Review of Lexique, Syntaxe et Lexique-Grammaire / Syntax, Lexis & Lexicon-Grammar
|
|
|
|
|
Review:
|
Date: Wed, 11 May 2005 10:22:36 -0700
From: Thierry Fontenelle <thierryf@microsoft.com>
Subject: Lexique, Syntaxe et Lexique-Grammaire: Papers in honour of
Maurice Gross
EDITORS: Leclère, Christian; Laporte, Eric; Piot, Mireille; Silberztein,
Max
TITLE: Lexique, Syntaxe et Lexique-Grammaire -- Syntax, Lexis & Lexicon-
Grammar
SUBTITLE: Papers in honour of Maurice Gross
SERIES: Lingvisticæ Investigationes Supplementa 24
PUBLISHER: John Benjamins Publishing Company
YEAR: 2004
Thierry Fontenelle, Microsoft Speech & Natural Language Group, Redmond
(USA)
This book is a collection of papers that the editors originally intended
to present to the French linguist Maurice Gross on some festive occasion.
When he died in December 2001, the editors decided to turn this volume
into a festschrift to pay homage to his memory.
Maurice Gross can be credited for creating a whole linguistic school which
exerted a significant influence on the description of a large number of
languages. He undertook a systematic investigation of the French lexicon
and his studies on French transformational syntax gave rise to the concept
of "lexicon-grammar" in which he proposed a model of the syntax of natural
languages in the form of a large network of finite automata. He managed to
bring together studies of the vocabulary of languages and of the syntactic
constructions of these languages. In a way, what he proposed for French
was the same type of systematic linguistic description which, in the Anglo-
Saxon lexicographical world, led to the creation of dictionaries-cum-
grammar, also known as learner's dictionaries like the Oxford Advanced
Learner's Dictionary of English or the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary
English.
This volume includes 34 papers in French and 17 papers in English, to
which a foreword (in English) and a list of Gross's publications are
added. The papers were all written by Maurice Gross's followers, former
students, colleagues and/or friends. While most of the papers are
concerned with some aspect of French (or, to a lesser extent, English)
linguistics, we also find contributions about Greek, Arabic, Chinese,
Italian, Korean, Malagasy, Portuguese, Japanese and Serbo-Croatian.
Regional varieties are also discussed in two papers, one on Québec French
and another one on Belgian French.
In his stimulating foreword, Eric Laporte notes that "the authors of the
contributions are from different schools of thought and from different
continents" (p.xxi). While this is true for some of the papers, it has to
be acknowledged that the majority do adopt the lexicon-grammar framework
developed by Gross and rely upon the tools and methods he and his
colleagues developed at the LADL (Laboratoire d'Automatique Documentaire
et Linguistique) in Paris. This leads to some repetitions which the
editors have not tried to avoid (I am thinking particularly of the
numerous descriptions of the concept of "support verb" or of the lexicon-
grammar tables in the electronic dictionaries). It is always nice to have
the terminological reminders in a paper, but when one reads the book from
cover to cover, this inevitably gives rise to some feeling of déjà vu.
The letter which was attached to the review copy sent by the publisher
indicates that a CD-Rom is also available with the book, but since it was
not included in the material I received, I will not try to speculate on
its contents. As soon as I started reading the book, I also noticed that
the second article (Anna Anastassiadis-Syméonidis on the lexicon-grammar
in Modern Greek) and the first four pages of the third article (Antoinette
Balibar-Mrabti) were missing from my copy. In fact, pages 10 to 26 are
missing and pages 27-42 appear twice! I of course realize that the editors
themselves cannot be blamed for this technical problem and I am not in a
position to check whether other copies have the same problem. However, I
cannot help but thinking that this is unacceptable for a book which costs
USD 192.00. One probably tends to be more lenient with Festschrifts
published by local university presses, because the ultimate aim of such
collections of papers is to disseminate the results of scientific work as
soon as possible and one usually forgives the editors for the odd typos
and poorer quality of the book itself if the contents is worth it and the
price is reasonable. But, in the present case, I would not be surprised if
the authors of the missing articles were disappointed (that is probably an
understatement) to see that a book published by such a reputable
publishing house was so expensive and sloppy.
