The Science of Linguistics

Eric Laporte

No description of any language encompasses both its grammar and its lexicon. Take, for
example, the French verb s’écraser:

1. L’avion s’est écrasé en mer.

The plane crashed at sea.

Do French speakers use 1. transitively?

2. Le pilote a écrasé l’avion en mer.

The pilot crashed the plane at sea.

Not frequently. This sort of question, multiplied by the number of similar constructions in
French, or in any other language, suggests just why no linguistic description is remotely
adequate to the facts. There are simply too many facts.

Few dictionaries and grammars are fully reliable, even when the facts in question are easily
verified. French dictionaries describe nouns referring to families of plants and animals as
plural: cucurbitacées (Cucurbitaceae). This implies that they are not used in the singular. But
they are: La courgette est une cucurbitacée (Zucchini belongs to the Cucurbitaceae family).
None of the three major English-French dictionaries have an entry or sub-entry for “as yet,”
which appears only in examples.1 And traditional grammars tend to ignore some syntactic
constructions, especially idioms.

Lélia Picabia suggested that the French adjective susceptible (likely) can only be applied to
human subjects:2

1. Rose est susceptible de devenir mère.

Rose might become a mother.

Not so:

2. Le cas est susceptible de se produire.

Such a case might happen.

On the other hand, her work does provide the data by which her conclusions may be checked.
A minority of French predicate adjectives, she argues, are “defined by the constraints [they]
impose on the subject and complement.”3 Her tables provide examples; her conclusions are
consistent with her data. This is a step, however small, in the right direction.

Most papers and books in linguistics are otherwise. Catherine Léger, in a paper representative
of contemporary linguistics, defines the effective adjectives as those French adjectives with
sentential complements describing “a subject’s relationship—whether causal, potential or
other—to the performance of an action.”4 Members of the effective class, she goes on to
assert, “all share the property that their complements must be tenseless.”5 Checking a general
claim of this sort is difficult. Léger does not provide a list of all the effective adjectives, and
describing a subject’s relationship to the performance of an action is both vague and fuzzy.
She cites susceptible as an example. But, consider:

1. Paul est susceptible de tomber.

Paul might fall down.
2. La couleur est susceptible d’être légèrement différente.
The color may be slightly different.

Falling down may represent the performance of an action, but not being slightly different.
Léger’s definition of an effective adjective yields different results for the same adjective.

Is susceptible an effective adjective in French?

There is no way to tell.

The Search for Definitions

Between 1925 and 1955, American structural linguists introduced distributional analysis into
linguistics. In distinguishing countable and uncountable nouns, such as “house” and “milk,”
Leonard Bloomfield, to take a prominent example, placed little faith in his own semantic
intuitions.6 He relied on native speakers: they determined whether some forms were in use or
not. It was not until the 1960s that the methods of distributional analysis were refined by the
French linguist Maurice Gross, and his students and collaborators. Lexicon-Grammar was the
result. Gross and his students systematically studied the forms that can appear in the subject
and complement of the verb écraser, in all of its senses.7 On the basis of distributional
differences, they described distinct entries for sentences such as L’avion s’est écrasé en mer
and Il a écrasé l’ail. The pilot crashed the plane; but he crushed the garlic. Gross rejected Le
pilote a écrasé l’avion en mer, and so assigned crash to a class of intransitive verbs, and crush
to a class of transitive verbs. Distributional analysis became an experimental protocol.8 I
discuss Gross’s method further down. Keep reading.

What of corpus linguistics and construction grammars? Corpus linguistics, as the name might
suggest, involves the study of a specific body of examples—hence, the corpus. In Henry
Kučera and W. Nelson Francis’s Computational Analysis of Present-Day American English,
the corpus contained roughly 500 examples of speech overheard. Written down, it came to
about one million words. With the data at hand, Kučera and Francis did what computational
linguists always do: they tested the data. Construction grammars are exercises in generative
semantics, the strange glow thrown off by generative syntax in the 1970s. Generative
semantics rejected the traditional view that the meaning of a linguistic form, whether a word,
a phrase, or a sentence, was necessarily a function of the meaning of its parts. The templates
introduced in construction grammars by linguists such as George Lakoff were indivisible.
Both corpus linguistics and construction grammars make use of distributional analysis, but
only as an adjunct to intuition.9 From the first, Noam Chomsky found operational procedures
useless.10 Most linguists have today abandoned the attempt to collect empirical evidence in a
formal and scientific way.

Have they found anything better, I wonder?

Reproducible Subjectivity
Whatever their various professional affiliations, all linguists must, in the end, depend on
intuition—their intuition and the intuition of their informants. Those who speak English
determine whether certain sentences are good, bad, or both, or neither. Those who do not,
have nothing to say. Beyond looking to the users of a language, where would linguists look?
The case of countable nouns is again instructive. Bloomfield’s procedure for deciding which
nouns were countable and which were not was the first to establish a criterion of countability.
Could a noun such as “house” occur in the singular without a determiner? A criterion given,
he then asked what speakers of the language said. “There is house?” No. “There is milk.” Yes.
The criterion and its employment work hand in glove. The criterion refines the question; the
answers make use of the criterion. Bloomfield chose to classify the countable and the
uncountable nouns on the basis of whether or not they required, or took, determiners, because
this criterion generated agreement among observers.11 Examples such as “He sold his house”
and “The milk is on the table” might suggest that so far as this criterion goes, tune-ups may be
required. And what of “house-proud,” “household,” and “house-bound?” How about “the
house-proud household is house-bound?”

