Book Reviews: Grammaires d'unification a traits et conto1e des infinitives en francais

The publication of this (1990) doctoral dissertation, written at the University of Clermont-Ferrand under Gabriel G. B6s, makes it possible to have in French a very useful reference work for syntactic systems based on generalized phrase-structure grammars (GPSGs) and unification categorial grammars (UCGs), as well as a good treatment of French syntax. Not only is the text very precise in its description of the constructions it deals with, but the detailed technical annexes (a quarter of the whole book) present lexical entries, grammar rules, and execution traces that give the reader a concrete idea of the actual implementation. The linguistic analysis, faithfully based on the data given by Gross (1975) for control phenomena, also covers other aspects of syntax (linear order, modifier/argument relations, etc.). The very good introduction to the theoretical framework of GPSG is based on that of Gazdar et al. (1985) and is followed by a detailed presentation of the way it was adapted for the grammar of French. 1 The introduction to UCG is based on that of Calder et al. (1986) and is illustrated by its implementation in the FDP system, built at Clermont-Ferrand, and by Baschung's own functional grammar (FG). 2 The explanation of the operations of composition and concatenation in UCG is so clear that it can serve as a reference for the theoretical framework, and the comparison between the two UCGs reveals those aspects that are due to linguistic choices rather than to the formalism itself. A thread running through the whole book, and especially emphasized in the section on GPSG, is the argumentation against the minimal distance principle (PDM in French) for determining the referent of the controller of an infinitive on a purely structural basis, with a criterion applied to the syntactic (or semantic) representation of the sentence. Baschung's thesis is that, on the contrary, the determination of the controller is based on a set of principles, some universal and some particular to the specific lan-