On the status of deep syntactic structure

International audienceThis paper defends an apparently paradoxical point of view: The deep-syntactic structure is a fundamental representation of a sentence, but it should not be considered as an intermediate structure in the meaning-text correspondence. We argue that the correspondence from the semantic level to the surface-syntactic level must be direct and that the deep-syntactic structure is the witness of this correspondence (i.e. the derivation structure in more technicalterms). Due to this status, it plays a major role in the paraphrasing and in the characterization of lexical functionsCet article défend un point de vue apparemment paradoxal : la structure syntaxique profonde est une représentation fondamentale de la phrase, mais elle ne doit pas être considérée comme une structure intermédiaire dans la correspondance sens-texte. Nous pensons que la correspondance du niveau sémantique au niveau syntaxique de surface doit être directe et que la structure syntaxique profonde est le témoin de cette correspondance (c'est-à-dire la structure de dérivation en termes plus techniques). En raison de ce statut, elle joue un rôle majeur dans le paraphrasage et la caractérisation des fonctions lexicale

Interpreting and defining connections in dependency structures

International audienceThis paper highlights the advantages of not interpreting connections in a dependency tree as combinations between words but of interpreting them more broadly as sets of combinations between catenae. One of the most important outcomes is the possibility of associating a connection structure to any set of combinations assuming some well-formedness properties and of providing a new way to define dependency trees and other kinds of dependency structures, which are not trees but "bubble graphs". The status of catenae of dependency trees as syntactic units is discussed

A formalism for machine translation in MTT, including syntactic restructurings

This paper presents a new formalisation of the transfer-based translation model of the Meaning-Text Theory. Our modelling is based on polarized correspondence grammars and observes a strict separation between the monolingual models, a minimal bilingual lexicon and universal restructuring rules, directly associated with syntactic lexical functions

The Meaning-Text Theory

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L'amas verbal au cœur d'une modélisation topologique de l'ordre des mots

Version courte présentée aux Journées de la syntaxe "ordre des mots dans la phrase française" tenue à Bordeaux (novembre 2004)International audienc

Dependency-based analyses for function words – Introducing the polygraphic approach

International audienceThis paper scrutinizes various dependency based representations of the syntax of function words, such as prepositions. The focus is on the underlying formal object used to encode the linguistic analyses and its relation to the corresponding linguistic theory. The poly-graph structure is introduced: it consists of a generalization of the concept of graph that allows edges to be vertices of other edges. Such a structure is used to encode dependency-based analyses that are founded on two kinds of morphosyn-tactic criteria: presence constraints and distributional constraints

Speaking in piles: Paradigmatic annotation of French spoken corpus

International audienceThis article describes a central part of the syntactic schemes that are currently used in the ongoing annotation of a French spoken corpus. Based on the Aix School grid analysis of spoken French, the notion of « pile » is introduced, allowing for an elegant description of various paradigmatic phenomena like disfluency, reformulation, apposition, instanciation, including question-answering and colon effect, and different types of coordination. Piles naturally complete dependency annotations by modeling non-functional relations between phrases

Advantages of the flux-based interpretation of dependency length minimization

International audienceDependency length minimization (DLM, also called dependency distance minimization) is studied by many authors and identified as a property of natural languages. In this paper we show that DLM can be interpreted as the flux size minimization and study the advantages of such a view. First it allows us to understand why DLM is cognitively motivated and how it is related to the constraints on the processing of sentences. Second, it opens the door to the definition of a big range of variations of DLM, taking into account other characteristics of the flux such as nested constructions and pro-jectivity

Word Ordering as a Graph Rewriting Process

International audienceThis paper shows how the correspondence between a unordered dependency tree and a sentence that expresses it can be achieved by transforming the tree into a string where each linear precedence link corresponds to one specific syntactic relation. We propose a formal grammar with a distributed architecture that can be used for both synthesis and analysis. We argue for the introduction of a topological tree as an intermediate step between dependency syntax and word order

Non-constituent coordination and other coordinative constructions as Dependency Graphs

International audienceThis paper proposes a new dependency-based analysis of coordination that generalizes over existing analyses by combining symmetrical and asymmetrical analyses of coordination into a DAG structure. The new joint structure is shown to be theoretically grounded in the notion of connections between words just as the formal definition of other types of dependencies. Beside formalizations of shared dependents (including right-node raising), paradigmatic adverbs, and embedded coordinations , a completely new formalization of non-constituent coordination is proposed