A Lexicalized Tree Adjoining Grammar for French: The General Framework

We present the first sizable grammar written in the Tree Adjoining Grammar formalism (TAG)1. In particular we have used \u27lexicalized\u27 TAGs as described in [Schabes, Abeillé and Joshi 1988]. We present the linguistic coverage of our grammar, and explain the linguistic reasons which lead us to choose the particular representations. We have shown that a wide range of linguistic phenomena can be handled within the TAG formalism with lexically specified structures only. We first state the basic structures needed for French, with a particular emphasis on TAG\u27s extended domain of locality that enables us to state complex subcategorization phenomena in a natural way. We motivate the choice of the head for the different structures and we contrast the treatment of nominal arguments with that of sentential ones, which is particular to the TAG framework. We also give a detailed analysis of sentential complements, because it has lead us to introduce substitution into the formalism, and because TAG makes interesting predictions in these cases. We discuss the different linguistic phenomena corresponding to adjunction and to substitution respectively. We then move on to \u27light verb\u27 constructions, in which extraction freely occurs out of the predicative NP. They are handled in a TAG straightforwardly as opposed to the usual double analysis. We lastly give an overview of the treatment of adjuncts,and suggest a treatment of idioms which make them fall into the same representations as \u27free\u27 structures

Deux constructions à SN antéposé en français

International audienceWe contrast two types of sentences with a preposed NP in French in a construction based HPSG grammar. They differ with respect to different grammatical aspects (syntax, semantics, pragmatics and phonology), which cluster uniquely into constructions. Both are colloquial, a reason why they have been recognized only recently (see Zribi-Hertz 1986, 1996, Sabio 1995, 2006). Accordingly, we rely for the data on spoken corpora (Corpaix, CFRP) as well as on our intuitions. Both constructions involve a partitioned semantics but this mode of composition is associated with different effects. One construction is characterized semantically: the preposed NP is the theme of a categorical proposition. The other construction is characterized pragmatically: it is associated with an independent declarative clause, a typical use of which is to signal a break in the interaction.Nous distinguons deux types de constructions introduites par un SN antéposé dans le cadre théorique HPSG. Ces deux types diffèrent selon plusieurs caractéristiques grammaticales (syntaxe, sémantique, pragmatique et phonologie). Ils relèvent plus spécifiquement de la langue parlée usuelle, ce qui explique qu'ils n'aient été isolés que récemment (voir Zribi-Hertz 1986, 1996, Sabio 1995, 2006)

Verbes « à montée » et auxiliaires dans une grammaire d’arbres adjoints

L’analyse transformationnelle des verbes « à montée », si elle a le mérite de maintenir un principe de correspondance entre arguments syntaxiques et arguments sémantiques, pose plus de problèmes qu’elle n’en résout. L’analyse alternative généralement adoptée en grammaires d’unification, qui identifie les structures syntaxiques des auxiliaires, des verbes à montée et des verbes à contrôle, ne tient pas en français. A partir de ce double constat, cet article propose une troisième voie pour rendre compte des ressemblances et des différences entre verbes « à montée » et auxiliaires, tout en maintenant une coïncidence entre arguments syntaxiques référentiels et arguments sémantiques dans une grammaire d’arbres adjoints.The (subject-to-subject) raising transformation, while ensuring a mapping principle between syntactic and semantic arguments, raises more questions than it can solve. The alternative analysis proposed by unification-based grammars assigns the same syntactic structure to auxiliaries, raising verbs and control verbs and cannot be true for French. This paper proposes a third solution within Tree Adjoining Grammar which can capture both similarities and differences between auxiliaries and « raising » verbs, while maintaining a coincidence between (referential) syntactic and semantic arguments

Parsing Strategies With \u27Lexicalized\u27 Grammars: Application to Tree Adjoining Grammars