When linguists assume that susceptible (likely), but not digne (worthy), “describes a subject’s
relationship … to the performance of an action,” agreement among observers is more
precarious.12 Very often, nothing is reliably observed. The formal procedures of structural and
distributional linguistics are a way to avoid this problem by redirecting attention to a narrower
and more obvious target.

Reproducibility is relevant to technology. Of course it is. The wrong data will inevitably
corrupt computer applications. Imperfect dictionaries and grammars do help with machine
translation, but their reliability is certainly a factor in their performance. Linguists interested
in language resources for Natural Language Processing (NLP) frequently assess “inter-judge
agreements,” and as frequently discover that it is often low.13 Judgment is more a matter of
opinion than data. This situation rarely leads NLP researchers to question the formal basis of
their enterprise.14

Sociolinguistic and idiolectal variations lead to countless differences in detail. Lexicon-

Grammars handle this by comparing independent judgments, the procedure followed by Gross
and his colleagues. Between 1968 and 1984, they met regularly in order to classify various
French verbs. Most of the lexicon-grammar of French is freely available, and thus exposed to
critical evaluation by other linguists.

Psychological bias should never be underestimated. Christian Lehmann notes that such biases
may result from prejudice toward a hypothesis, or toward literary norms; “few linguists,” he
observes acidly, “have escaped the temptation to dress the data they produce according to the
theory they cherish.”15 Studies that systematically scan a lexicon are less vulnerable to such
biases simply because numerous observations are required to validate a hypothesis. Methods
of prophylaxis are simple and effective; they involve nothing more than the comparison of
independent judgments by several linguists, and the publication of extensive results.

Lexicon-Grammars
If there are obstacles to reproducibility in linguistics, lexicon-grammars address them by
requiring observers to be properly trained. Reproducibility is never perfect, but what is?
The level of reproducibility is connected, among other things, to how strongly the observer
belongs to a speech community. We all belong to at least one. Sharpness of judgment depends
on the skill and training of the observer; reproducibility is enhanced by the kind of extensive
practice Gross and his colleagues had, and by collective sessions during which they controlled
one another’s judgments and analyses.16 The observer must imagine contexts in which a
sequence might make sense and be natural. This ability improved with training.

During the study of an individual linguistic property, hundreds of lexical entries are reviewed.

Lexical information is represented in the form of tables. Each table puts together elements of
a given category (for a given language) that share a certain number of defining features,
which usually concern sub-categorization. These elements form a class. These tables are
represented as matrices: each row corresponds to a lexical item of the corresponding class,
each column lists all features that may be valid or not for the different members of the class;
at the intersection of a row and a column, the symbol + (resp. −) indicates that the feature
corresponding to the column is valid (resp. not valid) for the lexical entry corresponding to
the row.17

Repetition serves to refine and sharpen definitions and homogenize their encoding. During
analysis of entries, LG linguists sometimes notice a problem in the definition of a certain
property. Is it one phenomenon at work? Or two? The solution is simple. Either give up the
study of this property or redefine it as one of several properties. The more a lexicon-grammar
table records reliable judgments, the more it is useful for syntactic parsing and other
applications.18

Once the tables are published, the results can be checked by other native speakers. By 1985, a
large collection of tables of French verbs and predicative nouns had been published together
with a few tables of English predicates. Tables of predicates in other languages have been
published since then.19 This work remains unchallenged.

For the moment, there are few debates about reproducibility in linguistics. One exception is
Walter Bisang, who suggested several solutions for enhancing reproducibility: “check[ing]
each sentence with twenty or thirty informants,”20 “work[ing] with about ten different lexical
forms (multiple lexical variants) that show the same effect,” and “systematic[ally] study[ing]
the social basis of variation.”21 Such practices increase both the number of observers and the
targets of observation. They require less care, training and skill than lexicon-grammars. This
is not a recommendation in their favor.

Acceptability
To be acceptable, a form must be meaningful. When linguists assess the acceptability of a
form, they assess the probability that it might be used in some context to convey information.
Some forms do not make sense in any context:

1. Ideas sleep down.

2. That ideas sleep down swims.
3. Ideas sleep down swims.
4. Sleep down swims.
Acceptability is a simplified form of probability: an unacceptable sequence is unlikely to
occur, whether in discourse or anywhere else. Since probabilities belong to an open scale,
linguistic reality is more complex than anything a binary view of acceptability might suggest.
In practice there is no way to measure probabilities for any sequence in a language. Where
would one start? Some linguists multiplied levels of acceptability. Starting with the triplet of
acceptable, unacceptable, and unknown; they quickly went on to a quartet,22 and even a
septet.23

These proposals are unreasonable, if only because a seven-fold distinction (good, not so good,
not really so good, really not so good, not so hot …) is less reliably observable than a
distinction based on an old-fashioned, two-fold yes or no. Ellen Gurman Bard et al.
experimented with an open scale requiring several informants for each judgment, a solution
incompatible with any systematic description of the lexicon.24 If the ensuing chaos has not
been recorded, it may, on the other hand, be imagined.

More concerned by the faculty of language than language itself, Chomsky contrasted
acceptability with grammaticality.25 There is a difference between the two. Acceptable
sentences must be meaningful, but may not be grammatical. Grammatical sentences must be
grammatical but may not be meaningful.

There are several reasons to find acceptability more interesting than grammaticality. Why
should grammars account for such nonsense as “Ideas sleep down?” If we are hoping to
discover potential computational applications in syntactic parsing or NLP, what is the point in
parsing or generating it? To distinguish grammatical from ungrammatical sequences,
Chomsky sometimes appeals to such features as prosody or ease of retention.26 These criteria
might point to decreasing grammaticality, from “Ideas sleep down” to “Sleep down swims,”
but they are vague. These observational issues obscure Chomsky’s distinction in the case of
meaningless sequences. Grammaticality is less reliably observable than acceptability.

