Lingvisticæ Investigationes - Volume 35, Issue 1, 2012

The paper provides a quantitative study (on the syntax) of the placement alternation for the adjective within the noun phrase in French. Taking the hypothesis that position constraints are mostly preferential as a starting point, we develop a methodology based on statistical inference in order to provide a formal account of the relative importance of three different groups of constraints: combinatorial, frequency and length, and lexical constraints. The study highlights the clear importance of lexical constraints for deciding the effective position of the adjective within the noun phrase. We conclude the paper by bringing some elements of discussion for two issues: the interaction between lexicon and grammar (or storage versus computation) and the underlying methodology for a probability-based study of syntax.

This article investigates the status of French N+N constructions in which the N2 productively combines with different N1’s (e.g. réunion marathon ‘marathon meeting’, examen marathon ‘marathon exam’, plaidoyer marathon ‘marathon plea’, etc). In the literature, this construction has been analyzed in very different ways, going from regular N+N compounding to the syntactic combination of a noun with a second noun converted into an adjective. In a first section, the arguments in favour of these different analyses are discussed. The second section is devoted to a specific case study in which the construction N-clé ‘key N’ (mot-clé ‘key word’, fonction-clé ‘key function’, élément-clé ‘key element’, etc.) is subjected to a profound semantic, orthographic, morphological and syntactic analysis. It will be observed that in recent uses the N-clé construction has developed some new syntactic properties that might be accounted for by a process of degrammaticalization.

This article deals with discourse functions of the Spanish scalar particle incluso in interaction with a si conditional. It will be shown that scalar properties of incluso require paying attention not only to its focus and scope, but also to its argumentative function and discourse structure. Thus, three main discourse functions are proposed for incluso when it appears with a si construction: co-argumentation, co-argumentation with a concessive sense, and counter-argumentation. Among these values, the latter constitutes a scalar concessive conditional. More generally, this article may shed light to understand how concessive conditionals work, and it may provide evidence for some controversial questions about the category.

While French and English share the same pluralization morpheme, a dictionary corpus sanctioned by press usage reveals that a small set of nominal anglicisms, particularly compounds, fail to receive inflection in French (e.g., des black-jacks, des happy ends, des beagles vs. des black-out, des has been, des people). This study interprets patterns of inflectional variation and reveals inflection-inhibiting constraints for these bare borrowings and thus contributes to explaining the little-researched morphology of anglicisms in French. The findings clearly demonstrate that the absence of inflection, seemingly atypical, is systematically rooted in the parameters of French morphology. The analysis simultaneously though secondarily documents phases, mechanisms, and processes of integration for contemporary borrowing — e.g., patterns of simplification with regularization of irregularities, a well-attested contact phenomenon; borrowing as a non-homogeneous phenomenon (English loans vs. other-language loans); and anglicisms as tools for creative, playful language.

Lexicon-Grammar tables, whose development was initiated by Gross (1975), are a very rich syntactic lexicon for the French language. They cover various lexical categories such as verbs, nouns, adjectives and adverbs. This linguistic database is nevertheless not directly usable by computer programs, as it is incomplete and lacks consistency.Tables are defined on the basis of features which are not explicitly recorded in the lexicon. These features are only described in literature. To use these tables, we must make explicit the essential features appearing in each one of them. In addition, many features must be renamed for consistency sake.Our aim is to adapt the tables, so as to make them usable in various Natural Language Processing (NLP) applications, in particular parsing. We describe the problems we encountered and the approaches we followed to enable their integration into a parser.LGExtractLGLexfffLexique des Formes Fléchies du FrançaisfffProduire des Annotations Syntaxiques à Grande Échelleet alfff