In this paper, we present a parsing strategy that arose from the development of an Earley-type parsing algorithm for TAGs (Schabes and Joshi 1988) and from some recent linguistic work in TAGs (Abeillé: 1988a). In our approach, each elementary structure is systematically associated with a lexical head. These structures specify extended domains of locality (as compared to a context-free grammar) over which constraints can be stated. These constraints either hold within the elementary structure itself or specify what other structures can be composed with a given elementary structure. The \u27grammar\u27 consists of a lexicon where each lexical item is associated with a finite number of structures for which that item is the head. There are no separate grammar rules. There are, of course, \u27rules\u27 which tell us how these structures are composed. A grammar of this form will be said to be \u27lexicalized\u27. We show that in general context-free grammars cannot be \u27lexicalized\u27. We then show how a \u27lexicalized\u27 grammar naturally follows from the extended domain of locality of TAGs and examine briefly some of the linguistic implications of our approach. A general parsing strategy for \u27lexicalized\u27 grammars is discussed. In the first stage, the parser selects a set of elementary structures associated with the lexical items in the input sentence, and in the second stage the sentence is parsed with respect to this set. The strategy is independent of nature of the elementary structures in the underlying grammar. However, we focus our attention on TAGs. Since the set of trees selected at the end of the first stage is not infinite, the parser can use in principle any search strategy. Thus, in particular, a top-down strategy can be used since problems due to recursive structures are eliminated. We then explain how the Earley-type parser for TAGs can be modified to take advantage of this approach

Using Lexicalized Tags for Machine Translation

Lexicalized Tree Adjoining Grammar (LTAG) is an attractive formalism for linguistic description mainly because of its extended domain of locality and its factoring recursion out from the domain of local dependencies (Joshi, 1984, Kroch and Joshi, 1985, Abeillé, 1988). LTAG\u27s extended domain of locality enables one to localize syntactic dependencies (such as filler-gap), as well as semantic dependencies (such as predicate-arguments). The aim of this paper is to show that these properties combined with the lexicalized property of LTAG are especially attractive for machine translation. The transfer between two languages, such as French and English, can be done by putting directly into correspondence large elementary universe without going through some interlingual representation and without major changes to the source and target grammars. The underlying formalism from the transfer is synchronous Tree Adjoining Grammars (Sheiber and Schabes [1990]). Transfer rules are stated as correspondences between nodes of trees of large domain of locality which are associated with words. We can thus define lexical transfer rules that avoid the defects of a mere word-to-word approach but still benefit from the simplicity and elegance of a lexical approach. We rely on the French and English LTAG grammars (Abeillé [1988], Abeillé [1990(b)], Abeillé et al. [1990], Abeillé and Schabes [1989, 1990]) that have been designed over the past two years jointly at University of Pennsylvania and University of Paris 7-Jussieu

La position de l'adjectif épithète en français : le poids des mots

Nous proposons une analyse de l'ordre des adjectifs épithètes par rapport au nom en français qui dépend crucialement de la notion de Poids syntaxique. Dans notre approche, les adjectifs appartenant à certaines sous-classes sémantiques ou morphologiques sont marqués comme de poids léger, et doivent être antéposés, sauf s'ils sont coordonnés ou modifiés. La notion de légèreté permet aussi de rendre compte de l'impossibilité d'avoir des syntagmes adjectivaux complets (avec des compléments ou des modifieurs syntagmatiques) en position antéposée.We suggest an explanation of the position of the attributive adjective with respect to the Noun in French, based on the notion of syntactic Weight. In our approach, adjectives belonging to certain morphological or semantic subclasses are marked as being "lite weight", and must be preposed, except if they are modified or conjoined. The notion of liteness also accounts for the impossibility to prepose full adjectival phrases (with complements or phrasal modifiers)

Deux types de prédicats complexes dans les langues romanes

Les prédicats complexes romans (auxiliaires, verbes restructurants, causatifs, attributifs) qu’on peut définir formellement par la propriété de « montée » des pronoms clitiques, sont souvent considérés comme formant un type, monoclausal analytique, à mi-chemin entre le type à construction biclausale (ex. les causatifs anglais) et le type monoclausal synthétique (ex. le causatif bantou). Nous voulons montrer que, pour les auxiliaires et les verbes dits « restructurants » (modaux, aspectuels), ..