Those who use the term “grammatical” may, in fact, find the notion of acceptability more
relevant: in practice, many sequences that, like “ideas sleep down,” are not in use, and, even
though they conform to Chomsky’s criteria of grammaticality,27 are rejected by native
speakers.28 Witness:

Karen has not probably left.

which is both widely rejected and never in use.

Differential Assessment of Meaning

Introduced by Gross, the technique of differential assessment of meaning, or DAM, is
essential to the observation of practically any formal property.29 Bloomfield’s criterion for
count nouns implicitly involves DAM, because in employing it, he checked for unexpected
changes in meaning. “Sloth kept me from getting up” points to an uncountable noun. I may be
slothful, but I cannot count the sloths. Unless, of course, I am thinking of sloths, as in “the
zoo’s sloth is pregnant.” A suitable interpretation of sloth and sloths must distinguish cases
where meaning changes. DAM explains why introspective distributional analysis is not
obsolete at a time when technology and the availability of huge corpora instantly tells the
linguist that “sloth” occurs without a determiner in the singular. Technology facilitates the
practice of distributional analysis by extracting examples, but does not assess meaning
changes.

Some form of DAM is essential to sound linguistic practice because the method allows
linguists reliably to apply distributional and transformational tests. If, in the case of “collect,”

Karl collects waste in the markets.

is understood as “Karl does the collection of waste in the markets,” then “Karl makes a
collection of waste in the markets,” if understandable, has a different, slightly more puzzling
meaning. In “Karl collects waste in the markets,” the direct object accepts a definite
determiner: “Karl collects the waste in the markets.” Now, in most contexts,

Karl collects pictures.

does not mean “Karl does the collection of pictures,” but rather “Karl makes a collection of
pictures,” and the direct object of “Karl collects pictures” does not accept a definite
determiner. “Karl collects the pictures” paraphrases “does the” but not “makes a.”

These observations lead to a distinction between at least two “collect”/“collection” pairs, with
distinct meanings, since they respond differently to the same two criteria. Depending on the
pair, translations into French are different: ramasser (collect) for collects waste versus faire
une collection (collect) for collects pictures.

Gross used introspection on a large scale in studying the syntax and lexicology of English and
French, and developed methodological precautions to make his observations reproducible. He
chose to rely on binary acceptability and differential assessment of meaning because these
types of empirical observation involve reproducible introspection. Introspective procedures
involving artificial sequences can produce authentic empirical evidence if the observers are
rigorous, and if they participate in collective sessions while selecting carefully the questions
to be answered.

Lexical-Grammar studies contributed massively to the understanding of support verbs.30

These are verbs that lend a helping hand: In “Bob paid or drew or gave special attention to the
details of his own funeral,” the verbs “paid,” “drew,” and “gave” provide inflectional and
aspectual information. It is “attention” and “detail” that do the heavy lifting.31

These methods have brought descriptive linguistics closer to an empirical discipline. Few
linguists learned from this work, perhaps because few linguists were aware of it. Supporters
of most trends either dispense with introspection or use it without any noticeable
precautions.32

Introspection and Corpora

The procedures of empirical linguistics rely on introspection or corpus observation. Both are
useful, since they give access to two aspects of language reality and use. Corpora are
important for forms that might otherwise go unnoticed, while introspection is needed to
distinguish rare forms from those that are not in use. But the empirical task of collecting
introspective data must follow systematically controlled procedures.
Corpus exploration is in the twenty-first century easier, more efficient, and scientifically safer
than introspection. It may even provide evidence of acceptability, as in the case of “there was
house.” This form’s absence from a large corpus is evidence that it does not occur in English.
There is no other explanation. The three words are common, and “there was N,” where N
stands for a noun, is a frequent sentence pattern. Still, with less frequent words and syntactic
constructions, introspection remains essential. If a large corpus contains only three
occurrences of the verb “honorificabilize,” all of them in the active voice, is this evidence that
the verb does not have a passive voice? It is a question that no corpus can properly answer. If
the form does not turn up in one place, it may turn up in another. To determine whether
“honorificabilize” admits the passive, a more decisive empirical procedure is needed. The
linguist must produce artificial forms. The resort to made-up forms is inevitable, because, as
Chomsky notes, “the set of grammatical sentences cannot be identified with any corpus of
utterances obtained by the linguist in his field work.”33

DAM also requires introspection. Limits of variability can be discovered only by observing
unacceptable sequences and comparing their meanings. Witness the perfectly ordinary

1. L’avion s’est écrasé en mer.

descending ignominiously to

2. Le pilote a écrasé l’avion en mer.

The procedures of structural linguistics require introspection when differential assessments of

meaning are needed. At a time when efficient corpus exploration was not available, Gross and
his colleagues used introspection. They began to use corpora as soon as the tools were
available. But they continued to practice controlled introspection to test each construction
systematically. Some linguists reject the idea that introspection might provide empirical
evidence because, in the words of Geoffrey Sampson, it is “flatly contradictory to describe
‘intuitions’ as ‘empirical’ data.”34 This is a criticism never applied to physicists, who rely in
the end on their eyes or who distinguish between theories by taste. Most observers, Lehmann
remarks, do not, and, presumably, cannot, master every last sociolect.35 True enough. There is
always the possibility that a bizarre construction may be found in some tucked-away
community of idiosyncratic native speakers prepared defiantly to accept “there is house” on
the grounds that it is just like “there is fire.” In advancing these criticisms, Sampson and
Lehmann have overlooked Gross’s methodological contributions.36 The long-standing
polarization of linguists between generative and corpus linguistics has encouraged the view
that if generative linguistics fails properly to make use of introspection, then introspection
cannot be used at all.

