Word Formation Rules and the Generative Lexicon: Representing Noun-to-Verb Versus Verb-to-Noun Conversion in French

The issues we address in this paper focus on the interface between lexical semantics and morphology. Just as lexical semantics can be viewed from a compositional point of view, morphology (that is, morpho-semantics) can be understood as a compositional semantics-constrained mechanism according to Corbin’s approach (Corbin 1987, 2001). These two levels of description give us distinct types of intrinsic information on the semantic content of derived words. One way to establish links between the two levels of description is to choose a common formalism for their representation. Basing our work on the study of the prefixation by M. Aurnague and M. Plénat (1996, 1997), limited to the popular prefix éin French, we (Jacquey and Namer 2003; Namer and Jacquey 2003) have suggested modelising the semantic role of this prefix within the framework of the Generative Lexicon Theory (Pustejovsky 1995). In this paper, we further this approach to modelisation of word formation mechanisms and apply this modelisation to account for another word formation (WF) process type in French, namely the NtoV versus VtoN conversion. Our reasons for focusing on the phenomenon of conversion are threefold. First, it consists in a non-conventional mechanism because of the absence of any affix. The absence of such morphological mark is crucial as far as conversion orientation is concerned. On the basis of the pairs danceN/danceV and butterN/butterV for example, what has to be decided is whether the (output) verb is converted from the (input) noun or vice-versa. This decision will allow us to draw the definition of the output with respect to that of the input.