Université de Montréal - Thèse sous forme numérique

74methodology of lexico-grammar developed by Gross (1975, 1981) as well as from thetransformational grammar of Harris (1964, 1968, 1976). The lexico-grammar model isbased on the Harris‘ notion of transformation and on the idea that grammaticalinformation should be formally described as clearly and as transparently as possible soas to be implemented by computers. The results of the descriptions in the lexicogrammarmodel consist in two-entry tables in which the semantic and syntacticproperties of lexical items are intersected, i.e. all the admitted constructions andtransformations concerning lexical items are thoroughly (quantitatively) listed.Gross (1994, 1995, 1996, 2003) considered this theory suitable for NLP anddeveloped it further into ―the theory of the classes of objects‖. As argued by Gross,printed dictionaries are not directly useful for the automatic analysis and for thegeneration of texts because: 1) only the most frequent senses are described due toformat and editorial constraints; 2) they do not provide all the necessary information onthe construction of elementary sentences such as the different behaviour of certainarguments (Je parle à Paul, Je lui parle, but Je pense à Paul, *Je lui pense); 3) they donot list complex restructurations (Il y a eu un grave accident à Paris; Paris a connu ungrave accident; Paris a été le théâtre d‟un grave accident); 4) examples given are ofteninsufficient or inappropriate. In contrast with printed dictionaries, electronic dictionariesmust contain all the necessary information not only for the recognition of sentences andtexts but also for the generation of them. To address the aforementioned problems ofprinted dictionaries, electronic dictionaries should be based on a logical, explicit andexhaustive description of language, in which every word has to be analyzed anddescribed.Gross views the lexicon as an entity composed of predicates and argumentsinstead of LUs (―mots‖), as well as an entity inseparable from syntax and semantics.Predicates are words or sequences of words that carry more specific information than