Lingvisticæ Investigationes - Volume 28, Issue 2, 2005

The purpose of this study is to solve translation problems between French and Italian as they appear on the tables of the Lexique-Grammaire. These difficulties are originated by differences in speech level ; others stem from the specific usages of the Italian language (caused by regional variation, or due to specific cultural references). After reexamining the criteria traditionally used by the community of the Lexique-Grammaire, the author proposes returning to the criterium of frequency which enables one to draw a distinction between panregionalims and less extensive diatopic data and to identify specific dialectal variations. This encoding is complementary to the three usual layers of electronic dictionaries.

The syntax of psychological verbs like amuse has interested linguists for a number of years. Certain phenomena may be explained in a framework in which the syntax of these verbs involves a primitive causative predicate and a derived subject (originating from an object position). In other words, psych verbs like amuse are causative unaccusative (have a derived subject) transitive (have a direct object) verbs. I argue in the first part of the article that Romance object pro, the null object found in simple sentences like le chômage, ça n’amuse pas (“unemployment, that does not amuse (people)”) or a complexe sentence like ça ne fait pas rire (“that does not make (one) laugh”), is a property of Romance causative constructions, combined with the requirement that semantic computation be compositional. The latter requirement accounts for the very specific distribution of pro, basically only found with psych verbs. The former property explains why object pro is found in Romance languages and not in English. Still probing in the properties of French psych constructions, the second part of the article examines an exceptional class of slang psychological adjectives like marrant “funny”, which do not conform to the general syntax of V-ant adjectives. They have specific properties, explained within the framework developed in the first part of the article.

Every project of automated lemmatization is confronted to the problem of lexical ambiguities. The aim of the authors is to provide a description of the lexical ambiguities to be found in Ancient Greek. They also wish to present a first set of local grammars intended to solve them. Results of automated desambiguisation are compared with lexical data previously treated by hand.

In some Germanic languages, like Norwegian, words can be produced by concatenation of other words. When these compound words are frozen expressions, we just have to list them into dictionaries. When they are free combinations, on the other hand, their productivity makes it impossible to describe them exhaustively by means of a list. To solve this problem, we present in this paper an automatic procedure for analysing such compound words in Norwegian. This procedure is based on the use of electronic dictionaries.

The aim of this article is to study the French pronoun y in its spatial uses. y can refer to different types of phrases and, in particular, to spatial prepositional phrases. This induces that those phrases have contextual effects, as other nominal phrases have. We study the role played by certain spatial prepositions in this process and conclude that they act as functions, working on entities of the universe of interpretation to produce new entities.

The computational treatment of multilingual language resources (as in the Prolex projet, cf (Grass et al. 2002)) should respect lexical conventions admitted by each language’s native speakers. These conventions may vary from one language to another, as in the case of alphabetical sorting algorithm. This algorithm must take a number of universal as well as language-dependent particularities into account, such as the distinction of upper- and lowercase letters, the sorting bi-directionality (from the left to the right or conversely), the role of diacritics (resulting either in variants of a letter, as é, è and ê in French, or in independent letters, as å in Danish or ą in Polish), the role of punctuation characters, the multi-character letters (as ch or ll in Spanish, or dzs in Hungarian) and the ligatures (as œ in French, or ß in German). We describe a Unicode-based sorting algorithm inspired by (LaBonté 1998) for proper names. In the particular case of the sorting of the proper names, three additional points are to be taken into account : the presence of numerical values (Arab numerals or Roman numerals), the variation of spelling of the ligatures and the permutation in the sorting of the multi-word units. Apart from the word list to be sorted, its input is a language-dependent code table which defines the language’s alphabet, the number of algorithm’s passes, the direction of each pass, and the order of letters or groups of letters in each pass. The implementation of the algorithm is done by a finite-state transducer which allows a fast assignment of sort keys to words. The algorithm proved correct for European languages such as English, French, and Polish, as well as for Thai. It outperforms other sorting algorithms, such as those implemented in Intex (Silberztein 1993) and Unitex (Paumier 2003) systems.