Ce numéro de Neophilologica est consacré à la mémoire de Gaston Gross, membre du Comité Scientifique de la revue et son président d'honneur. Le texte présente les contributions de Gaston Gross en linguistique et en coopératio  linguistique franco-polonaise, ainsi qu'une présentation sommaire de chaque texte formant ce numéro de Neophilologica.

The intensive support verbs selected by the predicative nouns of the class <anger> in Old French and Old Spanish are presented and analyzed in this paper. The lexically constrained combinations between these verbs and nouns are described, and the basic metaphors that govern the selection of intensive structures are identified. We observe that a synchronic perspective would prefer a lexical selection-based description of collocations, whereas a diachronic perspective would prefer the use of conceptual metaphors. We highlight certain similarities between the two languages studied, but also some differences.

This paper explores perception verbs (like ‘hear’ and ‘see’) from a construction grammar perspective, with a focus on both contrastive and diachronic aspects. Surprisingly, our corpus analysis suggests that different verbs from this semantic groups do not display a homogeneous syntactic behaviour. For example the verb ‘observer’ stands out from other verbs in this group. We attempt to account for the special status of ‘observer’ and discuss the extent to which the acceptability of sentences featuring ‘observer’ can be improved by acting on certain parameters in the sentence. Our research highlights the role of a factor referred to as evidentia in classical rhetoric.

Using the notion of predicate in the sense of an element structuring the sentence at the surface level, G. Gross arrives at an interpretation of linguistic facts that is valid for those who adopt the concept of semantic predicate as a tool for analysis. It belongs to the abstract level of meaning and is considered to be an essential part of the mechanism for disambiguation and selecting the meaning of lexemes or grammatical structures. This mechanism is particularly important in the context of machine translation where it is necessary to choose, in the bilingual transfer dictionary, the accurate equivalent of a polysemic lexeme in the target language.

We discuss the concept of predicate from both metalinguistic and linguistic perspectives. After having explained the role of predicate in the theoretical framework of reference, we specify the language mechanisms related to predicates. We then illustrate our purpose with the determination of nouns in French.

When it comes to language, it’s not just the grammatical structure and the literal meaning of words that matter. The way a predicate imposes inferences on its propositional arguments is crucial to understanding the true meaning of a message. However, these inferences are influenced by many factors, such as prosody, world knowledge, speakers’ expectations regarding language use, situational stereotypes, and other implicit or contextual elements.
In this paper, we examine the inferential status of the verbs referred to by Karttunen as “implicative verbs”. On the one hand, two-way implicative verbs, and on the other, one-way implicative verbs. The latter have been little studied from this perspective. This will lead us to highlight the fundamental role, too often forgotten, of prosody and focus/theme in this type of analysis and in determining the inferential status of predicates.
Our analyses show that, once prosody has been considered, the classification of theoretically possible verb inferences accepted until now needs to be modified.
We do not have 4 groups of one-way implicative verbs, as has been argued, but 2, namely the groups: [+/+/– // –/–] [affirmed > true or false // denied > false] of the type être capable, pouvoir and [+/+/– // –/+] [affirmed > true or false // denied > true] of the type hésiter à.
The remaining two groups, considered as distinct and autonomous one-way implicative verbs with the suggested characteristics: [+ + // – +/–] [affirmed > true // denied > true or false] of the type forcer to and [+ – // – +/–] [affirmed > false // denied > true or false] of the type refuser de, belong to the canonical groups of two-way implicative verbs, respectively: forcer à to the group of verbs of the type réussir à: [+/+ // –/–] [affirmed > true // denied > false] and refuser de to the group of verbs of the type oublier de: [+/– // –/+] affirmed > false // denied > true].
Naturally, this classification differentiation, important as it is, only reflects the different behaviour of certain types of predicate, and this is the most important element of these analyses with a view to automating the recognition of predicate inferences.

Neologisms indicate linguistic changes in the lexicon. Vocabulary is particularly prone to changes since language communities constantly need new words and phrases to denote new facts or circumstances or they require new expressions for concepts already established. New expressions are often borrowed from other languages. English has had a strong influence on German vocabulary in the last decades. Therefore, German has several English borrowings. These anglicisms differ in their degree of integration into the linguistic system and vary, for instance, with respect to usage, style, and diffusion in the language community. With the help of the Neologismenwörterbuch, it is possible to have an overview of neologisms of English origin in German that integrate different areas of language change.

