Logic and Grammar: Essays Dedicated to Alain Lecomte on the Occasion of His 60th Birthday

176 Pages·2011·1.4 MB·English

by  Sylvain Pogodalla

Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence 6700
EditedbyR.Goebel,J.Siekmann,andW.Wahlster
Subseries of Lecture Notes in Computer Science
FoLLI Publications on Logic, Language and Information
Editors-in-Chief
LuigiaCarlucciAiello,UniversityofRome"LaSapienza",Italy
MichaelMoortgat,UniversityofUtrecht,TheNetherlands
MaartendeRijke,UniversityofAmsterdam,TheNetherlands
EditorialBoard
CarlosAreces,INRIALorraine,France
NicholasAsher,UniversityofTexasatAustin,TX,USA
JohanvanBenthem,UniversityofAmsterdam,TheNetherlands
RaffaellaBernardi,FreeUniversityofBozen-Bolzano,Italy
AntalvandenBosch,TilburgUniversity,TheNetherlands
PaulBuitelaar,DFKI,Saarbrücken,Germany
DiegoCalvanese,FreeUniversityofBozen-Bolzano,Italy
AnnCopestake,UniversityofCambridge,UnitedKingdom
RobertDale,MacquarieUniversity,Sydney,Australia
LuisFariñas,IRIT,Toulouse,France
ClaireGardent,INRIALorraine,France
RajeevGoré,AustralianNationalUniversity,Canberra,Australia
ReinerHähnle,ChalmersUniversityofTechnology,Göteborg,Sweden
WilfridHodges,QueenMary,UniversityofLondon,UnitedKingdom
CarstenLutz,DresdenUniversityofTechnology,Germany
ChristopherManning,StanfordUniversity,CA,USA
ValeriadePaiva,PaloAltoResearchCenter,CA,USA
MarthaPalmer,UniversityofPennsylvania,PA,USA
AlbertoPolicriti,UniversityofUdine,Italy
JamesRogers,EarlhamCollege,Richmond,IN,USA
FrancescaRossi,UniversityofPadua,Italy
YdeVenema,UniversityofAmsterdam,TheNetherlands
BonnieWebber,UniversityofEdinburgh,Scotland,UnitedKingdom
IanH.Witten,UniversityofWaikato,NewZealand

Sylvain Pogodalla Myriam Quatrini
Christian Retoré (Eds.)
Logic and Grammar
Essays Dedicated to Alain Lecomte
on the Occasion of His 60th Birthday
1 3

