the notion of "head" which underlies the principle of pronoun accessing and the preselective clauses must take into account the way of determining the different components of the Dét. N1 de (dét.) N2. The role of determiners is therefore essential : those introducing N2 just as well as those preceding the whole prepositional construction because they all can contribute to making the whole complex structure, or part of it, salient. Examining the distribution of the determiners does not allow us to list all the possible and impossible anaphoras ; it simply aims at building up an access and preference scale based on the notions of salience and accessibility. The identification of references requires a treatment taking many other factors into account: conceptual agreement in gender, immediate or remote contexts, argumentative structure, shared information, extra-linguistic and encyclopedic knowledge...

A syntactic analyzer based on a string grammar is presented. The handling of idioms — a difficult problem for parsers — is more satisfactory than what has been accomplished until now. It appears that it is necessary to distinguish the lexical and syntactic phases of the analysis. Moreover, using a sentence graph structure makes this system really powerfull.There are four main points to this paper:— the architecture of the parser:— the identification of idioms based upon a new categorization of those forms;— the use of a sentence graph structure;— the description of the string grammar analyzer.

This work deals with the sub-class of concrete nouns and with automatic lexical transfer. It is a part of an ongoing project of comparative description of Quebec French.The paper presents a comparative method for studying language variants and some results concerning the construction of an electronic dictionary of synonyms. It is a contribution to the representation of relations of synonymy.

Syntax of the Hyphen: Complex PatternsAmong the different values of the hyphen in French (typographical uses, grammatical uses, lexical uses, etc.), this study focuses on a specific set of complex patterns. Three models are developed:a) correlative models, based on the particle mi- (mi-sérieux, mi-plaisant);b) juxtaposed models, particularly the pattern NO N1-N2 (V opposition consonne-voyelles, le vol Paris-Londres), which allows a typological description based on the nature of the introductory term (NO);c) double-compound models (conférence de presse-marathon, ex-homme de gauche), characterized by a form of discrepancy between the morphological pattern and the graphic boundaries (*presse-marathon, *ex-homme). They can combine with the first two models (mi-salle de billard, mi-cabinet de travail; l'interaction recherche fondamentale-recherche appliquée).These patterns are analyzed with a view to an automatic treatment of hyphenated forms.

This article focuses on the subset of French N à N compounds which denote concrete objects, which can be analyzed in terms of headnoun (Na) and specifier (à Nb), and in which the specifier subclassifies the head. Our study shows that the various semantic functions of an à Nb specifier with respect to its head (e.g. part of, destination of, etc.) correspond to a) distinct relational properties between the two components, b) specific distributional properties of either Na, Nb, or both components, as well as c) particular configurations of general properties that account for the greater or lesser syntactic flexibility of complex nominals. Surprisingly enough, most of the compounds we examined fall into one of three main classes thus defined.