Abstract
France played a specific role in the process of the computational mathematisation of the language sciences. Although it was one of the “winners” of Second World War and can be included among MT pioneers, it started experiments only in 1959, namely 10 years after the USA. Several factors may account for this French specificity; the lack of a proper configuration of the war sciences, the lack of roots in mathematical logic and philosophy of language which characterized the first mathematisation, the need to catch up with the American development in computing and the lack of specific training in the universities. The convergence of these various factors had the effect that the computational mathematisation of the language sciences was integrated in a totally external way. What can be called external reception. In this chapter, I examine the reception of MT and computational linguistics in France which required the intervention of intermediaries, conduit agents, be it either institutions or scientists.
This chapter is a summary of Léon (2010c).
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Notes
- 1.
Marcel Cohen published a review of Syntactic Structures in l’Année Sociologique in 1962 (Cohen 1962). However, Chomsky’s book published in 1957 was translated into French only in 1969 (by Michel Braudeau).
- 2.
Issues in Linguistics and News about Sciences in USSR
- 3.
The CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique), when created in 1939, involved some features of the war sciences. Its vocation consisting in grouping human and social sciences and applied sciences under the control of specialised committees comprising scientists, industrialists and engineers seemed close to the vocation of MIT in the USA, that is, a research centre where sciences, engineer sciences and human sciences interacted. After being put on standby during World War II, the CNRS resumed its activities only in 1945 with a philosophy that differed from the initial project.
- 4.
In fact, the first French machine for automatic translation was invented and built by Georges Artsrouni (1893–1960), a contemporary of Trojanskij (see Chap. 7), between 1932 and 1935. Artsrouni constructed three machines, all of them purely mechanical and electrical, which were first used for intelligence and accounting services. Words were stored on a strip of cardboard with several columns: on the left input words in the source language, and on the right corresponding words in the target languages. The strip was activated by a set of perforations on each side of the cardboard, just like rolls of film. A keyboard was used as an input device (see Daumas 1965 for more details).
- 5.
“If we rank the sequences of a given length in order of statistical approximation to English, we will find both grammatical and ungrammatical sequences scattered throughout the list; there appears to be no particular relation between order of approximation and grammaticalness” (Chomsky 1957: 17).
- 6.
“The real import of Mandelbrot’s work for linguistics seems to be that it shows that rank-frequency distributions of the type that Zipf and others have found are consistent with a very wide class of plausible assumptions about linguistic structure, and consequently, that we learn practically nothing about words when we discover this rank-frequency relation. In other words, this way of looking at linguistic data is apparently not a very fruitful one” (Chomsky 1958: 102).
- 7.
“le langage est un phénomène essentiellement statistique; c’est-à-dire soumis à des constantes et à des lois numériques et susceptibles, à ce titre, de définitions et d’interprétations quantitatives” (Guiraud 1960, p.16).
- 8.
On early debates on the statistical studies of vocabulary, see Léon (2017).
- 9.
See Cori and Léon (2002).
- 10.
This seminar was organised by Antoine Culioli and Daniel Hérault.
- 11.
The examination of this trend, which largely exceeds our study of the reception of computational linguistics, should be undertaken thoroughly.
- 12.
For the previous generation, the crucial role played by Knud Togeby in the spreading of American linguistics should be emphasised (see Chap. 9).
- 13.
However, one can suggest that this thorough knowledge of American works played a significant role, which explains why Pottier was the only French linguist who undertook MT works in the early 1960s.
- 14.
1966 was also the year when an international conference was organised at the University Johns Hopkins which gathered most of the structuralist theoreticians on the theme “Critical Languages and the Sciences of Man”.
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Léon, J. (2021). The French Linguistic Tradition and External Reception of the Computational Mathematisation of Language. In: Automating Linguistics. History of Computing. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70642-5_8
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