Lexicon-Grammar and the Syntactic Analysis of French

A lexicon-grammar is constituted of the elementary sentences of a language. Instead of considering words as basic syntactic units to which grammatical information is attached, we use simple sentences (subject-verb-objects) as dictionary entries. Hence, a full dictionary item is a simple sentence with a description of the corresponding distributional and transformational properties.The systematic study of French has led to an organization of its lexicon-grammar based on three main components:- the lexicon-grammar of free sentences, that is, of sentences whose verb imposes selectional restrictions on its subject and complements (e.g. to fall, to eat, to watch),- the lexicon-grammar of frozen or idiomatic expressions (e.g. N takes N into account, N raises a question,- the lexicon-grammar of support verbs. These verbs do not have the common selectional restrictions, but more complex dependencies between subject and complement (e.g. to have, to make in N has an impact on N, N makes a certain impression on N)These three components interact in specific ways. We present the structure of the lexicon-grammar built for French and we discuss its algorithmic implications for parsing.The construction of a lexicon-grammar of French has led to an accumulation of linguistic information that should significantly bear on the procedures of automatic analysis of natural languages. We shall present the structure of a lexicon-grammar built for French and will discuss its algorithmic main implications.