La coordination des adjectifs modificateurs en russe et en français : la conjonction russe i et la conjonction française et

Le présent article établit les régularités d’emploi de coordination, par opposition à la codépendance, de deux adjectifs modifiant un nom en français et en russe. La possibilité de coordination par la conjonction française et / russe i est basée sur l’homogénéité des adjectifs (un regard lourd et morose), tandis que celle de leur codépendance se base sur leur hétérogénéité (une voiture rouge fiable). On distingue l’homogénéité sémantique (induite par le sens lexicographique des adjectifs) et l’homogénéité pragmatique (imposée par le locuteur voulant souligner la similitude situationnelle de deux adjectifs sémantiquement hétérogènes). Pour caractériser l’homogénéité des adjectifs, l’article propose une classification sémantique. Une comparaison systématique de la coordination et de la codépendance adjectivales dans les deux langues démontre que, dans la majorité des cas, le français préfère la coordination des adjectifs et le russe la codépendance : par exemple, un ciel haut et bleu ~ vysokoe sinee nebo .The present paper establishes regularities in the use of coordination vs. co-dependence of two adjectives that modify a noun in French and Russian. The possibility of coordination by the conjunction Fr. et ‘and’/Rus. i ‘and’ is based on homogeneity of adjectives, while that of their co-dependence on their heterogeneity. Two types of adjective homogeneity are distinguished: semantic homogeneity (induced by the lexicographic meaning of adjectives) and pragmatic homogeneity (determined by the speaker who wants to emphasize the situational similarity of two adjectives that are semantically heterogeneous). In order to characterize the homogeneity of adjectives, the paper proposes their semantic classification. A systematic comparison of adjectival coordination with co-dependence in both languages shows that in a majority of cases French prefers coordination of adjectives, while Russian prefers their co-dependence: for instance, ‘a high blue sky’ is rendered in French as un ciel haut et bleu , and in Russian as vysokoe sinee nebo

Les sémantèmes de causation en français

Cet article propose une description linguistique des emplois de verbes du français dont le sens contient un sens de causation. Nous étudions en premier lieu deux sens du verbe CAUSER : ‘causer1’ (≈ ‘être la cause de’) et ‘causer2’ (≈ ‘être le causateur de’). Notre analyse de ‘causer1’ insiste sur le caractère « multidiathétique » de ce sémantème, qui possède deux variantes de régime ; nous proposons quatre décompositions sémantiques possibles de ce sémantème, qui sont des variantes d’expression du même contenu sémantique (du type représenté dans les paraphrases L’explosion de la dynamite a causé des dégâts ~ La dynamite a causé des dégâts par son explosion). Nous ébauchons également la description des sémantèmes ‘agir’ qui font, selon notre analyse, partie des sens ‘causer’. Nous distinguons les verbes de causation proprement dits (comme causer, pousser [à], provoquer, entraîner, ...), qui n’expriment que la causation comme telle, et les verbes causatifs (comme construire, cuire, briser, ....), dont le sens inclut l’effet produit par la causation. Nous défendons l’hypothèse que plusieurs verbes causatifs en français ont deux acceptions, l’une basée sur ‘causer2’, et l’autre sur ‘causer1’ (Jean coupe bien ~ Le couteau coupe bien). Les propriétés sémantiques, lexicales et syntaxiques des deux types de verbes sont présentées pour étayer cette nécessaire distinction, en même temps que la primauté lexicographique de la première acception (dite « agentive »). En illustration, nous donnerons les décompositions sémantiques de deux acceptions du verbe tuer et du verbe angl. have (comme dans She had John clean the room). Cette analyse fine des sémantèmes de causation nous amène à considérer des contraintes variées sur la combinatoire des sémantèmes et en particulier une prise en compte d’une certaine représentation de la situation réelle.We give a linguistic description of different uses of several French verbs whose mean­ing includes a meaning of causation. First, we study two senses of the verb CAUSER: ‘causer1’ (≈ ‘be the cause of’) and ‘causer2’ (≈ ‘be the causer of’). Our analysis of ‘causer1’ insists on the ‘multidiathetical’ character of this semanteme, which features two variants of government pattern); we propose for it four semantic decompositions, which are expression variants of the same semantic content (of the type presented in the paraphrases L’explosion de la dynamite a causé des dégâts ‘The dynamite explosion caused damage’ ~ La dynamite a causé des dégâts par son explosion ‘The dynamite caused damage by its explosion’). Then we sketch a description of the semantemes ‘agir’ (‘[to] act’), which, according to our analysis, are part of the semantemes ‘causer’. Two types of French transitive verbs are distinguished: causation verbs (such as CAUSER (‘[to] cause’), POUSSER [à] (‘[to] force [to]’), PROVOQUER (‘[to] provoke), ENTRAÎNER (‘[to] entail’), ...), which express only causation as such, and causative verbs (such as CON­STRUIRE (‘[to] build’), CUIRE (‘[to] cook’), BRISER (‘[to] break’), etc.), whose meaning includes also the effect achieved by the causation. Our hypothesis is that many French causative verbs have two senses, one based on ‘causer2’, and the other on ‘causer1’ (Jean coupe bien ‘Jean cuts well’ ~ Le couteau coupe bien ‘The knife cuts well’). Semantic, lexical and syntactic properties of these two types of verbs are presented in order to justify this necessary distinction and, at the same time, the lexicographic primacy of the first sense (called agentive). To illustrate, we give the semantic decompositions of two senses of the French verb TUER(‘[to] kill’) and of the English verb HAVE (as in She had John clean the room). The fine-grained analysis of causation semantemes in French requires one to consider various constraints imposed on semantemes’ cooccurrence and in particular to take into account a representation of real life situations