Reproducible and Non-Reproducible

If a semantic property is obscure or difficult to observe, it may yet be correlated with formal
properties that are not. Semantically gradable adjectives, such as “young,” often combine with
“very.” Non-gradable adjectives, such as “dead,” do not. Cynthia may be very young, but
while John can be almost dead, he cannot be very dead. Either he is or he isn’t. There is no
such thing as deader than dead. The meaning of adjectives like “gorgeous” is often up for
grabs, but its compatibility with “very” is clear-cut: “Cynthia is very gorgeous.” Cynthia is, in
fact, even more gorgeous than her sister. For all I know, she may be the most gorgeous sister
of them all. There is a difference in definiteness between the semantic and distributional
analysis of certain adjectives, and semantic and distributional properties pose distinct
methodological problems.

When formal and semantic features are correlated, there may well be a causal nexus between
them. The fact that an adjective is semantically gradable explains the fact that the adjective
does not admit adverbs of degree. Empirical evidence about distributional properties is
essential to the verification of such hypotheses.

In some cases, predicates denoting several entities require plural agreement, as in “John
collects paintings,” but not, “John collects a painting.” It is the semantic feature of the verb
“to collect” that is the cause of the formal feature expressed in plural agreement. As usual,
focusing on the formal feature results in superior reproducibility. The intuition governing
ascriptions of causality are less reliable. In “his son-in-law married them in their
wheelchairs,” the object of “marry” denotes a set of two people, but it can, nevertheless, occur
in the singular: “His son-in-law married him in his wheelchair.” The semantic feature does not
always cause the formal feature.

Is it really a cause?

Systematic Description of the Lexicon

Lexical coverage is a matter of how much of the vocabulary of a language a research project
includes in its study. The size of a lexicon makes coverage difficult, and for the most obvious
of reasons: it is enormous.

Lexicon-Grammars provide evidence that chaos prevails in large portions of any lexicon.37
This raises an unavoidable difficulty. Grammar involves generalizations from a lexicon, and a
study encompassing large lexical coverage is the only way to indicate whether a grammatical
feature is general. There is nothing to be done about this. Language is unbelievably complex.
Still, it is worth noting that the lexicon-grammar of French outperforms in the number of its
entries all other major dictionaries in French or English: FrameNet, VerbNet, ComLex, and
Meaning-Text.

Bias and Objectivity

In linguistics, objectivity means that the linguist and his informants are distinct. The linguist
listens; his informants talk. Questions of reproducibility are different. Psychological biases are
a problem in any case, the more so when “the speaker involved is … the theorist, so that
theory and data are simultaneously produced by the same person at the same time.”38

Corpus linguists are particularly keen to establish that

data points that are coded are not made-up, their frequency distributions are based on natural
data, and these data points force them to include inconvenient or highly unlikely examples
that armchair linguists may “overlook.”39

Generative linguists are plausible targets of such criticism, since they freely resort to
introspection and, as Steven Abney observes, inconvenient observations may always be
dismissed as a matter of performance before they are accepted as a matter of competence.40
Neurolinguists and psycholinguists are scrupulous about subjectivity. Preferred sources of
empirical evidence are experiments that do not allow a participant to be both a subject and an
observer. These very reasonable scruples need not remain the sole possession of
neurolinguists or psycholinguists. Linguistic protocols can ensure that subjective results are
also reproducible. This is what happens with reproducible acceptability judgments.

It is possible to imagine psycholinguistic experiments that aid in the construction of both

grammars and their lexicons. Subjects might be asked to distinguish parts of speech. What
would be the practical implications? Daunting. Some words are assigned to different parts of
speech in different contexts. The word “record” can be both a verb and a noun. There is “Let
me record this,” but there is also “This is a record,” as well as, “Let me get this on the
record.” No experiment could rely on a single subject for a given word. In order for twenty
informants to pass judgments on 220,000 lemmata,41 a single experiment would need to be
repeated four million times.42

And parts of speech are the easy example. Does a given lexical entry, with a given sense,
enter into a given syntactic construction? The practical problems are roughly the same as with
parts of speech, but on a much larger scale. There are hundreds of syntactic constructions in a
language and tens of thousands of words. The compatibility of a syntactic construction with a
word may be predictable or unpredictable. For each combination, a trial requires an
acceptability judgment. Some sequences might be extracted from corpora, but not all:
sequences with rare words or rare syntactic constructions would be more difficult to find.

Objectivity is sometimes incompatible with a systematic study of individual lexical entries

and syntactic constructions. Lexical-Grammar studies have demonstrated, on the other hand,
that the requirement of reproducibility is compatible with the description of a language on a
large scale.

Are Corpora Necessary?

Corpus linguistics sets a high standard of rigor with respect to factual observations: the
linguist studies facts on the ground. The motivation for this constraint is the quite reasonable
requirement of authenticity and objectivity. Now, if “authentic” designates a procedure based
on the facts, we are returned to our point of departure, and that is the need for empirical
evidence. This does yet seem an advance. If “authentic” means free from manipulation, but
excludes introspection or the precautions that make it reproducible, the requirement is
counter-productive. If I want to determine whether 2. Le pilote a écrasé l’avion en mer can be
used with the same sense as 1. L’avion s’est écrasé en mer, and if nothing like 2. occurs in my
corpus, I am bound to cobble together something like 2., and judge its acceptability by
introspection. This is of no use.

Objectivity is similar. Taken in its strict sense, it excludes introspection. It is better to

understand objectivity as one way, among others, of ensuring that observations are
reproducible.