A Lexicalized Tree Adjoining Grammar for English

This paper presents a sizable grammar for English written in the Tree Adjoining grammar (TAG) formalism. The grammar uses a TAG that is both lexicalized (Schabes, Abeillé, Joshi 1988) and feature-based (Vijay-Shankar, Joshi 1988). In this paper, we describe a wide range of phenomena that it covers. A Lexicalized TAG (LTAG) is organized around a lexicon, which associates sets of elementary trees (instead of just simple categories) with the lexical items. A Lexicalized TAG consists of a finite set of trees associated with lexical items, and operations (adjunction and substitution) for composing the trees. A lexical item is called the anchor of its corresponding tree and directly determines both the tree\u27s structure and its syntactic features. In particular, the trees define the domain of locality over which constraints are specified and these constraints are local with respect to their anchor. In this paper, the basic tree structures of the English LTAG are described, along with some relevant features. The interaction between the morphological and the syntactic components of the lexicon is also explained. Next, the properties of the different tree structures are discussed. The use of S complements exclusively allows us to take full advantage of the treatment of unbounded dependencies originally presented in Joshi (1985) and Kroch and Joshi (1985). Structures for auxiliaries and raising-verbs which use adjunction trees are also discussed. We present a representation of prepositional complements that is based on extended elementary trees. This representation avoids the need for preposition incorporation in order to account for double wh-questions (preposition stranding and pied-piping) and the pseudo-passive. A treatment of light verb constructions is also given, similar to what Abeillé (1988c) has presented. Again, neither noun nor adjective incorporation is needed to handle double passives and to account for CNPC violations in these constructions. TAG\u27S extended domain of locality allows us to handle, within a single level of syntactic description, phenomena that in other frameworks require either dual analyses or reanalysis. In addition, following Abeillé and Schabes (1989), we describe how to deal with semantic non compositionality in verb-particle combinations, light verb constructions and idioms, without losing the internal syntactic composition of these structures. The last sections discuss current work on PRO, case, anaphora and negation, and outline future work on copula constructions and small clauses, optional arguments, adverb movement and the nature of syntactic rules in a lexicalized framework

L’alternance actif / passif en français : une étude statistique sur corpus écrit

Nous étudions l’utilisation de la construction passive en français écrit, en mettant au jour des contraintes préférentielles. Nous avons extrait et annoté un échantillon de 500 phrases (250 actives et 250 passives) du corpus arboré du français (Abeillé et al., 2019) puis nous avons modélisé les données par régression logistique (Baayen, 2008). Si le passif court (sans complément d’agent) est plus fréquent que le passif long (77 % des passifs sont courts), nous observons que dans près de 80 % des cas de passif court, l’argument omis est récupérable en contexte. Nous montrons le rôle prépondérant de la longueur des arguments et de la structure informationnelle dans l’alternance actif / passif. Nous montrons également que la construction passive obéit à des contraintes plus générales sur l’alignement harmonique des arguments (Bresnan et al., 2001 et 2007).We study the active/passive alternation in written French to discover preference constraints. We have extracted and annotated a sample of 500 clauses (250 active and 250 passive) of the French Treebank (Abeillé et al., 2019) and modeled them with logistic regression (Baayen, 2008). Short passives (without a par-phrase) are more frequent than long passive (77% of passives are short); in 80% of short passives, the omitted argument is present in the context. We show that argument length and information structure are important factors in active/passive alternation. We also show that the passive construction obeys more general cross-linguistic harmonic argument alignment constraints (Bresnan et al., 2001 and 2007)