An Interaction Grammar of Interrogative and Relative Clauses in French

International Conference RANLP 2009 - Borovets, Bulgaria, pages 343–348 An Interaction Grammar of interrogative and relative clauses in French Guy Perrier LORIA - universit´e Nancy 2 BP 239 54506 Vandœuvre-l`es-Nancy cedex - France guy.perrier@loria.fr Abstract We present a fairly complete grammar of inter- rogative and relative clauses in French, written in the formalism of Interaction Grammars. Interac- tion Grammars combine two key ideas: a gram- mar is viewed as a constraint system which is expressed through the notion of tree description, and the resource sensitivity of natural languages is used as a syntactic composition principle by means of a system of polarities. Keywords Syntax, grammatical formalism, tree description, polarity, in- terrogative clause , relative clause, interaction grammar 1 Introduction This article is a contribution to the construction of for- mal grammars from linguistic knowledge. This task is motivated by both applicative and scientific considera- tions. From an applicative point of view, it is essential for NLP systems requiring a fine and complete syn- tactic analysis of natural languages. From a scientific point of view, formalization can be very helpful for lin- guists, who aim at capturing the complexity of a nat- ural languages with relevant generalizations. In this task, one of the most difficult challenges is to get the largest possible coverage of these formal grammars. Regarding this challenge, relative and interrogative clauses in French are a good test because they illus- trate the complexity of natural languages in a very obvious manner. They give rise to interference be- tween several phenomena, which are present in both types of clauses and justify a common study. In the following, a clause which is a relative clause or an in- terrogative clause is called a wh-clause. In this paper, we have highlighted four phenomena occurring with wh-clauses: • Wh-extraction: a particular constituent is ex- tracted from its canonical position in the wh- clause to be put in front of it: if the clause is interrogative, it contains the requested informa- tion and if the clause is relative, it contains a ref- erence to the antecedent of the relative clause; in both cases, they are represented with gram- matical words, which we call wh-words. The dif- ficulty lies in the fact that extraction can occur through a chain of a possibly indeterminate num- ber of embedded clauses. This gives rise to an unbounded dependency which is subject to spe- cial constraints, called island constraints. • Pied-piping: in some cases, wh-words drag a com- plex phrase along with them in the extraction movement. Another unbounded dependency may be generated from the fact the wh-word can be embedded less or more deeply in the extracted phrase. • Subject inversion: contrary to canonical construc- tions of clauses where the subject precedes the verb, wh-clauses allow subject inversion under some conditions. These conditions depend on var- ious factors. • Interrogative and declarative marking: in French, relative clauses and interrogative clauses often use the same wh-words but they differ in the fact that the first ones are marked …

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