Contenu du sommaire : La description syntaxique des adjectifs pour les traitements informatiques, sous la direction de Jee-Sun Nam

Adjectives like former, used in a strictly adnominal position, are deprived of the properties of predicative adjectives with a qualifying meaning, namely gradability and an attributive construction : This is his former house. These adjectives are numerous and semantically diverse. They can be used with abstract predicative nouns as well as concrete nouns. The adjectives of this class have a particular syntax. They can be analyzed as adverbs whose scope is a complete predicate, situated in a relative clause outside the noun phrase where they occur. For example, the exact scope of former is not the house, but the relation expressed by a sentence, He had a house. Theoretically, the interpretation of such adjectives and our analysis lead to question the usual view of noun phrases as compact syntactic and semantic blocks.

We investigate certain syntactic properties of French non-predicative denominal adjectives. These properties are correlated either to the argumentai fonction of the adjective — the adjective is an equivalent for an essential prepositional complement of the noun — or to its classifying interpretation inside the noun phrase. For some adjectives, we follow the hypothesis of an elementary structure that would comprise a nominal support such as nature, order, type, etc. These analyses are used for a classification of the compound entries noun adjective of an electronic dictionary. But the pattern noun adjective is so productive that general interpretation rules will be necessary for the phrases not included in the dictionary.

Looking up a French dictionary for many words such as rouge (red) provides two solutions : Noun and Adjective. We analyse sequences limited to two words which are ambiguous and which are potentially of one of the two forms : Noun Adjective or Adjective Noun. We reduce the ambiguity of such sequences by means of the positional properties of the French adjective. Adjectives in French can occupy either the prenominal position (gros livre, *livre gros), or the postnominal position (gant rouge, *rouge gant), or both (nouveau livre, livre nouveau). As a first approximation, this property is a lexical feature of the adjective. We indexed an electronic lexicon of more than 6,000 adjectives and marked them according to the three situations presented. The marks can then be applied automatically to a large corpus in order to reduce the ambiguities arising in a parsing procedure. We discuss various linguistic limitations of our marking method and further extensions of the study.

The notion of appropriate sequence as introduced by Z. Harris provides a powerful syntactic way of analysing the detailed meaning of various sentences, including ambiguous ones. In an adjectival sentence like The leather was yellow, the introduction of an appropriate noun, here colour, specifies which quality the adjective describes. In some other adjectival sentences with an appropriate noun, that noun plays the same part as colour and seems to be relevant to the description of the adjective. These appropriate nouns can usually be used in elementary sentences like The leather had some colour, but in many cases they have a more or less obligatory modifier. For example, you can hardly mention that an object has a colour without qualifying that colour at all. About 300 French nouns are appropriate in at least one adjectival sentence and have an obligatory modifier. They enter in a number of sentence structures related by several syntactic transformations. The appropriateness of the noun and the fact that the modifier is obligatory are reflected in these transformations. The description of these syntactic phenomena provides a basis for a classification of these nouns. It also concerns the lexical properties of thousands of predicative adjectives, and in particular the relations between the sentence without the noun : The leather was yellow and the adjectival sentence with the noun : The colour of the leather was yellow.

We present a systematic description of morphological variations and syntactic properties of Korean adjectives in order to implement an automatic parser of Korean texts. We classified 5, 300 simple adjectives according to the morpholo- gical variations of their root and inflectional suffixes. In addition, these adjectives were classified into 15 syntactic classes on the basis of formal criteria. The lexical analysis of Korean adjectives is extremely complex, since a great number of inflectional suffixes are attached to adjectival roots (an adjective generates about 6, 000 inflectional forms) ; moreover, some complements of adjectives can be found attached to adjectival roots. The fact that one must consider one or several nouns inside an adjectival string leads to a quite heavy parsing algorithm. One cannot avoid this situation without morphological and syntactic information. Therefore, it is necessary to construct on-line dictionaries as complete as possible.