The book comprises the following papers (the title is given in the
language in which the article is written):
1. Eric Laporte: Foreword
Laporte focuses on Gross's contribution to linguistics, with a special
emphasis on the predicate/argument model, finite automata,
transformational syntax, lexical ambiguities and idioms.
2. Jean-Claude Chevalier: Entretien avec Maurice Gross
Interview in which Gross talks about his early career, his studies, his
doctoral dissertation and his post-doc research in the United States.
3. Anna Anastassiadis-Syméonidis: Le Lexique-Grammaire du grec moderne.
Article missing in this reviewer's copy.
4. Antoinette Balibar-Lrabti: Lexique-Grammaire et extensions lexicales.
Notes sur le semi-figement.
The first four pages of this 7-page article on semi-fixed expressions are
missing, too.
5. Jorge Baptista: Instrument Nouns and Fusion. Predicative nouns
designating violent actions.
Baptista analyzes predicative nouns which express violent actions in
Portuguese.
6. Hava Bat-Zeev Shildkrot: La constitution d'une concordance de verbes de
l'ancien français.
Bat-Zeev Shyldkrot describes a completed project which aimed at building
concordances for Old French verbs, with a view to extracting phonetic and
morphological information and accounting for changes in transitivity. The
choice of the corpus is also discussed.
7. Andrée Borillo: Les adjectifs dérivés de noms de parties du corps dans
les textes médicaux.
Borillo describes denominal adjectives derived from nouns referring to
body parts. The types of nouns with which these relational adjectives co-
occur are analyzed (action nouns, diseases or pathologies, nouns for
methods and processes, etc., as in vaisseau sanguin, abcès dentaire, cage
thoracique...).
8. Mohamed Chad: A propos des phrases transitives en arabe. Sur quelques
critères de reconnaissance des objets directs.
This paper deals with the treatment of the object in Arabic and proposes
criteria for recognizing it.
9. Cheng Ting-Au: Etude distributionnelle des constructions en ba en
chinois.
This paper analyzes the distributional properties of the object introduced
by the preposition "ba" and found between the subject and the verb in
Mandarin Chinese. It explores the application of Gross's Lexicon-Grammar
theory to Chinese syntax.
10. Mirella Conenna: Principes d'analyse automatique des proverbes.
This paper describes a number of software tools which can identify
proverbs automatically and provide a translation for them. The underlying
system is the library of finite-state transducers found in Silberztein's
INTEX system.
11. Benoît de Cornulier: Sur la valeur de l'"incise" et sa postposition.
Sigle mimique et "style indirect libre".
The paper analyzes parenthetical constructions in French (of the
type "Please, she said, come in").
12. Blandine Courtois: Dictionnaires électroniques DELAF anglais et
français.
Courtois describes the three levels of the DELAF electronic dictionaries
of inflected forms for French and English. She examines the morphological,
semantic and syntactic codes of these large-coverage lexicons and shows
how they are linked with the syntactic tables which contain in-depth
descriptions of the syntactic behavior of verbs.
13. Emilio D'Agostino, Annibale Elia & Simonetta Vietri: Lexicon-Grammar,
Electronic Dictionaries and Local Grammars of Italian.
This paper describes the Italian electronic dictionaries based upon
Gross's lexicon-grammar model. It also shows how texts can be analyzed
with INTEX, a morphological analyzer which contains a tool enabling
linguists to build local grammars based on finite-state automata.
14. Laurence Danlos: Coréférence événementielle entre deux phrases.
Danlos focuses on event coreference between two sentences and on temporal
relations. She introduces new discourse relations which she discusses in
the framework of the discourse representation theory.
15. Ray C. Dougherty: Strings, Lists and Intonation in Garden Path
Sentences: Can it, plan it, or planet?
Dougherty applies INTEX finite-state graphs to the analysis of garden path
sentences, i.e. sentences that contain an element that can be assigned
more than one category.
