Lingvisticæ Investigationes - Volume 25, Issue 1, 2002

SummaryAutomatic natural language processing systems require dictionaries of compound words in order to recognize these words when analyzing text automatically. This article presents the electronic dictionary of compound words in Modern Greek. This morphological dictionary contains around 28þ000 entries associated with a flexional code and filters. The flexional codes are used to describe flexional vectors, the presence of variants or accent displacements. The filters are used to describe the inflection of the words (simple or compound), meaning the cases or genders allowed in order to obtain every possible form of the word. This study is part of the work carried out jointly by the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and Marne-la-Vallée University with a view to developing a complete and formalized description of the Greek language.

SummaryThe “Lexicon-grammar” of LADL describes about 15,000 simple verbs and 25,000 complex verbs, according to the syntactic, distributional or semantic properties of their main constructions. I present the types of properties that have been selected as the basis for the classification of these verbs.

SummarySince the dawn of structuralism and generativism, linguists have not ceased to criticize a lack of scientific rigour in «traditional» grammar. Nowadays, the scientific character of syntax crucially depends on the use of syntactic tests. It appears, however, that this concept was not completely absent in traditional grammar. After a brief historical sketch of the emergence of the notion of syntactic test in modern linguistics, this contribution offers a typology of syntactic tests found in a corpus of 25 reference grammars of modern French, published in the first half of the 20th century. The bulk of syntactic tests cannot be separated from the notion of paraphrase, which in traditional grammar was partly used as a heuristic means, very often without the necessary control of linguistic form. As the quantitative analysis of the phenomenon in this study shows, the typology should not suggest that the notion of syntactic test was a dominant concept in traditional grammar. In addition, the perception of the concept of ‘syntactic test’ by the grammarians themselves is rather negative, because of a strong tendency towards, on the one hand, a ‘semanticization’ of grammar, and on the other hand, to ‘didacticization’ of the syntactic description. These two tendencies run counter to the later evolution in syntax, which emphasizes the argumentative value of manipulating utterances in order to establish non-aprioristic syntactic categories.

SummaryVerbs of “movement” in the infinitive complement in contemporary Polish: comparison with other languagesIn this article we analyse the syntactic properties of the infinitive complement (“locative”) which appears after verbs of “movement” (Vmt) in contemporary Polish. Many of these properties are identical to properties of the infinitive complement (V-inf W) the verbs of “movement” in French and in other languages (Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and Korean). However, some properties are specific to the Polish construction No Vmt V-inf W.

SummaryOne of the most interesting problems in second-language (L2) phonology is how to account for differential substitution. This is the phenomenon by which speakers who lack a certain segment (sequence) in their first language (L1) may adopt alternative language-specific replacement strategies in the L2 they are attempting to acquire. It has recently been claimed by Weinberger (1997) that the reason why, for example, Japanese learners of English systematically replace English /θ ð/ by /s z/ while their Russian counterparts always substitute /t d/ is that fricatives are unspecified for the feature [continuant] in Japanese while in Russian, the stops constitute the default obstruents. What is argued here is that this analysis in terms of Underspecification Theory cannot possibly work in the case of European and Canadian French which evince an equally systematic differential substitution of /θ ð/ to /s z/ and /t d/ respectively even though they have an identical system of underlying obstuents. It is also suggested that a perception-based approach to the thorny problem of differential substitution would appear to be a much more promising avenue of research.

SummaryA sub-set of the psych verbs whose subject is a sentential clause and whose object is a human noun, the experiencer, has been studied in its lexical extension. The transformations that can be applied to the paradigm sentence are studied in detail, and their acceptability (or not) plus various syntactic properties are noted for each verb in a table. Two surprising results emerge from this study. (1) All the verbs can be classified with confidence into three semantic groups: the first two contain verbs referring respectively to a mental or a physical change in the experiencer, and the third contains verbs making an observation or judgment about the experiencer. (2) A group of reflexive psych verbs has been observed that has hitherto escaped notice.

SummaryThis paper tests on French Beck’s (2000) analysis of plural and quantified NP dependent readings of different in English. According to her, different works as a relational adjective when it depends on a plural NP, and as a comparison operator when it depends on a universally quantified NP. Beck treats as evidence in favour of her thesis the fact that German uses two distinct ‘different’ (verschieden and ander) to produce the range of possible readings of different in English. We show, however, that the opposition between différent and autre in French does not locate the border of lexical differentiation there where we find it in German and where Beck sets the functional split. Furthermore, a close scrutiny of the English data exposes inconsistencies in her analysis of different as a comparison operator. In sum, our contrastive study of the three languages does not provide evidence for a clear-cut opposition between different uses of ‘different’. On the contrary, the situation depicted is better described as a gradient divided up in different ways by the various languages when realised as lexical items.