From lesson 1 to lesson 2

Les petites phrases de la linguistique

Have a look at the course notes “Tools and Algorithms for Natural Language Processing” by Bertrand Gaiffe and Guy Perrier at http://www.loria.fr/%7Eperrier/teaching/tal_m2.html. You will see, among other things, a paradigmatic example of ambiguity:

La petite brise la glace

Actually, (written) sentences are ambiguous, but not (oral) utterances, or very rarely, if only because of prosody.

The important notion is that of paradigmatic sentence. Here are a few.

The horse passed the barn fell (garden-path sentence)

Les poules du couvent couvent (absurdity of French spelling)

Colorless green ideas sleep furiously (Chomsky showing that grammaticality is independent from having a meaning).

Then you have donkey sentences, hippopotamus sentences, paycheck sentences, etc. Sometimes the paradigmatic phrase becomes the name of the phenomenon. E.g.: bahuvrihi. Note the transfer: the phenomenon is the new signifié of the signifiant in a grammatical context.

© Gérard Huet 2006 Top | MPRI fr | MPRI en | Previous | Next |