16. Jean Dubois & Françoise Dubois-Charlier: Les relatifs de surface.
This paper examines some types of sentences which include a relative
pronoun, but which the authors claim are not 'true' relatives (as in "Tu
as ton jupon qui dépasse").
17. André Dugas: Les attributs du complément d'objet.
Dugas examines verbs that can take an object complement in French (Je le
vois déçu / On a élu Marie présidente) and reviews the main constraints
which play a role in the description of this linguistic phenomenon.
18. Cédric Fairon: Une étude de corpus pour éclairer la question du verbe
de l'incise en français.
Féron uses a corpus to analyze parenthetical expressions used in comment
clauses and indirect speech ("XXX, dit-il") and comes up with a linguistic
description of this phenomenon which can be used by natural language
processing systems. He also questions the common assertion that the French
verb 'dire' is the most frequent verb used in such constructions and that
the "passé simple" is the most frequent tense ("dire" is only the most
frequent verb in literary texts, but not in journalistic texts).
19. David Gaatone: Les prépositions forment-elles une classe?
Gaatone reviews the various criteria traditionally used to define
prepositions. He argues that the semantic, lexical, syntactic and lexico-
syntactic factors which can trigger the occurrence of a preposition make
it very difficult to find a feature that would be common to all the words
which are considered as prepositions in French.
20. Jacqueline Giry-Schneider: Une construction tronquée du verbe faire:
Jean fait le (brave + cachottier + repentant + enfant gâté).
Giry-Schneider analyzes constructions of the type "faire l'enfant"
or "faire le fier", which refer to a behavior and are wrongly described as
fixed. She shows that there are in fact two distinct constructions which
differ in syntax and in meaning (play a part vs. behavior).
21. Gaston Gross: Classes sémantiques et description des langues.
This paper seeks to demonstrate the importance of semantic classes in the
description of language. Gaston Gross shows that the arguments of a
predicate can often be grouped into semantic classes, so that the meaning
of a predicate can be automatically recognized in context.
22. Frantz Guenther & Xavier Blanco: Multi-Lexemic Expressions: an
overview.
This paper presents a high-level classification of multi-word entries and
puts forward proposals for encoding them in electronic dictionaries. It
introduces the notion of collocation and of support verb structure, also
arguing that compound nouns (and multi-word units in general) can be
defined in terms of their resistance to a number of syntactic
manipulations (e.g. coordination is not allowed for the idiomatic reading
of "black hole": * a black and deep hole).
23. Richard Kayne: Here and There.
Kayne analyzes locative and non-locative uses of "here" and "there" (as
in "John lives there" and "John spoke thereof"). He concludes that the
latter construction (which is widely used in German and Dutch) is an
instance of the demonstrative "there".
24. Ferenc Kiefer: Sur l'ordre des adjectifs.
Kiefer examines the various criteria which play a part to determine the
position an adjective occupies in a sequence of attribute adjectives in
French. He shows that there is a relationship between the semantic
complexity of adjectives and their position.
25. Georges Kleiber: Anaphores associatives: du large à l'étroit.
This paper discusses associative anaphora and shows that indirect
pronominal and demonstrative anaphora is distinct from associative
anaphora, in which the definite article plays a crucial role.
26. S.-Y. Kuroda: Tree pruning.
This paper, originally written in 1965 (!), introduces two principles that
determine the derivation of surface structure constituent trees from
underlying deep structure trees in Japanese.
27. Jacques Labelle: Lexiques-grammaires comparés. Quelques observations
sur des différences syntaxiques en français de France et du Québec.
This paper deals with the representation of linguistic differences between
varieties of the French language and discusses some of the lexical and
syntactic differences between standard European French and Québec French.
28. Nunzio La Fauci & Ignazio Mirto: Italian people at work. Jobs in
Lexical Syntax.
This paper deals with clauses using the Italian verb "fare" together with
nouns referring to jobs or professions and provides arguments for treating
the post-verbal noun as a predicate rather than a direct object and the
verb "fare" as a support verb.
29. Béatrice Lamiroy & Jean Klein: La structure de la phrase en français
de Belgique.
