📄 French and English determiners: Interaction of morphology, syntax and semantics in Lexicalized Tree Adjoining Grammars

Summary

The paper addresses how to describe the determiners (articles, quantity words, possessive and demonstrative determiners) of French and English within Lexicalized Tree Adjoining Grammar. The difficulty is that this word class operates on three levels at once: morphological (number, gender, agreement with the noun), syntactic (position in the NP, the possibility of several determiners in a row) and semantic (definiteness, quantification). Moreover, these levels do not line up with one another: an element that morphologically resembles an article may behave syntactically like an adjective. Instead of a separate set of rules for the NP, the author builds determiners into the lexicon. Each determiner is the lexical anchor of its own elementary tree with an associated feature structure, and agreement and co-occurrence constraints are derived from feature unification during substitution and adjunction. A comparison of the two languages shows that the same mechanisms cover both French determiner sequences and their English counterparts, and the difference comes down to the lexical entries. The paper's significance lies in demonstrating that lexicalization yields a description of the noun phrase that is economical, transferable across languages and suitable for parsing.

Key points

• Publication: Anne Abeillé, TAG+1 (Proceedings of the First International Workshop on Tree Adjoining Grammar and Related Frameworks), 1990; data: French and English.
• Formalism: Lexicalized Tree Adjoining Grammar. The grammar is represented as a lexicon of elementary trees, where each unit (including a determiner) is the anchor of its tree.
• Key claim: the morphological, syntactic and semantic categorizations of determiners are not isomorphic, so the description must be lexical rather than rule-centered. Agreement is implemented through feature structures and unification during substitution/adjunction.
• The paper examines cases with several determiners in one NP (such as French combinations of an article and a quantity word, and English ones with the + a quantifier), where some of the elements are treated as adjuncts rather than as the determiner head proper.
• The work builds on earlier LTAG grammars for French and English (the Abeillé & Schabes line) and serves as an argument in favor of lexicalized grammars in general.
• Caveat: the provided PDF extract is corrupted (lost encoding), so the details were reconstructed from the generally known content of the paper rather than from readable extract text; the paper contains no specific numerical results.