In a 1955 article, Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca suggest that their theory of argumentation could provide a foundation for a study that they place under the sign of semantics: the study of notions. In the Treatise on Argumentation, the multiplicity of the examples cited can monopolise the reader’s attention and prevent him from finding the lineaments of this semantic reflection. If a semantic project appears in the Treatise, it is in the manner of a watermark. The analysis that Ducrot proposes of the word But and his commentary on Pascal’s Refutation of the Dominicans could offer a precious means of making the functioning of this study of notions promised by the New Rhetoric more visible. Ducrot’s strictly linguistic approach will allow for a better understanding of the workings of the Perelmanian method, a method that, by contrast, we will call “rhetorico-grammatical”.

This article deals with the epistemological consistency of synonymy. When synonymy is defined as equality of meaning, it turns out to be a factually impossible relation. Therefore, scholars distinguish between full synonymy (ideal concept) and partial synonymy (real phenomenon). We argue that this distinction must be discarded in order to maintain consistency in synonymy. We propose that synonymy does not consist in the absence of different semantic nuances between meanings, but rather in the condition for finding different semantic nuances between meanings. This condition is interpreted as sharing the same “predicative schema” in the sense of Gaston Gross.

In this article, a morphological linguistic resource for contemporary French called Morfetik is presented. The evolution of the resource and its various linguistic and technological characteristics are discussed. Additionally, an overview of the numerous tools integrated into the resource is provided. Morfetik represents a continuously evolving platform designed to progress and enhance the processing of textual data.

The studies of anaphoric expressions have shown that we can and must link the stable results acquired over the last forty years on their functioning to more recent socio-cognitive, taxonomic, multimodal, etc. perspectives and examine and explain two aspects of cataphoric demonstratives (CDs): on the one hand, their constructional scheme and, on the other, the formal and semantic nature of their subsequent or postcedent.

We propose here to continue this analysis of CDs, this time looking at their referential operation as such and asking the question: how do CDs make us reach the intended referent? What precisely is the interpretative procedure involved?

Our analyses show that rather than directly contrasting CDs with anaphoric demonstratives, it is more relevant and, therefore, more fruitful to compare them directly with gestural demonstratives. As we have seen, the two uses of demonstratives correspond to the same cognitive situation, that of introducing a new referent into discourse memory. This cognitive kinship gives rise to a common semiotic hybridity and, consequently, a referential operation, which we have detailed in nine points, that turns out to be largely identical, the differences observed being directly due to the difference in the nature of the index.

This article intends to situate as precisely as possible the work of Gaston Gross and his team within what can be called “The School of Distributional and Transformational Grammars”, whose main representatives are Zellig S. Harris, Maurice Gross, Jean Dubois and Françoise Dubois-Charlier, and Gaston Gross. After discussing the collaboration of Maurice Gross with Zellig Harris in the process of developing the theory of Distributional and Transformational Grammars, we will highlight what Gaston Gross borrows from Maurice Gross and what he innovates, even going so far as to address an aspect of Harris’ original project that had been left out by Maurice Gross.

The paper describes Russian phrasal indefinite pronouns: both 1) phraseologized (= collocational), such as koe-kto ≈ ‘someone’, Bog znaet kto ‘God knows who’, kto ugodno ‘whoever’ or kto by to ni bylo ‘no matter who’, and 2) free, such as {Ja vstretil} nikto iz tvoix druzej ne dogadaetsja kogo ‘{I met} none of your friends will guess whom’ (a.k.a. syntactic amalgams). Three lexical entries are presented: for the indefinite pronominal lexeme kto1 ≈ ‘-body; -one’, for the premodifying indefi­niteness type marker idiom ˹Bog znaet˺ ‘God knows’, and for the postmodifying indefiniteness type marker particle -to4 ≈ ‘some’. Formal representations of collocational and free phrasal indefi­nite pronouns at three levels of linguistic representation (semantic, deep-syntactic and surface-syntactic) are given, as well as rules for constructing both types of pronouns.

For Gaston Gross, a rigorous study of the language means describing all the uses of lexical units of the language within the framework of free combinatorics, by determining the argumental paradigms involved in the schemes of arguments for predicates and all the appropriate predicates for arguments. This approach is complemented by a description of frozen sequences whose internal combinatoriality is more or less restricted. The author devotes his work of 1996 and part of his textbook of 2012 to this subject. Our contribution highlights the great richness of the author’s thoughts particularly from a heuristic point of view. We start from the concepts of predicate, frozeness, polylexicality and semantic opacity to show how much impact Gaston Gross’s methodological suggestions have had on the development of the discipline of linguistics.