Confrontation with Reality

The Lexical-Grammar approach to a natural language explicitly aims at large and fine-scaled
lexical and syntactic coverage. The results are usually presented in a table, and they show
unexpected differences between lexical entries, unexpectedly complex syntactic behavior, and
unanticipated discrepancies between form and meaning.

The notion of enumerating all of the linguistic instances that are relevant to a given
phenomenon was new in the 1970s, and even today, no other linguistic approach has gone as
far. Generative grammars have never implemented any systematic description of both the
grammar and the lexicon of a natural language. A great deal has been lost. The verb “irritate”
can be interpreted in a physical and a psychological sense. Is it more accurately described
with a single entry or with two? The answer suggested by Lexical-Grammar is that it
depends.43 Are both senses compatible with sentential subjects? A corpus may help in
answering this, but only if all the senses and syntactic constructions are well represented.
Corpus studies triggered revolutionary improvement in lexicography, but did not dramatically
change the way in which NLP dictionaries were constructed. Corpus linguistics may
contribute to the lexical coverage of dictionaries by providing a list of unaccounted forms, but
it is insufficient by itself to turn these forms into a list of lexical entries together with a formal
representation of their properties.44 Such work requires a further confrontation with linguistic
reality.45

Idioms, Granularity and the Intersection

Then there are idioms. Gross and his colleagues have inventoried the various senses of French
verbs. Their focus was on full verbs such as passer (pass; drop in; go through; hand over), but
the inventory also produced a list of verbal idioms, such as passer en revue (review). There
are surprisingly many such verbal idioms; and they figure prominently with respect to
syntactic constructions, distributional properties, and transformational properties.46

Lexical-Grammars divide each polysemous word into a finite number of lexical entries: the
French verb écraser is represented by a “crush” sense, a “crash” sense, and fourteen others.
This operation separates the semantic field of a word into discrete parts. It is a prerequisite for
the formalization of lexical properties. In a formal system, each property must be a property
of something, and properties vary according to senses. Most lexicographical and lexicological
traditions also separate lexical entries from one another. A word can be separated into lexical
entries of higher or lower granularity, depending on how finely semantic distinctions are
taken into account. For example, the sixteen-entry description of écraser separates a concrete
“crush” sense from a concrete “squeeze” sense: Il a écrasé l’ail (He crushed the garlic) but Tu
m’écrases le pied (You are stepping on my foot). A less fine-grained description might merge
these entries, and there is no ultimately satisfactory level of granularity. Each description
defines its level in an arbitrary way.

In a lexical-grammar, every distinction with any reproducible property is formalized unless

the distinction is merely a matter of syntactic transformation. It also should be strictly
correlated with at least one reproducibly observable property. The concrete “crush” sense of
écraser is compatible with a prepositional complement that denotes the resulting state of the
crushed object, as in

Il a écrasé l’ail en purée.

He crushed the garlic into paste.

The concrete “squeeze” sense is not:

Tu m’écrases le pied en N.
You are stepping on my foot into pulp, you fat fool.

Once this property has been encoded, it supports the separation, even though it was initially
suggested only by intuition. If the description were more fine-grained, it would represent
semantic distinctions not supported by reproducible observation; if it were more coarse-
grained, it would erroneously assign the formal property to the other sense.47

The study of grammatical properties identifies and lists properties for which reliable
systematic encoding is possible. Lexicon-Grammars are based on two lists: lexical entries and
grammatical properties. As such, this model is a simplified view of linguistic reality, but it
makes possible cross-tables that combine entries with properties. The tabular layout is natural,
clear and readable for descriptive work. Once tables are ready, they can be translated into
other formats for computer processing. Specialists in automatic syntactic parsing use formats
where each lexical entry is represented by a formula that explicitly states its positive or
negative properties. The constructions in which the entry does not appear are left out. The
only alternative to such fine-grained encoding is the use of generalization-based rules, which
are more compact than tables. Many computational linguists are more familiar with rules than
with tables. Tables are better. If the rules are checked before use, this requires fine-grained
encoded resources such as tables. If they are not, they are only approximations and may
produce the wrong results.

Many of my examples spotlight phenomena that belong to syntax and to the lexicon. By
definition, Lexicon-Grammar studies their intersection. Linguists have been aware of this
intersection at least since Edward Sapir’s observation that all grammars leak.48 Consider
“book”/“books,” “ox”/“oxen,” “sheep”/“sheep,” and “goose”/“geese.” No set of grammatical
rules encompasses this degree of irregularity. Lexicon-grammars have shown that the grey
zone between the syntax of a language and its lexicon is enormous.

Understanding syntax and semantics often requires taking the lexicon into account. Take the
following problem. In order to formalize the meaning of “John has a flu” and “John has a
wart,” which formal structure should be adopted? Have(John, flu) and Have(John, wart)? In
logical terms, “have” is functioning in these sentences as one two-place predicate: H(x,y).
There are two arguments in “John” and “flu” (or “wart”), but only one predicate in “have.”

Or is it better to represent the logical structure of “John has a flu” in terms of a one-place
predicate? Flu(John) or Wart(John)? Jacques Labelle makes the interesting point that some
disease nouns have a second argument (“John has a wart on his hand”); others (such as flu) do
not.49 Predicate structures are markedly different; and so are ancillary logical structures. John
has a flu, if expressed as Have(John, flu) implies that there is something that John has, but
expressed as Flu(John), it implies only that John exists and that he has the flu. Labelle noticed
the difference between these nouns only when he listed them and registered their properties.

