Implementing French clitics in ALE

This report describes the implementation of a portion of the French clitic system in the ALE system (Carpenter and Penn, 1999). Following the suggestions of Miller and Sag (1997), clitics are implemented entirely in the lexicon through a set of lexical rules that produce valence-reduced versions of inflected verbs. The rules governing agreement of past participles with a preceding pronominal direct object are also implemented. The implementation was based on a simple grammar for a fragment of English, which in turn was based on the HPSG treatment of English described by Sag andWasow (1999). The clitic system is one of the few areas in which French syntax differs substantially from English syntax—in most other respects, the two languages are very similar syntactically. So implementing this particular fragment of French goes some way to show that the version of HPSG given in Sag and Wasow, although it is based on the syntax of English, can also be used to model other languages with different syntactic features. The remainder of this paper is structured as follows. Section 2 gives an overview and a series of examples of the fragment of French syntax that was implemented in this grammar. Sections 3–6 describe the process of implementing this fragment in ALE. Section 7 describes a remaining overgeneration problem with the implementation, lists other French syntactic constructions that were not included in the fragment, and discusses the simplifications that were made to the Miller and Sag model in the implementation. Appendix A contains the full source code of the grammar.