[pt] Esta dissertação aborda um fenômeno pouco estudado no Português Brasileiro (PB): o sluicing, fenômeno no qual o sintagma de tempo (TP) de uma estrutura encabeçada por um elemento –QU é elidido, deixando explícito apenas o elemento –QU. Merchant (2001) argumenta que o sluicing envolve movimento –QU e apagamento do TP, e que disso segue a generalização, segundo a qual uma língua permitirá encalhamento de preposição no sluicing se o permite em sentenças simples. Almeida & Yoshida (2007) argumentam que o PB falseia essa generalização por permitir encalhamento de preposição em sluicing, mas não em sentenças simples. Rodrigues et al. (2009), todavia, propõe que existem duas raízes para o sluicing no PB: sluicing regular e pseudosluicing, sendo que o encalhamento de preposição ocorreria apenas nessas estruturas. A presente dissertação investiga a proposta de Rodrigues et al. (2009), por meio de experimento de juízo de gramaticalidade e metodologia experimental, para verificar relações entre apagamento de preposição e tipo de estrutura. Os resultados corroboram a proposta de Rodrigues et al. (2009), e apontam para uma restrição de identidade de ordem semântica entre o constituinte elidido e seu antecedente. Nossa conclusão sugere que: os dados PB não falseiam a generalização de Merchant; identidade semântica é suficiente para licenciar processos de elisão. Esse fenômeno é investigado à luz de uma proposta de integração entre a teoria linguística de vertente gerativista e a psicolinguística, proposta que tem caracterizado as pesquisas desenvolvidas no Laboratório de Psicolinguística e Aquisição da Linguagem (LAPAL) da PUC-Rio. / [en] This dissertation discusses an understudied phenomenon in Brazilian Portuguese (BP): sluicing, a phenomenon in which the tense phrase (TP) of a structure headed by an interrogative pronoun (-QU) is elided, leaving only the explicit -QU. Merchant (2001) argues that sluicing involves –wh movement and deletion in the phonological form of TP, and proposes the following generalization: a language L will allow preposition stranding in sentences with sluicing iff L allows this stranding in simple sentences. Almeida and Yoshida (2007) argue that the Brazilian Portuguese distorts this generalization as it allows preposition stranding in sluicing, but not in simple sentences. In contrast, Rodrigues et al. (2009) proposes that there are two processes of sluicing in Brazilian Portuguese: regular sluicing and pseudosluicing, with preposition stranding occurring only in these structures. This dissertation investigates the proposal of Rodrigues et al. (2009), leading a grammaticality judgment experiment and using experimental methodology in order to verify deletion relations between preposition and type of structure. The results support the proposal of Rodrigues et al. (2009), and point to a semantic identity between the elided constituent and its antecedent. Our findings suggest that: the Brazilian Portuguese data does not distort Merchant s generalization; and, semantic identity is sufficient for licensing elision processes. This phenomenon is investigated in light of an integrated proposal between generative linguistic theory and psycholinguistics, a proposal that has characterized the research being developed at the Laboratory of Psycholinguistics and Language Acquisition (LAPAL) at PUC-Rio.

Αντικείμενο της εργασίας αυτής αποτελεί η χρήση της γλώσσας λογικού προγραμματισμού Prolog για τη συντακτική ανάλυση (parsing) παραδειγμάτων ρηματικής φράσης, ακολουθώντας τις τελευταίες εξελίξεις στο χώρο της γενετικής γραμματικής (Μινιμαλιστικό Πρόγραμμα). Στην προσπάθεια πλήρους περιγραφής του προβλήματος, όπως απαιτεί ο λογικός προγραμματισμός, στο επίκεντρο τοποθετείται η διεπαφή σύνταξης – σημασιολογίας. Γίνεται αναφορά σε θεωρητικά προβλήματα όπως η διάκριση μεταξύ ανεργαστικών και μεταβατικών ρημάτων και η φύση των ρημάτων καιρού (weather verbs), και προτείνονται τρόποι ερμηνείας και διαχείρισης των παραπάνω προβλημάτων στο περιβάλλον της Prolog. / The purpose of this study is to examine the use of the logic programming language Prolog as a parser for VPs within the generative grammar/Minimalist Program framework. We focus on the syntax- semantics interface and try to address issues such as the differences between unergative- transitive verbs and the structure of weather verbs within the Prolog environment.

