Contenu du sommaire : Nouveaux raisonnements syntaxiques, sous la direction de Anne Abeillé et Danièle Godard

A traceless account of extraction phenomena Trace theory is an unquestioned part of transformational grammars and Governement and Binding theory. We show that theory external motivation for positing phonetically empty elements is in fact minimal, and no empirical evidence (syntactic, phonetic or psycholinguistic) can be found in favor of them in extraction contexts. We present an alternative view in Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar that can formalize the notion of a missing complement via syntactic features without positing a trace in a syntactic tree.

The complementation of French auxiliairies We show the set of French auxiliaries to be syntactically heterogeneous. We present new arguments in favor of a flat structure for French compound tenses, with the tense auxiliary as the head of a flat VP, inheriting the arguments and the semantics of its complement participle to which it adds it own agreement and aspectual contribution. We contrast the properties of tense auxiliaries with those of the passive auxiliary, for which we show a hierarchical structure (with a VP complement) to be motivated. Moreover, the so-called passive auxiliary should be identified with the copula. Although most of our arguments are neutral with respect to formalisms, we formulate our analysis in the framework of HPSG, whose mechanism of feature inheritance is well adapted to our findings. In addition, we offer new solutions for auxiliary selection, clitic placement, participle agreement and word order constraints.

A double analysis of the particle ne French negation is commonly realised by the cooccurrence of two elements, the particle ne, which is the focus of this paper, and a negative word such as pas. The particle ne is an atonic element, strongly linked to the verb. We show that the status of ne, lexical or affixal, can be decided only in relation with the finite or non-finite type of the verb it precedes. We argue in favor of the affixal status in case of finite verbs, that is to say, ne and the finite verb form a lexical unit. By contrast, we claim that the particle ne is syntactically attached to non-finite verb phrases. In order to elaborate those hypotheses, we propose a partial formalisation of negation in Head-driven Phrase Structure grammar (HPSG), making use of the notion of marker developped in this framework.

The syntactic analysis of French causative constructions relies on the distinction, crucial in the LFG formalism, between the constituent structure (hierarchical : faire takes a VP complement) and the functional structure (flat : faire and the infinitival V form a complex predicate in a unique functional structure). The semantic representation is constructed from the f-structure, lexical semantic information (which specifies semantic roles associated with each predicate), and independent rules which map functions onto semantic roles. This construction takes the general form of a deduction in linear logic, whose property of resource sensitivity is exploited to give the effect of completeness and coherence, which are general constraints on linguistic structures.

A lexicalist approach of control phenomena We deal with the problem of identifying the obligatory controller of an infinitival complement. We show that a lexical approach is descriptively more adequate than the purely syntactic one of generative grammarians (Minimal Distance Principle) or a purely semantic one (as in GPSG). We offer a formalization in Unification Categorial grammar (UCG) that captures the lexical generalizations we have found to hold in French. We also consider alternative approaches within lexical semantics (Dowty) or HPSG (Pollard and Sag).