Contenu du sommaire : Sémantique lexicale et grammaticale, sous la direction de Yvette Yannick Mathieu

We're wondering about what could be a « lexical and grammatical semantics », through the examination of neological processes. It appears that the meaning of a lexical unit cannot be conceived without any references to the lexical system, which conditions the formation of neologisms, and cannot be apprehended out of its discursive actualisations whereas the grammatical meaning, conceived as determined by its category belonging, remains to be denned more meticulously.

Semantic nets are one of several ways of representing concepts and the words that lexicalize them. I outline here the design of WordNet, a lexical database for English. The article will focus on the treatment of verbs, whose lexical semantics tend to be highly complex. In examining a number of particular cases, I discuss the conceptual and lexical relations that link verbs in WordNet and draw comparisons with other lexical semantic approaches to the verb lexicon and specific verb classes.

We present a linguistic description of the predicates of feelings based on both semantic and syntactic principles. Our hypothesis is that the sort of feeling expressed by a noun (sadness, anger, fear, etc.) is linked to the lexico-syntactic distribution of this noun. The predicates and their mutual relations will be incorporated into a model in order to map out a representation usable for automatic processing of natural language.

The « topological part / object » relation is one of the five or six large part / whole relations expressed in language. In French, it is expressed through a number of nouns called « Noms de localisation interne » . These NLI have many syntactic and semantic properties in common with nouns referring to object components, Ncomp, involved in another kind of part-whole relation, but a closer study shows that the NLI / Nobject relation is to be analysed both as a partition and a localisation relation. As a partitive relation, it is quite comparable to a Ncomp / Nobject relation, at the same time, it is to be considered as a spatial relation. An explanation can be found for this mixed status if we accept the hypothesis of an evolutionary path leading from Npc (body-part nouns) to Ncomp, then on to NLI and from there eventually to spatial relational markers (prepositions and adverbs). The transition from one stage to the other is marked by an increasing effect of grammaticalization and abstraction.

The goal of this article is to propose a model of semantic description of connectives (here of causal connectives). For a given connective, we proceed first by giving factorization of the morphological forms, thus avoiding redundancy in the description and putting forward equivalencies. A connective is considered to be a predicate, defined by the semantic nature of its arguments which are represented by the predicates of the main and subordinate clauses. We are thus in a position to enumerate the connectives that have the same arguments from a semantic point of view

Most grammatical units present various related meanings depending on the linguistic and extra-linguistic context in which they are used. This polysemy has often been dealt with by assuming a first concrete meaning, from which the other meanings are derived. For instance, many prepositions are supposed to be primarily spatial, their non-spatial uses being metaphorical. Here we contest such a point of view and we propose a theoretical framework in which grammatical units are tools specialised in constructing what we call verbal scenes, which are evoked by utterances. In this approach, one can associate every grammatical unit with a unique schematic form, which indicates how the unit interact with the linguistic and extralinguistic context. The schematic form is directly formulated in terms of the properties of the verbal scene. In particular, verbal scenes possess and abstract topological structure and the meaning of the so-called spatial prepositions can be described in abstract topological terms accounting for all their different meanings .

The nature of grammatical semantics and its relationships to lexical semantics are approached here through the problem of synchronie grammaticalization. Synchronie use of morphems in different syntactic categories is then analyzed in terms of fractals and topology, illustrated by examples from Wolof. Thus the functional model of fractal grammar, combining "scale invariance" and "scale properties", accounts for the semantic unity and functional flexibility of the transcategorial morphems through a dynamic linking of semantic and syntactic variations.