The paper analyzes 500 Belgian French verbs using the lexicon-grammar
framework and shows that, in addition to the well-known lexical
differences, there are also syntactic differences.
30. Eric Laporte: Restructuration and the subject of adjectives.
This paper discusses the selectional restrictions on the subject of
predicative adjectives in French. The organization of the lexical entries
of adjectives in the lexicon-grammar of French is examined to account for
restructurations and metonymic relations.
31. Christian Leclère & Jacqueline Brisbois-Leenhardt: Synonymie de mots
et synonymie de phrases: une approche formelle.
This paper discusses a notion of synonymy allowing for syntactic
variability and changes in the positions of semantic roles. In sentences
like "Le Président s'est rendu à Paris" and "Paris a accueilli le
Président", the verbs "se rendre" and "accueillir" belong to the same
synonym class even though the semantic roles associated with their
arguments occupy different positions.
32. Danielle Leeman: Les aventures de Max et Eve, j'ai aimé. A propos d'un
C.O.D. "Canada Dry".
Leeman discusses the concept of topicalisation applied to the direct
object in French. She shows that, in "La tarte, j'ai aimé", the NP "la
tarte" is not a direct object and that this is not an instance of
topicalisation.
33. Peter Machonis: Nominalization of English Neutral Verbs.
Machonis explores the use of the light (support) verbs "give", "make"
and "have" in English and their co-occurrence with the nominalizations of
the class of neutral verbs (which corresponds to causative/inchoative
verbs as in "John chimes the bell" vs. "The bell chimes").
34. Elisabete Marques-Ranchhod: Remarks on the Complementation of
Aspectual Verbs.
The paper discussed the notion of auxiliary verbs in Portuguese and
suggests that aspectual verbs should have a syntactic status identical to
that of tense auxiliaries.
35. Claude Muller: A propos de [pc-z].
This paper analyzes French completives introduced by "ce que" and focuses
on constructions which authorize a direct completive complementation with
indirect interpretation ("préposition ce zeroing", hence the
abbreviation "pc-z", as in "s'apercevoir (de ce) que").
36. Jee-Sun Nam: Some linguistic problems in building a Korean electronic
lexicon of simple verbs.
This paper discusses some of the problems related to the construction of
an electronic syntactic lexicon of Korean verbs, focusing on "hada" (to
do) sequences and on derivational entries and complex forms.
37. Kozué Ogata: Du locatif directionnel au datif dans les constructions
du verbe "arriver".
Ogata examines the relationship between the directional locative and the
dative in constructions with the French verb "arriver" and shows that they
are mutually exclusive because a verb can only take one directional object.
38. Mireille Piot: La conjonction même si n'existe pas.
Piot rejects the usual definition of "même si" as a single conjunction and
argues that it is a conjunctive phrase including the conditional
conjunction "si" and the conditional conjunction modifier "même".
39. Paul M. Postal: A Remark on the English Double Negatives.
Postal argues that there are two distinct analyses for English "no" forms
like "no cat" and that the traditionally banned double negative can be
seen as grammatical on a reading with strong stress on the second "no" in
a sentence like "I did not see no cat".
40. Roger-Bruno Rabenilaina: Déverbatif et diathèse en malgache.
This paper examines deverbal nouns in Malagasy and their ambivalent status
in terms of diathesis transformations.
41. Lucie Raharinirina Rabaovololona & Baholisoa Simone Ralalaoherivony:
Les travaux en Lexique-Grammaire du malgache et leurs extensions.
The paper lists the various research projects dealing with Malagasy at the
University of Antananarivo, focusing on construction of a lexicon-grammar
for this language.
42. Antoinette Renouf: Shall we hors d'œuvres? The Assimilation of
Gallicisms into English.
Renouf looks into the treatment of Gallicisms in British broad-sheet
journalism and examines their syntactic and lexical properties, concluding
that modern English appears to be assimilating French as much as French is
being 'invaded' by English.
43. Haj Ross: The Syntax of Emphasis - A Base Camp.
Ross surveys the major emphatic constructions in English, focusing on
pseudocleft sentences.