Despite the plethora of SLA research conducted on the acquisition of the definite marker in noun phrase configurations in L2 Arabic and English (e.g., Sarko, 2007; Master, 1997; Collier, 1987; Anderson, 1984; Kharma, 1981), there is as yet no definitive description of how noun phrases are acquired and why errors persist after advanced stages in L2 learning. Results, as shown by Butler (2002), are inconclusive, and the primary causes of difficulties in the acquisition of the definite marker in noun phrase configurations remain unclear. Recently, the internal syntax-semantics interface (Cuza & Frank, 2011; Montrul, 2010; Tsimpli & Sorace, 2006; Sorace, 2003, 2004) and the specificity-definiteness distinction (Ionin, 2003; Ionin et al., 2004; Ionin et al., 2008) have been considered as appropriate frameworks for exploring the acquisition of noun phrases and other structural features. The structure of noun phrase configurations in Arabic and English offers a complex interface between form and meaning for L2 learners with multiple cases of matches and mismatches between specificity and definiteness. In this three-article dissertation project, two of which were conducted in a bidirectional methodological framework with L1 Arabic-L2 English and L1 English-L2 Arabic learners, I explored the acquisition of three cases of noun phrase configurations. In the first study, I investigated the acquisition of plural noun phrase configurations that carry generic and specific readings at the initial state of L2 learning. Using three data collection instruments: written translation; error detection and correction; and forced choice elicitation, I tested the predictions made by the Interface Hypothesis (IH) and the Full Transfer (FT) Hypothesis. Results showed that L2 learners in both directions tend to transfer noun phrase configurations from L1 into L2, a result that I took to support the FT hypothesis. In addition, it took L1 English-L2 Arabic learners two years of instruction to recover from this L1 effect. The second study aimed at confirming the result of the first study, but in the acquisition of the definite marker in generic singular noun phrase configurations in the L1 English-L2 Arabic direction. The behavior of generic singular noun phrases in L2 Arabic offers a good testing ground since it has numerous similarities and differences with English. Two conditions were established: a matching condition and a mismatching condition. Both conditions were tested in the L1 English-L2 Arabic direction. Results showed a similar pattern to the one recorded in the first study. Typological proximity and distance were found to be important determiners of language acquisition of the in/definiteness configurations of singular noun phrases. In the third study, I shifted to the exploration of a more complex type of noun phrases; namely the definite Iḍāfah construction in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and its equivalent noun phrase configurations in English in the two directions. I started with a common difference between MSA and English. Whereas in MSA there is a canonical configuration in terms of head-complement ordering and head-complement definiteness, English is tolerant of more than one permissible configuration. I operationalized the acquisition of these noun phrases in terms of head-complement ordering and head-complement definiteness. Results showed a clear effect of L1 transfer in both directions; knowledge of L1 noun phrase configurations acts as the initial step in L2 learning. I concluded that both communities of L2 learners face problems that vary according to the L1 noun phrase configuration at hand. However, in the L1 English-L2 Arabic direction, learners reached a satisfactory level of performance in the Iḍāfah construction after two years of instruction. I approached this finding as a result of intensive Focus-on-Form Episodes (Loewn, 2005) that the Iḍāfah construction receives in MSA instruction. At the conclusion of this research project I highlighted some implications for the second language acquisition and teaching of noun phrases. The overall results were couched in a broader perspective that characterizes the initial state of L2 learning of noun phrases in + article and – article languages, the effects of typological proximity and distance, and the effects of Instructed SLA. For the pedagogical implications, I called for the integration of the semantics of the definite marker while presenting noun phrases in textbooks. I also recommended the use of explicit instruction and structured-input activities (VanPatten, 2004; Marsden & Chen, 2011) as effective pedagogical tools that foster form-meaning mapping in the acquisition of L2 Arabic and English noun phrases.