Conversely, lexicology involves syntax. Differences in syntax are immensely useful in

separating senses, as in the example of écraser, which can mean “crush” or “squeeze.” The
intersection between syntax and the lexicon is particularly relevant to syntactic analysis and
language technology. Chomsky’s assertion that the more the lexicon is studied, the less syntax
is, and vice-versa, has persuaded most generative grammarians and some linguists that it is
one thing or the other—the lexicon or syntax.50
The widespread impression among linguists that syntactical studies are somehow more
scientific than lexical studies has deterred them from studying the lexicon. Syntax is where
the theories are, and where would we be without the theories? “Picking up shells on the
beach,” some linguists scoff.51 That is where we would be.

Didn’t Hubble discover the galaxies after patiently observing individual stars?

The Armchair Linguist

The armchair linguist has been a staple of controversy for more than fifty years. It is a long
time for anyone to have remained seated. The story is worth recounting. Noam Chomsky,
whether sitting or standing, has been the dominant figure among generative grammarians for
as long as there has been anything like generative linguistics. Chomsky has little use for
corpora, and even less use for the formal procedures developed by American structural
linguistics. Generative grammar limits itself to facts that “reflect a regular grammatical
process of the language.”52 Everything else is assigned to the outer darkness of the lexicon.
Chaos is so much the standard in any language that large portions of the lexicon are simply
excluded from generative studies. It goes without saying that the success of these ideas among
linguists compromised the quality of their empirical data. Disagreement began in the 1970s,
and became exasperation, whereupon Charles Fillmore’s armchair linguist made his
appearance, a linguist careless in observation, and indifferent to complexity.53 Call it the
counterrevolution, but whether counter or not, the ensuing movement served to rehabilitate
corpus linguistics. But corpus linguists did little to rehabilitate either the formal procedures of
empirical observation or the systematic studies of a lexicon.

Gross stressed formal procedures of empirical observation and systematic lexical studies.
Generative grammar rejects, and corpus linguistics overlooks, both.

C’est dommage.

1. Sylviane Granger and Marie-Aude Lefer, “Enriching the Phraseological Coverage of

High-Frequency Adverbs in English–French Bilingual Dictionaries,” in Advances in
Corpus-Based Contrastive Linguistics: Studies in Honour of Stig Johansson, eds.
Karin Aijmer and Bengt Altenberg (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2013), 164. ↩
2. Lélia Picabia, Les constructions adjectivales en français (Adjectival Constructions in
French) (Geneva: Droz, 1978), 114. ↩
3. Lélia Picabia, Les constructions adjectivales en français (Adjectival Constructions in
French) (Geneva: Droz, 1978), 107. ↩
4. Catherine Léger, “Sentential Complementation of Adjectives in French,” in eds.
Patricia Cabredo Hofherr and Ora Matushansky, Adjectives: Formal Analysis in
Syntax and Semantics (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2010), 285. ↩
5. Catherine Léger, “Sentential Complementation of Adjectives in French,” in eds.
Patricia Cabredo Hofherr and Ora Matushansky, Adjectives: Formal Analysis in
Syntax and Semantics (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2010), 286. ↩
6. Leonard Bloomfield, Language (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1933),
205. ↩
7. See Jean-Paul Boons, Alain Guillet, and Christian Leclère, La structure des phrases
simples en français: constructions intransitives (The Structure of Simple Sentences in
French: Intransitive Constructions) (Geneva: Droz, 1976), 378; Alain Guillet and
Christian Leclère, La structure des phrases simples en français: Les constructions
 transitives locatives (The Structure of Simple Sentences in French: Transitive Locative
Constructions) (Geneva: Droz, 1992), 446. ↩
8. Operational procedures based on distributional analysis were also adopted by Naomi
Sager’s Linguistic String Project (LSP), which lasted between 1960 and 2005. ↩
9. Nick Enfield, “Review of the Book Constructions at Work: The Nature of
Generalization in Language by Adele E. Goldberg,” Linguistic Typology 12 (2008):
157. Even when they use this style of operational methods, authors belonging to these
trends hold in only modest esteem structural and distributional linguistics and lexicon-
grammar, and very rarely acknowledge the origin of the methods. ↩
10. “When an operational procedure is proposed, it must be tested for adequacy … by
measuring it against the standard provided by the tacit knowledge that it attempts to
specify and describe.” Noam Chomsky, Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 1965), 19. ↩
11. The criterion may not be the best, others are possible: for example, it would be better
to exclude title style, so as to prevent “Man comes home and finds house on fire with
dog inside” from pointing to “man,” “house,” and “dog” as uncountable. ↩
12. Catherine Léger, “Sentential Complementation of Adjectives in French,” in eds.
Patricia Cabredo Hofherr and Ora Matushansky, Adjectives: Formal Analysis in
Syntax and Semantics (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2010), 285–86. ↩
13. See Paola Merlo and Suzanne Stevenson, “Establishing the Upper Bound and Inter-
Judge Agreement of a Verb Classification Task,” in Proceedings of LREC, (European
Language Resources Association (ELRA), 2000): 1659–64. ↩
14. As Joan Bresnan said, for example:

[In the 2000s] I began to realize that we theoretical linguists had no privileged way of
distinguishing the possible formal patterns of a language from the merely probable.
Many of the kinds of sentences reported by theorists to be ungrammatical are actually
used quite grammatically in rare contexts. Authentic examples can be found in very
large collections of language use, such as the World Wide Web.