Anna Wierzbicka, Semantic Decomposition, and the Meaning-Text Approach

The paper aims to demonstrate that the main contribution of Anna Wierzbicka to linguistics is the idea of semantic decomposition - that is, representing meaning in terms of structurally organized configurations of simpler meanings - and a huge amount of specific decompositions of lexical meanings from many languages. One of possible developments of this idea of Wierzbicka’s is the Meaning-Text linguistic approach, and in particular - the Meaning-Text model of natural language. To illustrate the importance and fruitfulness of semantic decomposition, two Meaning-Text mini-models are presented for English and Russian. Two semantically equivalent sentences of these languages are considered: (1) a. Eng. A honeymooner was fatally attacked by a shark. ~ b. Rus. Molodožën pogib v rezul´tate napadenija akuly vo vremja medovogo mesjaca lit. ‘Young.husband died as result of.attack of.shark during honey month’ The formal representations of these sentences at four levels-Meaning-Text style-are shown: semantic, deep-syntactic, surface-syntactic, and deep-morphological. Examples of formal rules relating the representations of two adjacent levels are presented

Prédicats et quasi-prédicats sémantiques dans une perspective lexicographique

La notion de prédicat sémantique permet de distinguer deux classes de sens lexicaux, ou sémantèmes : 1) les prédicats, qui tous dénotent des faits, au sens le plus large (évènements, actions, activités, états, caractéristiques, relations, etc.), et 2) les noms sémantiques, qui dénotent des entités au sens large (êtres vivants, objets physiques, substances, etc.). Nous nous intéressons tout particulièrement au fait qu’il existe une troisième classe de sémantèmes, ni prédicats véritables ni noms sémantiques : il s’agit des quasi-prédicats. Ces derniers dénotent, tout comme les noms sémantiques, des entités et non des faits. Cependant, comme les prédicats, ils ne peuvent être modélisés sans tenir compte de positions actancielles qu’ils contrôlent. L’ensemble des quasi-prédicats d’une langue est très hétérogène, et chaque type de quasi-prédicat pose ses propres problèmes au niveau de la modélisation. Nous examinons différents types de quasi-prédicats présents dans les langues, en adoptant une perspective lexicographique. Plus précisément, nous nous situons dans le cadre de la Lexicologie Explicative et Combinatoire, en empruntant nombre de nos illustrations aux données de la base lexicale DiCo des dérivations sémantiques et collocations du français ainsi qu’aux données publiées dans le Lexique actif du français.The notion of semantic predicate allows for the distinction of two classes of lexical meanings, or semantemes: 1) predicates, all of which denote situations in the broadest sense (events, actions, activities, states, characteristics, relations, etc.), and 2) semantic names, which denote entities, also in the broadest sense (living beings, physical objects, substances, etc.). In this paper we concentrate in particular on the existence of a third class of semantemes that are neither genuine predicates nor semantic names: these are quasi-predicates. Like semantic names, quasi-predicates denote entities, and not situations. But like predicates, they cannot be described without accounting for the actant slots they control. The set of quasi-predicates of a language is quite heterogeneous, and each type of quasi-predicate poses its own problems from the point of view of formal description. The paper examines several types of quasi-predicates found in natural languages by putting them into a lexicographic perspective. More precisely, we conduct the discussion in the framework of Explicative and Combinatorial Lexicology, borrowing our illustrations from the lexical database DiCo (semantic derivations and collocations of French) as well as from the recently published Lexique actif du français

