A Fully Lexicalized Grammar for French Based on Meaning-Text Theory (Invited Talk)

The paper presents a formal lexicalized dependency grammar based on Meaning-Text theory. This grammar associates semantic graphs with sentences. We propose a fragment of a grammar for French, including the description of extractions. The main particularity of our grammar is it that it builds bubble trees as syntactic representations, that is, trees whose nodes can be filled by bubbles, which can contain others nodes. Our grammar needs more complex operations of combination of elementary structures than other lexicalized grammars, such as TAG or CG, but avoids the multiplication of elementary structures and provides linguistically well-motivated treatments. 1 I n t r o d u c t i o n Meaning-Text theory (MTT) has been developed since more than thirty years, but no complete formalization of the model has been achieved. Our main goal in this paper is to propose a formal grammar based on MTT. We insist on the fact that our grammar in any case is a ‘kosher’ implementation of MTT. Following the MTT postulates ([16]: 53), we consider that 1) a grammar is a formal system which ensures the bidirectional correspondence between texts and meanings (= semantic representations) and that 2) intermediate levels of representation—a morphological level and a syntactic level—must be considered and that a grammar consists of several modules which establish correspondence between representations of adjacent levels. Our grammar is composed of three modules: the morphological module ensures the correspondence between sentences and morphological representations, the syntactic module ensures the correspondence between morphological and syntactic representations and the semantic module ensures the correspondence between syntactic and semantic representations. In section 2, we present the different levels of representation, in section 3, the syntactic module and in section 4, the semantic module. Our formalism will be exem1 I want to thank Jasmina Milievi, as well as two anonymous referees, for many valuable comments and corrections. 2 The term grammar is used in its Chomskian sense of ‘linguistic model’.