The Lexicon-Grammar of French Verbs: a syntactic database

Résumé En

The LADL (Laboratoire d'Automatique Documentaire et Linguistique) , headed by Maurice GROSS from 1968 to 2002, aimed to classify all grammatical word classes in French according to their syntactic properties, and the distributional constraints that could characterize the sentences in which they occur. At the outset, it was essentially a linguistic approach, with no intention to build a tool for computational applications. But the way in which the description was formalized allowed us to incorporate the data within a general system capable of tagging very large corpora, analyzing texts and producing a syntactic description of sentences. Our electronic dictionary provides information about the grammatical category (part-of-speech of each item), its possible inflected forms, and, in the case of verbs, a code indicating which syntactic class(es) it belongs to. I briefly describe how the classification of verbs has been organized, and what kind of information it contains.