A metagrammar for French predicative nouns developed and tested through tree adjoining grammar formalism

In the study we describe in our thesis, we analyze « verb (+preposition) + noun » or « noun + verb » French combinations, known as support verb patterns (also known as light verb patterns in English). The grammar we describe is intended to comply not only with tree adjoining grammar formalism, but also with a more abstract language called metagrammar. In order to build an accurate and realistic syntactic lexicon, we use a corpus from the French daily Le Monde (developed at Paris 7 University), so as to represent only the most productive predicative nouns. The corpus allows us as well to check the regularities of support verb patterns in contemporary French. Applying our low-level grammar to a series of test sentences enables us to make sure that sentences whose descriptions used to be impossible or unsatisfactory may be adequately parsed.