Lingvisticæ Investigationes - Volume 34, Issue 1, 2011

This paper aims to bring out the spatial properties of motion eventualities by focusing on French intransitive motion verbs. After examining changes of posture and changes of placement, we introduce the concept of change of basic locative relation (J.-P. Boons 1987) in order to accurately grasp the telic processes usually characterized as changes of location. The complex combinatory possibilities as between changes of relation and changes of placement are then illustrated by pinpointing the factors that condition the use of predicates of change of placement in utterances denoting changes of relation and placement (the notion of tendenciality). Finally, a categorization of French intransitive verbs of change of relation and placement is proposed, which is based on the way these two notions interact in their semantics.

Named Entity Recognition (NER) aims to classify each word of a document into predefined target named entity (NE) classes and is nowadays considered to be fundamental for many Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks such as information retrieval, machine translation, information extraction, question answering systems and others. This paper reports about the development of a NER system for Bengali and Hindi using Support Vector Machine (SVM). We have used the annotated corpora of 122,467 tokens of Bengali and 502,974 tokens of Hindi tagged with the twelve different NE classes, defined as part of the IJCNLP-08 NER Shared Task for South and South East Asian Languages (SSEAL). An appropriate tag conversion routine has been developed in order to convert the data into the forms tagged with the four NE tags, namely Person name, Location name, Organization name and Miscellaneous name. The system makes use of the different contextual information of the words along with the variety of orthographic word-level features that are helpful in predicting the different NE classes. The system has been tested with the gold standard test sets of 35K, and 38K tokens for Bengali, and Hindi, respectively. Evaluation results have demonstrated the overall recall, precision, and f-score values of 85.11%, 81.74%, and 83.39%, respectively, for Bengali and 82.76%, 77.81%, and 80.21%, respectively, for Hindi. Statistical analysis, ANOVA is performed to show that the improvement in the performance with the use of language dependent features is statistically significant over the language independent features for Bengali and Hindi both.

Complex collocations are a type of collocation whose syntactic structure is more complex than that of simple collocations. Thus, they are binary standardized or frequent phrases whose components show a lexical restriction relationship. The complex character of its structure means that one of its components, the collocative, is not a lexical unit, but rather a fixed phrase. Most of them are adverbial, either in the case of verbal predicates (llover a cántaros) or adjectival predicates (loco de atar), although they can also — in less frequent cases — be adjectival, as when combined with a noun (dinero en efectivo), or also nominal, in combination with a verb (hacer un corte de mangas).

This article deals with adjectives which, in French, are used to estimate subjectively a quantity in sentences such as Ce salaire est bas, ridicule (Those wages are low), Ce livre est épais (This book is thick), Cette pente est faible, douce (This slope is smooth). Howether, these adjective do not all have a quantitative sense as such. We therefore try to define under what syntactical and lexical conditions they can have such a quantitative meaning. Among other characteristics, they are quite unique as far as gradation is concerned. Two kinds are easily identifiable, one with adjective that can only used with nouns expressing measure, the other with adjectives that can qualify concrete objects or human beings. The latter highlights both an approximate quantity and a sensory quality. The main point was to prove that such a subjective semantical phenomenon could be described in syntactical and lexical terms.

This paper deals with the spatial features of event-denoting nouns [EvNs], which are often overlooked in the linguistic literature on space. EvNs can refer to spatial entities, as they can be used as trajectors in localization sentences (Il y a une cérémonie dans l’église ‘There is a ceremony in the church’). Still, EvNs differ in several ways from nouns denoting prototypical spatial entities. They do not combine with complements denoting spatial extension (*une cérémonie de deux hectares ‘a four acres’ ceremony’), and they are associated with specific nouns and verbs of location (le lieu / *la place de la cérémonie ‘the location / the place of the ceremony’, Une cérémonie a lieu / *se trouve dans l’église ‘A ceremony takes place / is in the church’). It is assumed that the peculiarity of the spatial denotation of EvNs is due to their direct relation to time. The dependence between the spatial and temporal properties of EvNs shows when these nouns are used as landmarks (Pierre se rend à la cérémonie ‘Peter goes to the ceremony’). First, spatial eventive landmarks bear a temporal specification. Second, the temporal features of events determine their ability to be used as spatial landmarks.