Contenu du sommaire : Les représentations des structures prédicat-arguments

Actantial Alternations and Possessor Raising : A Case Study in Spanish The present paper is an exercise in the description of actant structures in Spanish possessor raising constructions in the framework of the Meaning-Text Theory (MTT). We argue that there is a significant difference between constructions in which the possessor is incorporated into the meaning of the main verb and constructions in which it is not. This difference explains the availability or lack of certain alternations for specific constructions ; it also leads to different semantic and syntactic actant structures of the main verb. We show that the multilevel linguistic model of the MTT allows for a distinct representation of each type of construction, and that the concepts of Government Pattern and transduction underlying MTT facilitate an adequate representation of the projection of the structures of possessor raising constructions between the different levels of the MTT model. A particular role in these projections is assigned to another central feature of the MTT : the semantic communicative structure.

Frame Semantics and the Frame
Net Project : a different approach to valency We introduce the theory of Frame Semantics, in which word senses are defined in relation to semantic frames. The prototypical semantic frame is a conceptualization of a type of event, with its participant roles (frame elements, FEs), props, and circumstances, but frames can also represent classes of relations, states, and even entities. A lexical unit (LU = word sense) is defined as a relation between a lemma and a semantic frame ; we give three examples of frames, each with FEs, LUs, and annotated examples, and introduce the FrameNet (FN) Project (http://framenet.icsi.berkeley.edu), which is building a frame semantic lexicon of English with 960 + frames and 11,700 + LUs. We show how FN displays the valence information for an LU, and how semantic dependency graphs can be derived from FN-annotated sentences. We discuss relations between frames and FEs, the structure of the FN database, FrameNets for other languages, the limitations of FN, and a new project to annotate syntactic constructions in a similar way.

Grammatical Values and Predicate-Argument Structures We present the typology of grammatical meanings that we intend to use for the actualisation of predicate-argument structures in the dictionaries of fLexSem (Laboratory of Phonetics, Lexicology and Semantics, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona). We highlight the big area of intersection that exists between the set of meanings expressed by means of flexemes and derivatemes, on the one hand, and by means of restricted lexical cooccurrence, on the other. We underline the importance of this issue regarding the design of machine translation systems with grammatical interlingua.

The Electronic Dictionaries of the Class of Objects Model This article first presents a methodology for the elaboration of electronic dictionaries based on the theoretical model of 'objects classes'. We shall then discuss about the problems encountered while trying to map our linguistic model on to a database model, particularly with the encoding of the predicates. We finally put forward the theoretical solutions adopted to improve our description. Our analysis settles as aim the construction of all the possible parameters necessary to build an exhaustive and precise description of the uses of predicates with the accuracy and completeness required by automatic analysis so as to satisfy the functional constraints of a 'good' electronic dictionary.

Coordinated Monolingual Dictionaries : The Adjectival Predicates In this paper, we present an ongoing lexicographical work undertaken by the research laboratory fLexSem at the Autonomous University of Barcelone and the LDI at the University of Paris 13. The goal of our research is to build a system of coordinated monolingual dictionaries for machine translation (Spanish/French). In order to illustrate our methodological approach, we will focus on the description of the predicate adjectives in Spanish by using the model of the classes of objects. We underline the benefits of such a description and some problems encountered from a bilingual perspective Spanish-French. Finally, we introduce a new global semantic description of adjectives by means of the concept of grammatical meaning.

Government Pattern : The Bridge between Lexicon and Grammar The paper discusses the concept of Government Pattern [GP] in the sense of Meaning-Text linguistic theory. GP is a tool for describing the cooccurrence of a predicative lexeme with its actants. This cooccurrence is largely idiosyncratic, i.e., not fully predictable from the lexeme's meaning. Nevertheless, correlations between the meaning of a lexeme and its GP type do exist, which allows for establishing (underspecified) generalized GPs for classes of semantically related lexemes. Generalized GPs are proposed for a number of Serbian lexemes denoting unpleasant physical sensations and exhibiting uncharacteristic behavior from the viewpoint of argument linking (= correspondence between their semantic and syntactic actants).