Joan Bresnan, “A Voyage into Uncertainty,” in Thinking Reed: Centennial Essays by

Graduates of Reed College, eds. Roger Porter and Robert Reynolds (Portland, OR:
Reed College, 2011), 74. ↩

15. Christian Lehmann, “Data in Linguistics,” The Linguistic Review 21, no. 3–4 (2004):
294–95. ↩
16. Maurice Gross, “Methods and Tactics in the Construction of a Lexicon-Grammar,” in
Linguistics in the Morning Calm 2: Selected Papers from SICOL 1986 (Seoul:
Hanshin, 1988), 177–197. ↩
17. Elsa Tolone and Benoît Sagot, “Using Lexical-Grammar Tables for French Verbs in a
Large-Coverage Parser,” Human Language Technology. Challenges for Computer
Science and Linguistics: Lecture Notes in Computer Science 6562 (2001): 183. ↩
18. For an example, see the following table:

Figure 1. Sample of verb class 33

The Lexicon-Grammar methodology consists in establishing a taxonomy of
syntactic-semantic classes whose lexical items share some syntactic features.
For instance, class 33 contains verbs that enter the construction with one
indirect complement introduced by preposition à. Each class is represented by
a table that includes all lexical items of the class. If a verb has two meanings, it
is divided into two lexical items. In the verb class 33 … se rendre has two
meanings and therefore two lexical items:

1. Jean s'est rendu à mon opinion (John finally accepted my opinion)

2. Vercingetorix s'est rendu à César (Vercingetorix surrendered to
Caesar)

Each feature of the table of classes is associated with a set of operations that
combine linguistic objects together; for instance, when feature N0 =: Nhum is
true for a given entry, an object defining a human noun phrase is added to the
distribution of N0 (i.e., the argument 0 of the predicate). If the feature is
assigned true for a given lexical entry, the associated operations are activated.
Ppv stands for positive predictive value.

A selection of features is applied to all entries and their linguistic validity is

checked. At the intersection of a row corresponding to a lexical item and a
column corresponding to a feature, the cell is set to ‘+’ if it is valid or ‘-’ if is
not. For instance, one meaning of se rendre (to accept) accepts a non human
nominal complement in its canonical sentence: its feature N1 =: N-hum value
is true (‘+’) while it is false (‘-’) for the other (to surrender).
 Matthieu Constant and Elsa Tolone, “A Generic Tool to Generate a Lexicon for NLP
from Lexicon-Grammar Tables.” ↩

19. 61 tables for simple verbs have been developed for the French language, as well as 59
tables for predicative nouns, 65 tables for idiomatic expressions (mostly verbal), and
32 tables for (simple and idiomatic) adverbs. See Elsa Tolone and Benoît Sagot,
“Using Lexical-Grammar Tables for French Verbs in a Large-Coverage Parser,”
Human Language Technology. Challenges for Comuter Science and Linguistics:
Lecture Notes in Computer Science 6562 (2001): 183. ↩
20. Walter Bisang, “Variation and Reproducibility in Linguistics,” in Linguistic
Universals and Language Variation, ed. Peter Siemund, (Berlin/New York: Walter de
Gruyter, 2011), 251. ↩
21. Walter Bisang, “Variation and Reproducibility in Linguistics,” in Linguistic
Universals and Language Variation, ed. Peter Siemund, (Berlin/New York: Walter de
Gruyter, 2011), 254. ↩
22. Georgia Green, Semantics and Syntactic Regularity (London: Cambridge University
Press, 1973). ↩
23. Adriana Belletti and Luigi Rizzi, “Psych-Verbs and θ-Theory,” Natural Language and
Linguistic Theory 6, no. 3 (1988): 291–352. ↩
24. Ellen Gurman Bard, Dan Robertson, and Antonella Sorace, “Magnitude Estimation of
Linguistic Acceptability,” Language 72, no. 1 (1996): 32–68. ↩
25. Noam Chomsky, Syntactic Structures (The Hague/Paris: Mouton, 1957), 15. ↩
26. Noam Chomsky, Syntactic Structures (The Hague/Paris: Mouton, 1957), 16, 35–36. ↩
27. Carson Schütze, The Empirical Base of Linguistics: Grammaticality Judgments and
Linguistic Methodology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). Schütze
provides a detailed discussion of how inconsistently Chomsky has used the terms
grammaticality and acceptability. ↩
28. Thomas Ernst, “Speaker-Oriented Adverbs,” Natural Language & Linguistic Theory
27, no. 3 (2009): 497–544. ↩
29. “When we compare meanings as we did between L’avion s’est écrasé en mer (The
plane crashed at sea), and Le pilote a écrasé l’avion en mer (The pilot crashed the
plane at sea),” wrote Maurice Gross,

[W]e will say we proceed to differential assessment of meaning. The distinction has a
parallel in measurement of physical quantities. For instance, the absolute measurement
of a temperature or weight is relatively coarse, whereas differential measurement of
the same variables is quite sharp.

Gross refers to the following examples:

1. La décoratrice enjolive la vitrine de minijupes claires

The decorator ornaments the shop window with bright miniskirts
2. La décoratrice enjolive la vitrine de sa minijupe claire
The decorator ornaments the shop window with her bright miniskirt
3. Pierre amuse Paul
Peter entertains Paul; Paul finds Peter funny