44. Morris Salkoff: Verbs of Mental States.
Salkoff investigates the syntactic properties of psych verbs that can take
a sentential clause as subject and a human noun as direct object
(e.g. "That Mary refused his offer exasperated Jim").
45. Sandford Schane: Diphtongues vocaliques et diphtongues consonantiques.
Schane examines the nature of diphthongs and makes a distinction between
vocalic and consonantal diphthongs. The conflicting criteria he analyzes
force him to find a solution through a constraint against syllables with
no onset.
46. Helmut Schnelle: Time in Language - Language in Time. A Leibnizian
Perspective.
Schnelle adopts an epistemological perspective to show that there are a
multiplicity of temporalities (he prefers to talk of temporality instead
of time) and his goal is to analyze the proper discovery of time in
language.
47. Max Silberztein: Reconnaissance des déterminants français.
Silberztein uses finite-state transducers to develop a French syntactic
parser. He is mainly concerned here with the implementation of a
description of determiners and predeterminers, using INTEX graphs to
represent the syntactic constraints on the grammatical words which are
part of determiners.
48. Yoichiro Tsuruga: Essai d'interprétation fonctionnelle des tables du
Lexique-Grammaire.
Tsuruga studies the correspondence between constructions like N0 V N1 de
N2 ("Luc creuse le sol de trous") and N0 V N2 Loc N1 ("Luc creuse des
trous dans le sol"), as well as a number of similar systematic
alternations in French. The semantic and functional factors that control
these tendencies to alternate are analyzed in detail.
49. Jean-Roger Vergnaud & Maria Luísa Zubizarreta: Some Elements for an
Empirical Approach to the Study of Meaning.
The paper argues that meaning must be analyzed in terms of a notion of
description of events, entities, states, properties, locations, manners,
etc.
50. Duško Vitas: Morphologie dérivationnelle et mots simples. Le cas du
serbo-croate.
The paper examines derivational relationships in a Serbo-Croatian lexicon-
grammar and discusses the formation of diminutives and augmentatives as
well as gender mutation.
51. Robert Vivès: Une grille d'analyse pour les prédicats nominaux.
Vivès analyzes the semantic, syntactic and lexical features that must be
taken into account to describe the properties of predicative nouns and
shows that grouping them in terms of "object classes" enables the
researcher to predict with which support verbs and in which combinatory
environment they can appear.
52. Publications de Maurice Gross. References compiled by Takuya Nakamura.
CRITICAL EVALUATION
It is impossible to evaluate and discuss every individual contribution in
such a Festschrift containing over 50 papers on topics covering a large
number of languages and ranging from phonology to transformational syntax,
computational lexicography, lexical semantics or morphology. Maurice Gross
himself wrote on many of these topics and the contributors to this volume
were in many cases influenced by his linguistic work and in one way or
another applied his theories to develop their own research agenda. But
this does not mean that the book itself is coherent in this respect and,
to someone who reads it from cover to cover, it may give the impression
that it is a random collection of papers whose unity simply rests upon
some kind of sometimes loose affiliation with the person to whom the book
is dedicated. While it is easy to see why papers on lexicon-grammar
proper, on the syntactic tables of the electronic dictionaries, on support
verbs, object classes or INTEX-based finite-state transducers used to
write local grammars have been included in this volume, it is more
difficult to see why papers like Schnelle's, Postal's or Kuroda's and
several others are included, except if one considers that the authors were
at some point in time friends with Maurice Gross.
The fact that Gross's theories on the lexicon have been adopted by a
number of non-French researchers also accounts for some of the
unfortunately inevitable repetitions which can frequently be found in
books of this nature. In this respect, even though I am aware that each
paper must be able to stand on its own, it is certainly a pity to find so
much redundancy among the papers that deal with the electronic
dictionaries of a given language: Courtois's paper on the French and
English DELAF dictionaries is immediately followed by D'Agostino et al.'s
article on Italian lexicon-grammar, whose introduction is very similar to
Courtois's description, since it discusses the same theoretical framework
for the coding of morpho-syntactic properties.