Exploiting Lexical Conceptual Structure for paraphrase generation

Abstract. Lexical Conceptual Structure (LCS) represents verbs as semantic structures with a limited number of semantic predicates. This paper attempts to exploit how LCS can be used to explain the regularities underlying lexical and syntactic paraphrases, such as verb alternation, compound word decomposition, and lexical derivation. We propose a paraphrase generation model which transforms LCSs of verbs, and then conduct an empirical experiment taking the paraphrasing of Japanese light-verb constructions as an example. Experimental results justify that syntactic and semantic properties of verbs encoded in LCS are useful to semantically constrain the syntactic transformation in paraphrase generation.

On Heads and Coordination in Valence Acquisition

Abstract. The aim of this paper is to present the design of a partial syntactic annotation of the IPI PAN Corpus of Polish [22] and the cor-responding extension of the corpus search engine Poliqarp [25,12] devel-oped at the Institue of Computer Science PAS and currently employed in Polish and Portuguese corpora projects. In particular, we will argue for the need to distinguish between, and represent both, syntactic and se-mantic heads, and we will sketch the representation of coordination, the area traditionally controversial both in theoretical and in computational linguistics. The annotation is designed in a way intended to maximise the usefulness of the resulting corpus for the task of automatic valence acquisition

Non-crossing dependencies: Least effort, not grammar

The use of null hypotheses (in a statistical sense) is common in hard sciences but not in theoretical linguistics. Here the null hypothesis that the low frequency of syntactic dependency crossings is expected by an arbitrary ordering of words is rejected. It is shown that this would require star dependency structures, which are both unrealistic and too restrictive. The hypothesis of the limited resources of the human brain is revisited. Stronger null hypotheses taking into account actual dependency lengths for the likelihood of crossings are presented. Those hypotheses suggests that crossings are likely to reduce when dependencies are shortened. A hypothesis based on pressure to reduce dependency lengths is more parsimonious than a principle of minimization of crossings or a grammatical ban that is totally dissociated from the general and non-linguistic principle of economy.Postprint (author's final draft

Comparative constructions of similarity in Northern Samoyedic languages

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the suffixes which are used in Northern Samoyedic languages to build comparative constructions of equality. Depending on the language, the suffixes may perform three functions: word-building, form-building, and inflectional. When they mark the noun, they serve as simulative suffixes and are employed to build object comparison. In the inflectional function, these suffixes mark the verb and are a means of constructing situational comparison. In this case, they signal the formation of a special mood termed the Approximative. This paper provides a detailed description of the Approximative from paradigmatic and syntagmatic perspectives