Jacques Jayez

Towards a proper treatment of coercion phenomena

The interpretation of coercion constructions (to begin a book) has been recently considered as resulting from the operation of type changing. For instance, a phrase of type o (object) is coerced to a phrase of type e (event) under the influence of the predicate. We show that this procedure encounters empirical difficulties. Focussing on the begin/commencer case, we show that the coercion interpretation results both from general semantic processes and properties of the predicate, and we argue that it is best represented at the lexical level. The solution is formulated in the HPSG formalism, where the lexical description of heads includes a specification of the argument and articulates syntax and semantics. We propose that the properties attached to the complement remain the same as they are outside the construction, but that the semantics of the predicate is enriched to include an abstract predicate of which the complement is an argument.

Pragmatic Connectives as Predicates. The Case of Inferential Connectives

This chapter investigates the linguistic description and formal representation of some pragmatic inferential connectives in French. We show that connectives expressing consequence, opposition or reformulation (like anyway in English) presuppose an abstract relation between propositional arguments of certain semantic types. We first contrast inferential and non-inferential connectives, then we turn to the semantic types of the propositional arguments to lay down some basic distinctions. Finally we substantiate the relations themselves. We use a version of generalized quantification over proofs to describe the inferential constraints which define the various relations presupposed by the connectives. The very possibility of such a description suggests that inferential connectives have a genuine (presupposed) predicative content.

Problems of Context and Knowledge

In spite of alleged differences in purpose, descriptive and computational linguistics share many problems, due to the fact that any precise study on language needs some form of knowledge representation. This constraint is mostly apparent when interpretation of sentences takes into account elements of the so-called “context”. The parametrization of context, i.e. the explicit listing of features relevant to some intepretation task, is difficult because it requires flexible formal structures for understanding or simulating inferential behaviour, as well as a large amount of information about conventional structures in the given language. This paper aims at illustrating major difficulties in these two fields, in relation with the necessity of a contextual approach. It offers a (clearly partial) enumeration of open problems inthe reperesentation of commonsense knowledge and languages-dependent structures, with some attempt to delineate future solutions.