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 ca...

This paper considers some of the foundational issues of formal semantics. These issues include the nature of the data that is to be accounted for, the nature of the formalism used to characterise that data, and the criteria for determining whether a particular formal account is adequate. If the relevant data is merely the arguments and truth conditions that subjects agree with, then the terms i...

The paper describes a formal theory for the dependency approach to syntax. The formalism is able to deal with long-distance dependencies, involved in function sharing and extractions. The distinctive aspects of the approach are the use of non lexical categories and a GPSG-style treatment of long-distance dependencies. The formalism is applied to a number of coordination phenomena, that are well...

The aim of this paper is to compare the discourse structures proposed in RST, SDRT and dependency DAGs which extend the semantic level of MTT for discourses. The key question is the following: do these formalisms allow the representation of all the discourse structures which correspond to felicitous discourses and exclude those which correspond to infelicitous discourses? Hence the term of “str...

An adequate, complete, and economical linguistic theory is necessary for MT and the question is whether a consistent use of the often unduly neglected dependency syntax, including a systematic description of topic and focus, cannot serve as a reliable base for the grammar of an interlingua, or of a set of interrelated interface structures. i. As Slocum (198~)convinc~ly shows, the attitude towar...

This paper shows how the correspondence between a unordered dependency tree and a sentence that expresses it can be achieved by transforming the tree into a string where each linear precedence link corresponds to one specific syntactic relation. We propose a formal grammar with a distributed architecture that can be used for both synthesis and analysis. We argue for the introduction of a topolo...

In the past decades, there has been much progress in the formal Semantics of ordinary language. Logicians, linguists and philosophers have extensively used logical formalisms in order to interpret directly or after translation important fragments of actual natural languages. They have thereby contributed to the foundations of the theory of sentence meaning. In formal Semantics, speaker meaning ...