Lingvisticæ Investigationes - Volume 32, Issue 1, 2009

The article investigates the multi-functional status of the French connective donc (‘so’) showing on the basis of a corpus analysis that the connective may be used to structure the discourse at different levels. The study distinguishes four main functions for donc: consequential, recapitulating, reformulating, and discursive. In the discourse situation, donc may acquire properly discursive functions reaching beyond its primary consequential function. This functional evolution partially parallels a loss of the specific semantico-syntactic features of consequential donc.

‘Minor sentences’ is one of the many terms used in the literature to refer to a phenomenon usually relegated to an obscure paragraph of the grammar book, or treated principally as a spoken discourse feature. These forms are also referred to as sentence fragments, incomplete sentences, verbless sentences, and nominal sentences, to name but a few of the terms found. Despite the marginal status attributed to the forms, more detailed study is warranted. Minor sentences occur frequently in the written language, and perform important communicative functions in a range of contexts. The term is used to refer to apparently complete phrases which do not conform to canonical sentence structure. Typically, they lack a subject noun phrase, or a finite verb, i.e. one of the two ‘essential’ elements of the sentence. In this paper, we begin with an overview of English and French grammar book and discourse analysis approaches. We then discuss previous studies of minor sentence contexts, French recipes and newspaper headlines, before turning to a corpus consisting of public signs and notices, headlines, advertising slogans, and crossword clues, in an effort to determine whether certain minor sentence types can be associated with particular (written) discourse functions.

This paper deals with the complex interaction between form and function in the verb morphosyntax of four Indo-European languages (French, Italian, Ancient Greek and Sanskrit). Beyond the difference in form, auxiliation patterns in French and Italian, and verb inflections in Ancient Greek and Sanskrit correlate, thanks to the agreement for number and person, to the expression of the relationship with the Subject. The different auxiliation patterns (sum and habeo) and the different inflections (middle and active) correlate to different properties of the Subject. In particular, these forms depend on the syntactic opposition between middle and non-middle. The ways of this dependency are regulated and systematic, although they appear fuzzy and chaotic, not only if the four languages are compared to each other, but also if different morphosyntactic combinations, inside the same language, are concerned.

This paper presents a versatile system intended to acquire paraphrastic phrases from a small-size representative corpus. In order to decrease the time spent on the elaboration of resources for NLP system (for example for Information Extraction), we suggest to use a knowledge acquisition module that helps extracting new information despite linguistic variation. This knowledge is semi-automatically derived from the text collection, in interaction with a large semantic network.

The aim of this paper is to propose a unified account of dative assignment for both verbs and adjectives in French. We will show that both types of predicates assign dative case to their second internal argument, provided that this argument is situated in a higher position in the thematic hierarchy than the first internal argument. This hypothesis, which considers the dative in French as a structural rather than a semantic case, can easily account for all three-argument verbs, for most two-argument verbs and even for adjunct datives. As for the adjectival predicates, we will show that only ergative adjectives, whose first argument is an internal argument, can assign dative to their second internal argument. The few exceptions to this hypothesis can be explained by the fact that, although the dative is not a semantic case, it is associated with certain semantic roles, given that its semantic role is situated in the thematic hierarchy between the role of the external argument and the role of the first internal argument.

This paper deals with nouns morphologically and/or semantically paired with verbs denoting activities. We show that (contra N. Flaux & D. Van de Velde 2000) such nouns are not to be divided in three subclasses. Based on their distribution and interpretation (particularly the well-established count/mass distinction), we suggest that they denote either activities or occurrences. We provide a comparison with simple (i.e. non deverbal) nouns exhibiting the same behaviour when occurring in light verb constructions.