Contenu du sommaire : Empirie, Théorie, Exploitation : le travail de Jean Dubois sur les verbes français

Description, taxonomy, systems analysis: a model for the uses of the French verbs The goal of this study is to demonstrate the validity and current relevance of the epistemological foundations of structuralism. It will focus on the dictionary Les Verbes français (French Verbs), by J. Dubois & F. Dubois-Charlier (2004) as an exemplar of this theory of the object and of the methodology it implements. This dictionary is based on four postulates which characterize the works stemming from Ferdinand de Saussure's Cours de Linguistique générale: (1) the need for comprehensive empirical coverage; (2) the relevance of formal properties (both morphological and syntactic) and of lexical (distributional) properties for semantic classification on account of the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign (that is, the autonomy of the linguistic system in relation to the world and thought) and the correlated indissoluble association of the signifier and the signified; (3) the conception of the classification of the whole of the object as a theory, that is, a hypothesized abstract organization whose predictions and explanations are verifiable; (4) the consideration of the resulting model as a hypothetical construction reflecting the knowledge and options of the scholars of the time, without any pretension to reveal the laws of the workings of the world or of thought (apart from those apprehended by the language itself).

Lexico-syntactical combinations in a French electronic dictionary. Musical terms as an example We present the characteristics of the French electronic dictionary Dictionnaire électronique des mots, a database of 140 000 entries. By means of a systematic encoding, each entry is defined with about ten headings that specify, besides the meaning of the entry, its categorial, morphological, semantic and syntactic properties. These properties enable to draw up prototypical sentences and classes. We examine three headings in order to illustrate the idea that the descriptive analysis is a combinatory of discrete elements. By way of an exemple, we show how the classification and the combinatory of 1 237 terms (nouns, adjectives, verbs, etc.) concerning the domain of music are organized.

The theoretical bases of the classification of impersonal verbs in ‘Les Verbes français' This study is devoted to the treatment of impersonal verbs and constructions in Les Verbes français by J. Dubois and F. Dubois-Charlier (1997). The goal is to make explicit the various choices and theoretical implications motivating the proposed classes and constructions, and to illustrate how an object of description is elaborated by means of some specific preconception of the fact under scrutiny. Several features are pointed out: the absence of a unified notation for all facts concerned with impersonality; the presence of entries for the impersonal uses of some selected verbs, but not all; the change of semantic classes, showing that impersonalization is considered as a sign of grammaticalization; and some remarkable particuliarities concerning meteorological verbs. The implications of those hints are elicited in the light of various descriptive and theoretical approaches including language psychomechanics, enunciation, polyphony, the theory of interlocutive relations, and cognitive grammar.

Els Tobback, Copular verbs: inventories and status On the basis of Les verbes français by Dubois and Dubois-Charlier (as well as other valency dictionaries), this article proposes to reconsider the inventory of copular verbs. The lists of copular verbs vary considerably from one inventory to another, which is partially due to the theoretical status of the copular verbs assigned by these inventories, some of them treating copulas the same way a full lexical verbs, others considering them as light verbs. Based on the existing inventories and on corpus analysis, we propose a new, more complete inventory of copular verbs. It adds to the existing lists a certain number of verbs ordinarily taking predicative adjuncts but which happen to integrate a predicative complement under certain circumstances. Our list, moreover, integrates a series of reflexive copular verbs that tend to become autonomous with respect to the corresponding object complement construction. The inventory completed, we take stock of the results obtained. We observe that copular verbs (including être 'to be') impose all kinds of distributional constraints, whether morpho-syntactic or semantic. We show furthermore that the empirical observations have important consequences for the status and the treatment of copular verbs, both on a methodological and a theoretical level.

Syntax and formal semantics of verbal constructions expressing symmetric relations We present a syntactic and semantic study on French verbs that are in essence symmetric and on verbal structures in which the symmetric relation is built combining a non symmetric verb with a complement introduced by the French preposition avec (with) with a comitative sense. We propose a type of semantic representation for these constructions and show at which level of representation the symmetric characteristic of these verbs must be specified. We present the principles we have implemented in order to build a list of essentially symmetric verbs from the 26 509 verbal entries of the French dictionary Les Verbes français (Dubois & Dubois-Charlier 1997).

