French Order Without Order

FRENCH ORDER WITHOUT ORDER* Gabriel G. B~ Universit6 Blaise Pascal - Clermont II, Formation Doctorale Linguistique et Informatique 34 Ave. Carnot, 63037 Clermont-Ferrand Cedex, FRANCE Claire Gardent Universit6 Blaise Pascal -Clermont II and University of Edinburgh, Centre for Cognitive Science, 2 Buccleuch Place, Edinburgh EH89LW, SCOTLAND, UK ABSTRACT To account for the semi-free word order of French, Unification Categorial Grammar is extended in two ways. First, verbal valencies are contained in a set rather than in a list. Second, type-raised NP's are described as two-sided functors. The new framework does not overgenerate i.e., it accepts all and only the sentences which are grammatical. This follows partly from the elimination of false lexical ambiguities - i.e., ambiguities introduced in order to account for all the possible positions a word can be in within a sentence - and partly from a system of features constraining the possible combinations. INTRODUCTION In the version of categorial grammar (henceforth, CG) developed by Bar-Hillel (Bar-Hillel 1953), cate- gories encode both constituency and linear prece- dence. Linear precedence is encoded by (a) ordering valencies in a list and (b) using directional slashes indicating whether the argument is to be found to the left or to the right of the functor. A similar approach is adopted in Unification Cate- gorial Grammar (UCG) (Zeevat, Klein and Calder 1987) as regards word order whereby the directional slash is replaced by a binary Order feature with value pre orpost. Thus, S/NPLNP in normal CG lranslates as S/NP:predNP:post in UCG, wherepre indicates that the functor must precede the argument and post that it should follow it. Our work on French syntax supports the claim that the complicated pattern of French linearity phenomena can be treated in a framework closely related to UCG but which departs from it in two ways. First, there is no rigid assignment of an order value (pre orpost) to verb valencies. Second, following (Gunji 1986) verbal va- lencies are viewed as forming a set rather than a list. As * The word reported here was tan'led out as part of ESPRIT Project 393 ACORD,'q'he Construction and Interrogation of Knowledge Bases using Natural Language Text and Gra- pities". a result, the syntactic behaviour of constituents is dissociated from surface ordering. Constraints on word order are described by a system of features as advocated in COszkoreit 1987) and (Karttunen 1986). 1. UCG In UCG, the phonological, categorial, semantic and order information associated with a word is contained in a single grammar structure called a sign. This can be represented as follows. (1) UCG sign Phonology:Categnry:Semantics:Order or equivalently Phonology :Category :Semantics :Order where colons separate the different fields of the sign. We need not concern ourselves here with the Se- mantics and the Phonology fields of the sign. More interesting for our purpose are the Category and the Order attributes. Following the categorial tradition, categories can be basic or complex. Basic categories are of the form HeadAFeatures where Head is one of the atomic symbols n(oun), np or s(entence) and Fea- …

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