Lingvisticæ Investigationes - Volume 23, Issue 2, 2000

SummaryThe aim of this article is to give an account of the work in progress concerning the Spanish electronic dictionaries of the DELA system. We describe the process of construction and maintenance of the dictionary of simple words (DELASs) and these of compound words (DELACs), which the latter comprising different modules for nouns (monolingual and French-Spanish bilingual), adverbs, verbs and adjectives. We also present a nominal determiners dictionary and we make some remarks about French-Spanish comparative lexicology.

SummaryWe use the Web as a corpus to validate and extend linguistic descriptions of lexical classes, that are homogeneous from a semantic point of view. We put the emphasis, here, on a 10000-noun class : þprofessionþ.

SummaryThe paper compares broad focus, narrow focus and contrastive focus in English and Italian. It concludes that a focus cannot have a contrastive meaning unless some precise syntactic and discourse features “preliminarly” make it a narrow focus. The comparison between broad and narrow focus should be made on a syntactic and discourse level, whereas the relationship between narrow and contrastive focus is better described in semantic terms. In particular, a narrow focus arises when the intonational prominence is in a marked position, i.e. not only a position which is marked for the intonational prominence as such, but also any position that is marked for the constituent that bears the prominence. One difference in this respect between order in English (more fixed) and in Italian (less fixed) is analysed, leading to the conclusion that some relationships with narrow focus usually attributed to specific syntactic roles are better seen as a matter of simple position of the constituents. The different factors that cause contrastive focus (such as words belonging to closed paradigms, focus on given information, etc.) are analysed comparatively and a classification is suggested in terms of paradigmatic vs. syntagmatic contrast.

SummaryThe constructions with support verbs raise specific problems in Machine Translation. Within the scope of this note, we first characterise, from a linguistic point of view, the sentences with support verbs. That characterisation will be illustrated by examples from French and Portuguese. The difficulties in the automatic translation of support verbs constructions will be illustrated with examples from Portuguese, taken as source language, and French, taken as target language.

SummaryTaking as the starting point the tautology in logics, the present paper explores the expression of tautology in language. It deals exclusively with tautological phrases constituting complete messages which, according to the definition of tautology, are not supposed to communicate any information. The main cases of tautology and their correspondent linguistic structures are analyzed. While some of these phrases are formally identical to the logical formulae, their functioning, as well as their semantic interpretations, their pragmatic and stylistic values lead, when examined, to the questioning of the very existence of tautology in verbal communication.

Summary« Du coup » and the consequence discourse markers in a dynamic perspectiveDu coup is a French discourse marker (DM) which signals that a consequence relation obtains between two propositions. In this respect it is in the same class as the other consequence French DM, such as donc, alors, par conséquent, de ce fait or aussi. Those different DM’s impose different constraints on the syntactic and semantic environments where they occur. In this paper, we describe the constraints which are particular to du coup. First, we propose a global description of the consequence DM, in order to emphasize the different dimensions along which the DM’s of this kind can be classified. This leads us to a first characterization of du coup. We show that, unfortunately, du coup eludes any analysis in these terms and calls for a more fine-grained description. We then show that the properties of this DM are aspectual and epistemic and we formulate a constraint which allows one to derive the aspectual properties from the epistemic ones, by resorting to the notion of omission in information states.

SummaryThis paper presents some of the findings which emerged during the construction of a French-Italian lexicon-grammar of frozen adverbs. A French lexicon-grammar compiled by Maurice Gross (1990) was compared with an Italian lexicon-grammar (De Gioia 1994b) with a view to finding semantically equivalent entries for translation purposes. The results showed that 65% of the French entries can be translated with equivalent adverbial and idiomatic expressions in Italian, giving the lie to the traditionally held view that idiomatic expressions are generally untranslatable. A further analysis of cases of semantic and syntactic equivalence showed that the two languages share many families of frozen adverbs, which can be represented by automata and transducers.