Elements for a lexicon of the verbal nominalization complementation J. Dubois & F. Dubois-Charlier (1997) Les Verbes français (LVF) precisely describes French verbs, their different uses and patterns as well as various argument and adjunct semantic constraints. In addition, morphological derivatives are supplied for each of the uses of these verbs. Out of 26 130 verbal entries, we have counted 13 331 nominalizations of these verbs and studied 463 of them. We have analysed the structural characteristics of the predicate NPs and of the syntactic pattern (s) corresponding to the verb to which it is linked. We have tried to predict which NP corresponds to the verb nominalization and the nature of the NP's syntactic pattern using the “example” entry of LVF sentences. In order to show that all arguments, in most cases, are present in the predicate NP, the NPs are described in a saturated form, i.e. with all of its arguments.

The interest of adopting LVF semantic interface for a new syntactic lexicon of French verbal complementation The aim of this article is to display the interest of combining a semantic interface with Lexvalf, a lexicon of French verbal complementation under construction, strictly syntactic intially. We try to demonstrate that the resort to the semantic definitions of usages that are carefully described and defined in LVF, impose themselves, in particular in the case of polysemic verbs: it is possible to disambiguate complement structures that are described with too general lexical selections and to specify the meaning of many encountered restricted lexical selections of which meaning is not predictable.

An electronic version of LVF compared with other lexical resources Open access to rich English lexical resources helped the development of natural language processing research in English. Unfortunately there is no comparable lexical resource in French. While WordNet is surely the most well known, we can also think of VerbNet and FrameNet. We show that Les Verbes français by J. Dubois and F. Dubois-Charlier with its rich semantic description of predicate units is equivalent in many respects with those English resources. Its availability in a natural language processing oriented format would facilitate research and applications in French. This article describes an XML version illustrated with a browsing web site. We then compare it with the resources cited above for English and with Dicovalence for French.

The formalization of the LVF dictionary with Noo
J and its applications in corpus linguistics We show how we have formalized the linguistic information of the dictionary LVF, so that an automatic text parser can process it. Formalizing lexical, morphological, syntactic and semantic properties has required the construction of an electronic dictionary, a set of morphological rules as well as a set of syntactic grammars. Applying these resources automatically to large-sized texts produces sophisticated analyses of verbs' meaning, rather than of mere morphological forms. We discuss the problems linked to remaining semantic ambiguities and present new applications of the use of high precision and large-coverage linguistic resources.

To what extent does syntax build meaning? Reflexions on an Italian-French comparison of frozen verbal expressions According to the postulate established by J. Dubois and M. Gross there is no real language analysis without a broad and unbiased observation of a specific language. Another requirement is a prior careful syntactic description in accordance with Z. Harris's findings. These two conditions remain relevant when it comes to the comparison of idioms in two languages. The fruitfulness of this approach is illustrated in this paper which deals with idioms that in both Italian and French involve verbs. A sharp treatment of meaning however eludes the mere domain of syntax even if it is studied in depth. Yet the use of electronic tools which goes with descriptive work enables scholars to overcome this obstacle.

Exhaustiveness and representativeness of formulaic expressions with ‘dire' in ‘Locutions en français' by J. Dubois and F. Dubois-Charlier The electronic dictionary Locutions en français (LEF) by J. Dubois and F. Dubois-Charlier (2004) does not aim to achieve lexical exhaustiveness but rather the coverage of syntactic schemes into which expressions fit. Although LEF intends to cover all possible fixed expressions, is it possible effectively to encompass everything that fits into this category in the LEF? Using the French verb dire as a base in formulaic expressions in relation to a situational function, we put forward an examination of LEF's coverage using examples recorded in various texts and dictionaries. We test the pertinence of the exhaustiveness principle amongst the expressions not recorded in the LEF: the expressions that are not recorded are either part of a scheme that is already included in LEF –and these syntactical schemes will have a predictive capability–or the examples are not recorded and do not fit into any scheme. In the latter case we shall show that to position these examples, the phrase subtype (‘focused') simply has to be defined or the verbal construction has to be included in an expression with dire recorded in Les Verbes français (LVF) by J. Dubois and F. Dubois Charlier (1997).