Lingvisticæ Investigationes - Volume 21, Issue 1, 1997

This paper deals with automatic structuring of semantic values in a dictionary of synonyms. The data we used were first extracted from seven French published dictionnaries of synonyms and then merged to obtain the files we worked on. We explain here why a discrete mathematic representation of synonymic relation is not sufficient to produce a semantic structure (that represents the different meanings of a term but also their overlapping).Then we propose a continuous representation (using data analysis) that ables the machine to produce for each term its semantic values. The system also labels these values with prototypic synonyms and detects synonyms that share different semantic "axes" with the headword. It should be noted that these semantic spaces are obtained automatically for each headword from a homogeneous list of synonyms.

Taking as a starting point one of Maurice Gross's work on the construction be Prep X, we present the classes we have established for the Greek language.We have retained the classes established by M. Gross for French. For the Greek study, our point of departure is a selection of 2200 frozen expressions. But we have gone beyond this to study not only frozen expression but also productive phrases. The aim of this analysis was to establish the similarities or differences which exist between Greek and French. By studying the elements of these syntactic strings in both languages, we observe that the area of greatest difference occurs in the selection of prepositions, We have also studied the relationship between the support verb to be in Modern Greek and French and its relations with other support verbs.This study will serve as a basis for future comparative studies which will ultimately serve to support automatic translation.

This article is based on the results of a study dealing with the various classes of Italian verbs (modals, aspectuels, verbs of movement, progressives, avere da + infinitive) that attract the clitic pronouns from their base position. Their "climbing" is accounted for by excluding any sentence boundary in the domain of the clitic movement. Since this is exactly the traditional structure of the verb-auxiliary relationship, the following hypothesis is made: the verb phrases of a single sentence comprise, in addition to the main verb, an indefinite number of complementary verbs (the ones listed above plus the temporal/aspectual and passive auxiliaries). As a result, their distribution becomes unpredictable and is complicated further by the possible reiteration of certain verbs in the phrase. An account for this on the basis of structural rules is thus quite difficult. Therefore, it is proposed that the complementary verbs are freely generated in the base through a recurrent rule associated with some strategies of meaning interpretation.

This paper analyzes the properties of discourses in French and in Korean which express a direct causal relation. Our work leads us to observe a striking parallelism between the two languages although they are very distant from each other. It goes considerably further than Danlos's remarks, which are confined to the analogy between Romance languages and English. Furthermore, it is very interesting to see that Danlos's hypotheses are language-independent and that Pustejovsky's event structure and the relations of generalization and particularization are notions which can be applied in the same way in all these languages.

We present and comment a lexicon-grammar with objects classes describing French basic sentential schemata and frozen expressions concerning football game (soccer).

Two French Grammars Published in Spain During the XVIIth CenturyIn this article, after a brief review of the historical context of the XVIth and XVIIth centuries (especially of the franco-Spanish context), we describe two grammars made to teach French to Spaniards. The first one, written by a Spaniard, is included in the school of the general and philological grammar, developed in Spain during the XVIIth century, which, from a paedagogical viewpoint, is based in the analysis. The second one, included in the school called «grammaires des observations», is based, from a methodological viewpoint, in the learning of the grammatical forms.