Can the TAG derivation tree represent a semantic graph? An answer in the light of Meaning-Text Theory

From the parsing point of view, the derivation tree in TAG [hereafter DT] is seen as the "history" of the derivation but also as a linguistic representation, closer to semantics, that can be the basis of a further analysis. Because in TAG the elementary trees are lexicalized and localize the predicate-arguments relations, several works have compared the DT to a structure involving dependencies between lexical items (RJ92; RVW95). We agree with these authors that there are divergences between the DT and syntactic dependencies, but we show here that the DT — in the sense of (SS94) — can be viewed as a semantic dependency graph, namely a SemS for Meaning-Text Theory [MTT] (ZM67; M88). This requires the predicate-argument cooccurrence principle and also constraints on the adjunction of predicative auxiliary trees. We briefly introduce the representation levels in MTT before studying the dependencies shown by the DT.