SeriesEditors
RandyGoebel,UniversityofAlberta,Edmonton,Canada
JörgSiekmann,UniversityofSaarland,Saarbrücken,Germany
WolfgangWahlster,DFKIandUniversityofSaarland,Saarbrücken,Germany
VolumeEditors
SylvainPogodalla
INRIANancy–GrandEst
615,rueduJardinBotanique,54602Villers-lès-NancyCedex,France
E-mail:[email protected]
MyriamQuatrini
UniversitédeMarseille
InstitutdeMathématiquesdeLuminy
163,avenuedeLuminy,Case907,13288MarseilleCedex9,France
E-mail:[email protected]
ChristianRetoré
UniversitéBordeaux1
LaBRI
351,coursdelalibération,33405Talencecedex,France
E-mail:[email protected]
ISSN0302-9743 e-ISSN1611-3349
ISBN978-3-642-21489-9 e-ISBN978-3-642-21490-5
DOI10.1007/978-3-642-21490-5
SpringerHeidelbergDordrechtLondonNewYork
LibraryofCongressControlNumber:2011928314
CRSubjectClassification(1998):F.4.2,F.4,I.2.7,I.2.3,I.2.6
LNCSSublibrary:SL7–ArtificialIntelligence
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Preface
“Science longue patience”
Louis Aragon
This volume presents contributed papers of the Colloquium in Honor of Alain
Lecomte,held in Pauillac,France,November 2–3,20071. This event was part of
the ANR project Pr´elude2. The selected papers belong to the numerous scien-
tific areas in which Alain has worked and to which he has contributed—formal
linguistics, computationallinguistics, logic and cognition.Being able to work in
and across such diverse and active areas requires a bird’s eye view from high
above.So it mighthavebeen predestinationthat Alainwas bornin Le Bourget,
the former north airport of Paris, in 1947. His father was in fact a mechanic
for the A´eropostale and for Air France thereafter, possibly also explaining why
Alain is so keen on plane noise, the smell of kerosene and travelling.
After studying in the high school of Drancy, he undertook studies in math-
ematics in what was to become Jussieu. His interest in philosophy also led him
to attendAlthusser’s seminar.After enjoyingMay 1968in Parisandspending a
fewmonthsinCopenhagen,in1969heobtainedamaster’sdegreeinstatisticsin
Grenoble where he became lecturer (assistant) at the IMSS (Institute of Math-
ematics for Social Sciences). Resisting the call of the mountains surrounding
Grenoble, Alain got more and more interested in linguistics: he was preparing
for a PhD under the supervision of Jacques Rouault, who was leading a team
called“Traitementautomatique des langues et applications”(Natural Language
Processing and Applications), issued from the former“Centre d’´etude pour la
traductionautomatique”(CenterforResearchonAutomatedTranslation)ledby
BernardVauquois.Alainpassedhis PhDinappliedmathematicsentitled“Essai
de formalisationdes op´erationslinguistiquesde pr´edication”in 1974.Thereafter
he spent two years teaching statistics in Oran, and returned to Grenoble at the
end of the 1970s.
Jacques Rouault knew Michel Pˆecheux because they were both following
Antoine Culioli’s aproach to the formalization of linguistics. That is how Alain
joinedtheresearchprojectconductedbyMichelPˆecheux:RCPAdela(Recherche
Coop´erative Programm´ee, Analyse du Discours Et Lecture d’Archive) in 1980.
Within this project, Alain, with Jacqueline L´eon and Jean-Marie Marandin,
focused on the incremental analysis of discourse. He was already involved in
the logical aspects of such issues. The project also needed a parser and Michel
Pˆecheux got in touch with Pierre Plante from Montreal who was developing
one in Lisp, Deredec. A research program with UQA`M (Universit´e du Qu´ebec
1 http://www.loria.fr/ pogodall/AL/
2 http://www.anr-prelude.fr/
VIII Preface
`a Montr´eal) was launched, involving Alain, Jacqueline L´eon and Jean-Marie
Marandin, among others, on the French side.
Corresponding to this interest in formalizing linguistic phenomena, the first
contribution of this volume, by Claire Beyssade, provides a linguistic analysis
of bare nouns in French. The main claim of this paper is that interpretative
differences between bare nouns and indefinite nouns in predicate position in
Frenchderivefromadifferencebetweentwotypesofjudgements:theattributive
ones and the identificational ones. Such a claim relies on an analysis of copular
sentences for which the logical forms differ on whether they are built with bare
nouns or indefinite noun phrases.
The projects on automatic analysis of discourse (AAD) and the Adela team
soon stopped after the death of Michel Pˆecheux in 1984. By that time, Jean-
MarieMarandinhadintroducedAlaintoGabrielB`es(GRIL,Clermont-Ferrand).
TheGRILwasinvolvedinaEuropeanproject:DYANA(Dynamicinterpretation
of naturallanguage,DYANA andDYANA-2, that lastedfrom1988to 1995)in-
cluding a large part on categorialgrammars,with people from Edinburgh(such
as Claire Gardent,formerly member of the GRIL, or Glyn Morrill)and Utrecht
(such as Michael Moortgat). The GRIL was looking for someone comfortable
with the mathematical aspects of categorialgrammarsand Alain thus joined it.
There, he familiarized himself with these grammars that would occupy him for
several years. In 1990, he organized a DYANA workshop at Clermont-Ferrant