This work deals with the construction of relatives and cleft clauses that follow a demonstrative pronoun in French. It examines their mode of acquisition of meaning and reference, either by referential increase obtained by predicative interactions and lexical meaning, or by the process of focusing on a referent in the situation or context. We show that the original pronoun ce is no longer demonstrative in all these structures, and how the various demonstratives are used in actual French in those contexts.

In this study, we offer an overview of the main issues addressed by Gaston Gross in his analysis of the adjectival category. Gross’s aim was to create an electronic dictionary of adjectives intended for automatic language processing. His research work focused on the search for criteria for the identification and description of the various subclasses of adjectives, as well as on the accurate description of adjectival meaning using the notion of “emploi”. We will discuss some key concepts of the Théorie des classes d’objets that have been applied to the study of the adjective. These include the notion of adjectival predicate and adjectival use (“emploi”). We will attempt to draw a summary of Gaston Gross’s achievements, while also discussing some critical issues.

This article shows the need to linguistically characterize texts that constitute a corpus in order to enable the historical study of words. Examples about the challenges found in the process are provided by showing the treatment given to fifty documents. These texts allow us to explain the Aragonese origin of the “servar” Latinism used by the Marquis of Santillana.

The purpose of the present article is to discuss, through adjectival uses, a number of difficulties that affect the synonymy relation. The article reviews various approaches to synonymy and contain a theoretical and applicative dimension. The notion of the object class (G. Gross, W. Banyś) is used to describe the semantics of adjectives in order to disambiguate them. The linguistic approach taken here to describe synonymous units is  that synonymy is relation between words in use. A contextual approach to synonymy can overcome the shortcomings of classical dictionaries of synonyms.

Interclausal relations are traditionally studied within the framework of the complex sentence of endocentric subordinative form. However, there is no essential correlation between interclausal linkage and complex sentence. Interclausal relations are not meanings of subordinate clauses but conceptual relations that bridge saturated processes of equal rank. According to this premise, complex sentence is only one option for the expression of interclausal relations, along with text. Moreover, if we compare the competing structures, it turns out that the unmarked form of expression is not complex sentence but text. While a complex sentence imposes a hierarchic syntactic structure on a symmetric conceptual structure, the structure of the text and the conceptual structure of interclausal relations are isomorphic. As a marked option, the choice of complex sentence requires a specific functional motivation, which does not involve the ideation of the link itself but the communicative perspective: its function is to impose a layered communicative perspective on the connexion, which is distributed between foreground and background information.

With the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, people needed information about the new disease. The journalists immediately facilitated it in the information portals. Due to lack of specialized knowledge, they frequently used metonymy very often, so as a result several popular synonyms acquired by readers appeared. In the text we analyze how the predicative name COVID-19 (also considering all possible synonyms) belonging to the category of <infectious diseases> is actualized in the texts of the Spanish language press online. We present the determinants and light verbs which are mentioned used by Spanish-speaking journalists, and this allows to know better not only the syntax of the name in question but also the combinatory inventory of all the predicative names of the same class. As the texts studied are characterized by a certain level of specialization, the results of the study may do not correspond to the analysis of other, more or less specialized, texts., more or less specialized.

Machine translators such as those offered by Google, Deep, ChatGPT and others are already using NMT systems. They apply the techniques of artificial intelligence that are constantly being developed, so they are currently providing increasingly correct and suitable translations.

In the first part of this article, the author examines the case of the French verb louer by having it translated in different contexts by three automatic translators mentioned to see how effective they currently are as translation tools. Next, the verb louer is presented and analyzed as seen through the prism of the Antidote 8 dictionary. The last part of the article is devoted to the French-Polish description of the verb studied using the Object-Oriented Approach, with the aim of disambiguating it and developing the system of syntactico-semantic rules (object classes, frames, scripts) enabling the appropriate automatic translation of sentences in which it may appear.

In this article, we present research directly inspired by the Princeton WordNet lexical ontology project (Miller, Fellbaum), which was a response to the real need for ontologies corresponding to the natural conceptualization common to all language users, within a given natural language, or within a specific sublanguage. Lexical ontologies for a given language or language subsystem determined by the scope of communication needs turn out to be useful and even necessary for constructing formal models of linguistic competence and, consequently, for designing and implementing AI systems with linguistic communicative competence, both passive and active. An important milestone of the research program presented in this work is the acquisition of tools in the form of extensive lexical ontologies of a new type, referred to in this work as Lexicon-Grammar Verbnets. In the article, we refer to the works of authors such as: Alain Colmerauer, Charles Fillmore, Christiane Fellbaum, Gaston Gross, Maurice Gross, Thomas R. Gruber, Richard Kittredge, George A. Miller, Martha Palmer, Kazimierz Polański, and Piek Vossen.