This being said, I have found many papers very stimulating and the volume
certainly contributes to making it abundantly clear that the development
of lexical and grammatical resources for natural language processing is
both time-consuming and difficult. One of Gross's major contributions is
to have shown how intertwined lexis and syntax can be and the richness of
the lexicon-grammar tables is both a wonderful tool for researchers and a
sine qua non for many NLP tasks. The various articles on "support verbs"
(Guenthner & Blanco, Vivès, La Fauri & Mirto...) show how tricky
phraseology and the treatment of collocations in computational linguistics
can be (and how important it can be in fields like machine translation or
language teaching). Several contributions also clearly demonstrate how
important it is to use corpus data before jumping to conclusions (in this
respect, Fairon's work on parenthetical expressions is illuminating
insofar as it shows that some of the assumptions that are regularly found
in grammars are wrong when one examines corpus data). At the same time, it
is clear that not every author has been using corpora to test their claims
and hypotheses. Tsuruga's paper on a number of transitivity alternations
is interesting ("Luc charge du blé dans le camion" vs. "Luc charge le
camion de blé") and is very similar to Beth Levin's work on English Verb
classes and alternations (Levin 1993, though Levin is not cited anywhere),
but I must admit that I find the constructions "Le blé charge le camion"
(p.601) and "Le chocolat saupoudre le gateau" very strange indeed. This
probably raises the question of whether the tables in these electronic
dictionaries have been compiled on the basis of natural data or result
from the coders' intuition (which is frequently wrong, as anyone who has
worked with corpora knows).
Another interesting topic which is discussed by several authors is the
recognition of multi-word units. Conenna studies this topic from the point
of view of an automaton trying to recognize proverbs and match them
against a bilingual electronic dictionary. Conenna's solution is based
upon a fine-grained coding of all the syntactic types of manipulations
which proverbs can undergo. Such local grammars, she claims, can be used
to recognize a proverb, even if it has been manipulated. The problem with
this type of approach, based upon finite-state transducers, is that it
forces the lexicographer to explicitly code all the possible variations
and any manipulation that has not been explicitly foreseen means that the
proverb cannot be recognized (the automaton described on page 92 for the
proverb "Qui casse les verres les paye" indeed makes it possible to
predict and recognize variants like "Qui cassera les verres les paiera"
and "Qui casse les verres paie", but it would not allow the variant "Qui
casse paie" to be recognized, despite its high frequency in corpora). Moon
(1998) has shown that the syntactic and lexical variations of idioms are
very often unpredictable and that "fixed expressions" are rarely fixed,
which would probably make the task nearly unfeasible if one were to apply
Conenna's proposal in a real-life NLP system. Perhaps one should explore
other avenues such as those proposed by the partners of the Compass
project about 10 years ago (Bauer et al. 1995, Breidt et al. 1996) or by
Michiels (1998, 2000), who, in the DEFI project (Disambiguation with
Filters) uses the same parser to produce a linguistic analysis of idioms
in machine-readable dictionaries and in the text to be matched against
dictionary entries, thereby avoiding the need to manually encode
gazillions of local grammars.
There are certainly a fair amount of papers I would recommend because I
have found them interesting and informative: Salkoff's article on verbs of
mental states is definitely worth reading (even if the construction with
impersonal 'it' could have been mentioned: "It troubled Helen that John
was so stingy"). So are Borillo's contribution on adjectives based upon
body parts, La Fauci & Mirto's paper on jobs in Italian, Leclère &
Brisbois-Leenhardt's paper on sentence synonymy (which is very similar to
Fillmore's frame semantics approach, which it does not cite), or Renouf's
nice essay on Gallicisms in English (which should reassure those in the
French-speaking world who constantly complain about English 'invading' the
French language). I have already mentioned Fairon's article on
parenthesized expressions or Guenthner & Blanco, who make interesting
points on multi-word units, but fail to acknowledge that other researchers
have worked on the nature of MWEs and their place in electronic
dictionaries, despite their claim to the contrary (see the references to
the Compass and DEFI projects above, to mention only a few). There are
certainly other papers I have liked and the list probably depends upon my
own research interests. For space reasons, I cannot give comments on all
papers, of course. As a native speaker of "Belgian French", I would have
liked to spend more time on Lamiroy & Klein's paper on French used in
Belgium, in which I found some words, word senses or constructions I had
never heard ("décalcairer", "jouer tennis" without any preposition
or "acheter" for "to have a baby"). Several of the examples given in this
paper illustrate the influence of Dutch on the variety of French spoken in
the Brussels region.