andin1992heeditedWordOrderinCategorialGrammar,acollectionofarticles
on categorialgrammar deriving from this workshop.
Because of his interest in formalization and modelling of linguistic phenom-
ena, in particular from the logical point of view, Alain could not miss what is
now a well-established and continuously exciting event: the European Summer
School of Logic, Language, and Information, ESSLLI. Indeed, Alain attended
ESSLLI in 1990 and since then, he attended, lectured, or presented a communi-
cation at most ESSLLI venues: 1990, 1991, 1992, 1995, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000,
2002, 2005,2006, 2007, 2008,2009 and 2010.
HisinterestinlogicfornaturallanguageledhimtomeetChristianRetor´e(co-
editor of this volume) in 1993. Because Alain was looking for non-commutative
versions of linear logic, Vincent Danos suggestedhe get in touch with Christian
whohadjustobtainedaPhDdegreewithJean-YvesGirardonpartiallyordered
sequentsandthe“before”connective(pomsetlogic).AlainshowedChristianhow
useful non-commutative calculi are for linguistics. Although they never worked
in the same location, this was the starting point of a fruitful collaboration.
At this time, while teaching in Grenoble, Alain was part of the GRIL and in
1994, he defended his habilitation thesis entitled“Mod`eles logiques en th´eorie
linguistique”in front of a jury consisting of Michele Abrusci, GabrielB`es, Jean-
Pierre Descl´es, Michel Eytan and Michael Moortgat. When Christian moved to
Nancy, in October 1994, Alain played an important role in the creation of the
INRIA Project team Calligramme, led by Philippe de Groote, soon joined by
Franc¸ois Lamarche and Guy Perrier. The theoretical center of the team was
Preface IX
linear logic, especially proof-nets, and the application areas were concurrency
but also—and soon mainly—computationallinguistics.
One of the key ideas Alain and Christian had was to map words not to
formulasasincategorialgrammar,buttopartialproof-nets(ofLambekcalculus
or of pomset logic), and to view parsing as assembling partial proof-nets into
a complete correct proof. They presented their work to the Roma workshops
organized by Michele Abrusci and Claudia Casadio on Lambek calculus, linear
logicandlinguisticapplications,orto FormalGrammararoundESSLLIvenues.
In1995,Alainbecameprofessorinepistemology,philosophyofsciencesandlogic
in Grenoble and was the dean of his faculty for several years.
Partialproof-nets as lexical entries was rather a broad notionof a grammar,
encompassingrich syntactic formalisms,e.g., TAG, but more symmetrical.This
approach permitted one to model discontinuous constituents or relatively free
word order while sticking to the idea of “proof as analysis.” As in categorial
grammar, from this proof could be recoveredsemantic readings in a Montague-
like style. Alain and Christian also thought of inverting this process, and wrote
a PhD proposal with Marc Dymetman on this topic: their common student
Sylvain Pogodalla (co-editor of this volume) made a contribution to this topic
in the more standard framework of Lambek grammars:“R´eseaux de preuves et
g´en´erations pour les grammaires de type logique”(defended in 2001 in Nancy).
In the present volume, the second paper also pertains to the logical view of
language. It aims at reconstructing the Cooper storage method for quantifiers
within a type-theoretic framework: convergent grammar (CVG). In this paper,
CarlPollardmotivatestheCVGframeworkbyanalyzingtheevolutionsofChom-
sky’stransformationalmodelthroughtheminimalistprogramandbycomparing
it with the categorial grammar approaches. This leads to considering syntactic
treesasprooftrees.But,contrarytostandardcategorialgrammar,thesemantics
terms do not directly result from the syntactic terms. They are instead built in
parallel using a purely derivational calculus for the syntax-semantics interface.
While the CVGframeworkitselfdoes notconsistina rephrasingofthe Min-
imalist Program, it highlights some of its relations to type theory and logical
grammar. It interestingly echoes that at the beginning of the 2000s, because of
Alain’s knowledge about generative grammar and Noam Chomsky’s work, and
because of Christian’s interest in this formalism, Alain gave a series of semi-
nars on this topic in Nancy issuing in a joint work for a categorialtreatment of
minimalism, and in particular of Ed Stabler’s minimalist grammars (MG) first
presented at Logical Aspects of Computational Linguistics (LACL), a confer-
ence launched by Alain and Christian in 1996. The point of giving a catego-
rial view of minimalism was to provide it with better semantic representations.
First, the proof expresses valency consumption of linguistic resources, but then
a process computes from the proof either word order or semantic representa-
tion. This topic was an important one in the INRIA group Signes that Chris-
tian started in Bordeaux in September 2002 and to which Alain actively took
part. In addition to joint papers on that subject, they also co-advised two PhD
students: Maxime Amblard,“Calculs de repr´esentations s´emantiques et syntaxe