GenDR est un réalisateur de texte symbolique qui prend en entrée un graphe, une repré- sentation sémantique, et génère les graphes sous forme d’arbres de dépendances syntaxiques lui correspondant. L’une des tâches de GenDR lui permettant d’effectuer cette transduction est la lexicalisation profonde. Il s’agit de choisir les bonnes unités lexicales exprimant les sémantèmes de la représentation sémantique d’entrée. Pour ce faire, GenDR a besoin d’un dictionnaire sémantique établissant la correspondance entre les sémantèmes et les unités lexi- cales correspondantes dans une langue donnée. L’objectif de cette étude est d’élaborer un module de lexicalisation souple construisant automatiquement un dictionnaire sémantique du français riche pour GenDR, son dictionnaire actuel étant très pauvre. Plus le dictionnaire de GenDR est riche, plus sa capacité à paraphra- ser s’élargit, ce qui lui permet de produire la base de textes variés et naturels correspondant à un même sens. Pour y parvenir, nous avons testé deux méthodes. La première méthode consistait à réorganiser les données du Réseau Lexical du Français sous la forme d’un dictionnaire sémantique, en faisant de chacun de ses noeuds une entrée du dictionnaire et des noeuds y étant reliés par un type de lien lexical que nous appelons fonctions lexicales paradigmatiques sémantiquement vides ses lexicalisations. La deuxième méthode consistait à tester la capacité d’un modèle de langue neuronal contextuel à générer des lexicalisations supplémentaires potentielles correspondant aux plus proches voisins du vecteur calculé pour chaque entrée du dictionnaire afin de l’enrichir. Le dictionnaire construit à partir du Réseau lexical du français est compatible avec GenDR et sa couverture a été considérablement élargie. L’utilité des lexicalisations supplémentaires générées par le modèle neuronal s’est avérée limitée, ce qui nous amène à conclure que le modèle testé n’est pas tout à fait apte à accomplir le genre de tâche que nous lui avons de- mandée. / GenDR is an automatic text realiser. Its input is a graph; a semantic representation, and its output is the corresponding syntactic dependencies tree graphs. One of GenDR’s tasks to operate this transduction successfully is called deep lexicalization, i.e. choosing the right lexical units to express the input semantic representation’s semantemes. To do so, GenDR needs access to a semantic dictionnary that maps the semantemes to the corresponding lexical units in a given language. This study aims to develop a flexible lexicalization module to build a rich French semantic dictionary automatically for GenDR, its current one being very poor. The more data the semantic dictionary contains, the more paraphrases GenDR is able to produce, which enables it to generate the basis for natural and diverse texts associated to a same meaning. To achieve this, we have tested two different methods. The first one involved the reorganization of the French Lexical Network in the shape of a semantic dictionary, by using each of the network’s nodes as a dictionary entry and the nodes linked to it by a special lexical relationship we call semantically empty paradigmatic lexical functions as its lexicalizations. The second method involved testing a contextual neural language model’s ability to gen- erate potential additional lexicalizations by calculating the vector of each of the dictionary entries and generating its closest neighbours in order to expand the semantic dictionary’s coverage. The dictionary we built from the data contained in the French Lexical Network is com- patible with GenDR and its coverage has been significantly broadened. Use of the additional lexicalizations produced by the language model turned out to be limited, which brings us to the conclusion that the tested model isn’t completely able to perform the task we’ve asked from it.

Les constructions causatives ont fait l’objet d’une attention particulière dans les études linguistiques, non seulement parce qu’elles font partie des innombrables expressions qui composent le système langagier humain, mais parce qu'elles reflètent également la mesure dans laquelle la cognition humaine perçoit et interprète la nature de la causation. Parmi les diverses causatives prédicatives, nous accordons une attention particulière aux causatives analytiques tirées des données anglaises et mandarines – deux langues qui comptent le plus grand nombre de locuteurs au monde : les constructions cause, make, have, shi (使) et rang (让). Guidé par le programme cartographique et minimaliste de la syntaxe générative, ce travail fournit, dans un premier temps, une recension des caractéristiques sémantico-syntaxiques qui permettent d’unir ou de distinguer les causatives de l’anglais et du mandarin. Ensuite, nous passons en revue les approches existantes qui discutent de la structure sous-jacente des constructions visées afin d’examiner à quel point ces approches pourraient nous guider dans la description des données interlinguistiques. Finalement, sur la base de ces approches, nous tentons de proposer une structure syntaxique plus universelle des causatives anglaises/mandarines tout en tenant compte des particularités sémantiques et des spécificités interlinguistiques. En plus d'adopter une configuration syntaxique monoclausale qui scinde la couche vP en deux, nous insistons également sur la nécessité d’introduire un trait évènementiel [contrôle] et de déterminer la valeur sémantique des verbes impliqués dans chaque structure causative anglaise/mandarine. / Causative constructions have received particular attention in linguistic studies, not only because they are part of the countless expressions that constitute the human language system, but also because they reflect the extent to which human cognition perceives and interprets the nature of causation. Among the various predicative causatives, this study focuses on analytic causatives drawn from English and Mandarin data - two languages with the largest number of speakers in the world: the cause, make, have, shi (使) and rang (让) constructions. Driven by the cartographic and minimalist program of generative syntax, this work first provides a survey of the semantic-syntactic features that unite or distinguish English and Mandarin causatives. Next, we review existing approaches that discuss the underlying structure of the target constructions to examine how these approaches might guide us in describing cross-linguistic data. Finally, based on these approaches, we attempt to propose a more universal syntactic structure of English/Mandarin causatives while considering semantic particularities and cross-linguistic specificities. In addition to adopting a monoclausal structure that splits the vP layer in two, we also insist on the need to introduce an event feature [control] and to determine the semantic value of verbs involved in each English/Mandarin causative structure.