Abstract
Unary transformations are transformations that link one sentence to another, keeping the same semantic material. This paper presents a system that formalises a subset of Harris’ transformations for French, in particular the transformations described in the lexicon-grammar table #1, which describes a hundred auxiliary, modal and aspectual verbs. Other, more general transformations will be described as well.
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Notes
- 1.
Silberztein (2017) shows how to automatically produce a large number of sentences from relatively elementary statements represented as predicates in Friend Of A Friend (FOAF) data bases.
- 2.
See Silberztein (2016b).
- 3.
A 1976 Ministerial decree promotes the use of the présent du subjonctif, instead of the imparfait du subjonctif, e.g. Joe aimerait qu’elle vienne instead of Joe aimerait qu’elle vînt.
- 4.
Lea is going to sleep: Some of these sentences are ambiguous. For instance, Léa ira dormir (Léa is going to sleep) can mean that she will be getting ready to sleep (aller as an auxiliary verb), or that she will go somewhere to sleep (aller as a movement verb).
- 5.
*Léa était allé dormir: This sentence is correct only if aller is interpreted as the movement verb, as in Lea was getting to her bedroom in order to sleep. However, the auxiliary verb aller used to express the near future as in Lea was on the verge of sleeping cannot be expressed by this sentence.
- 6.
*Léa est en train d’aller dormir: Ibid.
- 7.
I have not described the pronouns je, tu, me, nous, te, vous in this study. The pronoun on is often used as a variant of nous: nous mangeons = on mange (we are eating). There are over 200 other pronouns (e.g. aucun, celui-ci, certains, n’importe qui, personne, plusieurs, etc.) that are described in Gross (1986) and have been integrated in a syntactic grammar by Silberztein (2003).
- 8.
- 9.
Transformations like Passive [P] or Negation [N] can be applied more than once, if they are interlaced with the reverse transformations [P]−1, e.g. [P][N][P]−1[N]−1[P]. It is not possible to describe these types of constraints in a Context-Free grammar.
- 10.
Of course, not all verbs can enter in transitive sentences. Thanks to Prof. Mauro-Mirto for the following remark: the grammar recognizes certain sentences that contain an intransitive verb, e.g. Luc est un policier. These sentences still accept several transformations, e.g. [Negation_pas]: Luc n’est pas un policier, [Extract_N0]: C’est Luc qui est un policier, whereas other transformations will have to be deactivated, e.g. [Extract_N1] *C’est un policier que Luc est, [Passif_par] *Un policier est été par Luc.
- 11.
See Dubois and Dubois-Charlier (2017).
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Silberztein, M. (2019). Unary Transformations for French Transitive Sentences. In: Mirto, I., Monteleone, M., Silberztein, M. (eds) Formalizing Natural Languages with NooJ 2018 and Its Natural Language Processing Applications. NooJ 2018. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 987. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-10868-7_13
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