A note should also be said about the linguistic quality of the
contributions, which is in general very good. A few papers unfortunately
show that the book would have benefited from some kind of editing by a
native speaker of English (This support verbs cannot be ... -p.247; not
more of a dozen - p.246; range from high idiosyncratic to almost regular -
p.246; this leads as to - p.251... in Guenthner & Blanco's paper). Another
irritating problem is the high frequency of superfluous hyphens which
probably result from some conversion problem. They are so frequent that
they should have been spotted by one of the editors before the book went
to press (comprehen-sive, p.xvii; commu-nautariser, franco-phone, p.343;
témoi-gnage, p.345; classe-ment, p.351; reduc-tion, p.440; nomi-naux,
p.441; atten-tion, p.444; para-phrasé, p.473; dimen-sions, p.581; proper-
ties, p.647...). I suppose that technical reasons will be invoked
to 'justify' these typos. While I'm ready to accept them (for want of a
better excuse), I suppose it will be difficult to account for the
incomprehensible transformation of Grevisse's famous "Le Bon Usage"
into "L'Usage bon" on page 111. Together with the 16 missing pages I
mentioned above, it is a lot of technical problems for an otherwise
interesting book.
REFERENCES
Bauer, D., Segond, F. and Zaenen, A. 'LOCOLEX: The translation rolls off
your tongue.' In Proceedings of the ACH-ALLC Conference, Santa Barbara,
California, 1995, pp. 6-8.
Breidt, E., Segond,F. and Valetto,G. 'Local grammars for the description
of multi-word lexemes and their automatic recognition in texts', in
Kiefer, Kiss and Pajzs (eds) Papers in Computational Lexicography -
COMPLEX'96, Linguistics Institute, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, 1996,
pp.19-28.
Fillmore, Ch., Johnson, C. & Petruck, M. 'Background to FrameNet', in
Fontenelle (ed.) Special issue on FrameNet and Frame Semantics,
International Journal of Lexicography, OUP, Vol.16, no3, 2003, pp. 235-250.
Levin, B. English Verb Classes and Alternations - A Preliminary
Investigation, Chicago and London, The University of Chicago Press, 1993.
Michiels, A. 'The defi Matcher' in T. Fontenelle, P. Hiligsmann, A.
Michiels, A. Moulin and S. Theissen (eds), Euralex'98 Proceedings. Liège:
University of Liège, 1998, pp. 203-11.
Michiels, A. 'New developments in the DEFI matcher.' International Journal
of Lexicography. OUP. Vol. 13, no3, 2000, pp.151-167.
Moon, R. Fixed Expressions and Idioms in English: A Corpus-based Approach,
(Oxford Studies in Lexicography and Lexicology) Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1998.
Silberztein, M.. Dictionnaires électroniques et analyse automatique des
textes. Le système INTEX. Paris: Masson. 1993.
|
| |
ABOUT THE REVIEWER:
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Thierry Fontenelle is a computational linguist with Microsoft's Speech &
Natural Language Group in Redmond (USA), where he is responsible for the
French lexical database used in a variety of NL applications, such as the
new French spell-checker which was recently made available to MS Office
users. He received his PhD from the University of Liège in 1995 (his
dissertation, published by Max Niemeyer Verlag in 1997, dealt with the
transformation of the Collins-Robert English-French dictionary into a
lexical-semantic database). His research interests include computational
lexicography for natural language processing, and more specifically
collocations, lexical functions and frame semantics. He is also Past
President of the European Association for Lexicography (EURALEX) and an
Associate Editor of the International Journal of Lexicography published by
Oxford University Press.
|
|
|
|
|
|
