P+Det contracted forms are found throughout Romance to varying degrees, and also in Modern Greek, German, ... All contributions are welcome.
Simplest case
- The contracted forms are unambiguous (allows straightforward string-based pre-processing into 2 forms for parsing)
- The un-contracted P+Det sequence is unambiguously ungrammatical (allows straightfoward string-based post-processing for generation)
- no non-local, non-adjacency effects (e.g. interaction with coordination, parentheticals)
These conditions are rarely satisfied, perhaps in Spanish?
Spanish al/del
French
Contractions in French involve the prepositional forms à and de in combination with the forms of the definite article le and les (but not l' and la):
à + le |
au |
|
de + le |
du |
à + les |
aux |
|
de + les |
des |
The problem for a straightforward pre- and post-processing approach is that identical sequences of a verbal marker à or de followed by the pronominal clitic le or les must not contract:
J'ai besoin du conseiller (= I need the adviser)
vs J'ai besoin de le conseiller (= I need to advise him)
J'ai besoin du nôtre (= I need ours)
vs J'ai besoin de Le Nôtre (= I need Le Nôtre)
Contraction is also conditioned by the presence or absence of elision (le vs l' ), a process which itself cannot be handled by simple string matching:
[à le huissier] > à l'hussier / *au huissier (to the bailiff)
[à le huitième huissier] > au huitième huissier / *à l'huitième huissier (to the 8th bailiff)
Finally, there is some evidence that the contraction mechanism is part of the grammar, in view of the following long-distance effects:
- de [la mère et la fille]
- *de [la mère et le fils]
- *du père et la mère
- du père et le fils
Generalization: à and de cannot combine with a coordinated NP if any of the conjuncts begins with a contracting article le or les.
[current analysis in La Grenouille (contraction and elision analyzed as "deep" grammatical phenomena)]
Portuguese
For Portuguese, we developed an approach that relies on tagging to resolve ambiguity, scoring 99.44% accuracy.
All the details are reported this working paper.
Modern Greek
You can find a detailed description of our approach in the documentation of the Modern Greek Resource Grammar at http://www.delph-in.net/mgrg/