Maurice Gross, “Les limites de la phrase figée (The Limits of the Fixed Sentence),” in
Languages 90 (Paris: Larousse, 1988; my translation), 7–22. ↩
30. Maurice Gross, “On the Failure of Generative Grammar,” Language 55, no. 4 (1979):
868. ↩
31. Éric Laporte, Elisabete Ranchhod, and Anastasia Yannacopoulou, “Syntactic
Variation of Support Verb Constructions,” Lingvisticae Investigationes 31, no. 2
(2008): 173–85. ↩
32. Most of the early lexicon-grammar studies were in French, but this was still an
international language for linguistics in the 1970s. ↩
33. Noam Chomsky, Syntactic Structures (The Hague/Paris: Mouton, 1957), 15. ↩
34. Geoffrey Sampson, “What was Transformational Grammar? A Review of: Noam
Chomsky, The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory,” Lingua 48 (1979): 370. ↩
35. Christian Lehmann, “Data in Linguistics,” The Linguistic Review 21, no. 3–4 (2004):
294–95. ↩
36. Maurice Gross, Méthodes en syntaxe: régime des constructions complétives (Syntax
Methods: The System of Complements Constructions), (Paris: Hermann, 1975). ↩
37. Examples from Morris Salkoff, “Bees are Swarming in the Garden: A Systematic
Synchronic Study of Productivity,” Language 59, no. 2 (1983): 288–346; Morris
Salkoff, “Verbs with a Sentential Subject. A Lexical Examination of a Sub-Set of
Psych Verbs,” Lingvisticae Investigationes 25, no. 1 (2002): 97–147. ↩
38. William Labov, “Some Observations on the Foundation of Linguistics,” (1987). ↩
39. Stephan Gries, “Methodological and Interdisciplinary Stance in Corpus Linguistics,”
in Perspectives on Corpus Linguistics, eds. Vanda Viana, Sonier Zyngier and Geoff
Barnbrook (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2011): 87. ↩
40. Steven Abney, “Data-Intensive Experimental Linguistics,” Linguistic Issues in
Language Technology 6, no. 2 (2011): 9. ↩
41. For a definition see Wikipedia, s.v. “Lemma (Morphology)”:

In morphology and lexicography, a lemma (plural lemmas or lemmata) is the

canonical form, dictionary form, or citation form of a set of words (headword). In
English, for example, run, runs, ran and running are forms of the same lexeme, with
run as the lemma. Lexeme, in this context, refers to the set of all the forms that have
the same meaning, and lemma refers to the particular form that is chosen by
convention to represent the lexeme. In lexicography, this unit is usually also the
citation form or headword by which it is indexed. … Lemmas or word stems are used
often in corpus linguistics for determining word frequency. In such usage the specific
definition of “lemma” is flexible depending on the task it is being used for.

42. In reality, not even Balota et al. do that in their objectivity-aware work on the lexicon
of English for experimental psycho- and neurolinguistics. See David Balota, Melvin
Yap, Michael Cortese, Keith Hutchison, Brett Kessler, Bjorn Loftis, James Neely,
Douglas Nelson, Greg Simpson, and Rebecca Treiman, “The English Lexicon
Project,” Behavior Research Methods 39, no. 3 (2007): 445–59. Their dictionary does
provide parts of speech of the words, and they do not report the source of the
information, but they do not claim that this source is free of subjectivity. They
probably trusted grammarians or lexicographers. ↩
43. Morris Salkoff, “Verbs with a Sentential Subject. A Lexical Examination of a Sub-set
of Psych Verbs,” Lingvisticae Investigationes 25, no. 1 (2002): 97–147. ↩
44. Many computational linguists also hope that statistical and probabilistic models are
able to compensate for deficient dictionaries and grammars in NLP systems. See
 Steven Abney, “Data-Intensive Experimental Linguistics,” Linguistic Issues in
Language Technology 6, no. 2 (2011): 11–12. Such models do help in some aspects,
but there is no proof that they are able to automatically work out resources that would
be “aware” of the meanings and formal variations of all the expressions relevant to
NLP systems. ↩
45. According to Paul Hopper, confrontation with linguistic reality essentially tends to
reveal the existence of unexpected cases of low consistency: differences,
discrepancies, and complexity. However, his methodological contribution to
confronting such aspects of language does not go beyond recommending a
psychological attitude:

[Y]ou accept and incorporate into your working method, your theory, the assumption
that language is not especially uniform, and you make the ragged, messy nature of
your data and their unpredictable margins visible and public … we should be prepared
to question [consistency] when the competing demands of accuracy and integrity
militate against it.

Paul Hopper, “The Ideal of Consistency in Thinking about Language,” Southwest

Journal of Linguistics 19, no. 1 (2000): 2. ↩

46. “In French, for instance, Maurice Gross indexed 26,000 verbal idioms and 12,000
adverbial idioms.” Éric Laporte, “In Memoriam Maurice Gross.” (Paper presented at
the Language and Technology Conference (LTC), Poznan, Poland, 2005): 3. ↩
47. Éric Laporte, “Defining a Verb Taxonomy by a Decision Tree,” in Autour des verbes:
Constructions et interprétations (Around Verbs: Constructions and Interpretations),
ed. Kozué Ogata, (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2013), 102. ↩
48. Edward Sapir, Language: An Introduction to the Study of Speech (New York:
Harcourt Brace, 1921), 38. ↩
49. Jacques Labelle, “Grammaire des noms de maladie (The Grammar of Disease
Names),” in Langue Française 69 (Paris: Larousse, 1986), 109. ↩
50. Noam Chomsky, “Remarks on Nominalization,” in Readings in English
Transformational Grammar, eds. Roderick Jacobs and Peter Rosenbaum (Waltham,
MA: Ginn, 1970), 185. ↩
51. Brian Silver, The Ascent of Science, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 16. ↩
52. John J. McCarthy and Alan S. Prince, “Foot and Word in Prosodic Morphology: the
Arabic Broken Plural,” Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 8, no. 2 (1990):
267. ↩
53. Charles Fillmore, “Corpus Linguistics or Computer-aided Armchair Linguistics,” in
Directions in Corpus Linguistics: Proceedings of Nobel Symposium 82, Stokholm, 4-8
August 1991, ed. Jan Svartik (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1992), 35. ↩