French de and en as expressions of the genitive case: a unified analysis within LFG and computational implementation in XLE

Leonel Figueiredo De Alencar,Christoph Schwarze

doi:10.1590/1678-460x2021370104

Abstract

ABSTRACT The French clitic pro-form en represents a wide range of heterogeneous constituents: de-PP complements and adjuncts, partitive objects, and prepositionless objects of cardinals. The main goal of this paper is to formalize this relationship computationally in terms of genitive case. This is apparently the first non-transformational counterpart to Kayne (1975)’s unified analysis, which derives en from a deep structure with de by means of syntactic transformations. Transformational grammars are problematic from the parsing perspective. In order to test our analysis automatically on a large amount of data, we implemented it in a computational grammar of French in the Lexical-Functional Grammar (LFG) formalism using the XLE system. This non-transformational framework is particularly fit for expressing systematic relationships between heterogeneous structures and has successfully been used for the implementation of natural language grammars since the 1980s. We tested the implementation on 320 grammatical sentences and on an equal number of ungrammatical examples. It analyzed all grammatical examples and blocked almost 95% of the ungrammatical ones, showing a high empirical adequacy of the grammar.

Highlights

There is a striking parallelism in French between forms de and en, see (1)-(8), where the constituent containing de in (a) is anaphorically substituted for by the pronominal clitic en in (b)
An Lexical-Functional Grammar (LFG) grammar is a declarative model of a language fragment, encoding constraints at different levels
We reported on an LFG implementation of French en and de in a wide range of constructions

Summary

Introduction

There is a striking parallelism in French between forms de and en, see (1)-(8), where the constituent containing de in (a) is anaphorically substituted for by the pronominal clitic en in (b).(1) a. There is a striking parallelism in French between forms de and en, see (1)-(8), where the constituent containing de in (a) is anaphorically substituted for by the pronominal clitic en in (b). La population dépend [de la forêt].4 the population depends DE the:F.SG forest ‘The population depends on the forest.’. The population EN=depends ‘The population depends on it.’. Luc comes DE Paris ‘Luc comes from Paris.’.

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