French order without order

Abstract

To account for the semi-free word order of French, Unification Categorial Grammar is extended in two ways. First, verbal valencies are contained in a set rather than in a list. Second, type-raised NP's are described as two-sided functors. The new framework does not overgenerate i.e., it accepts all and only the sentences which are grammatical. This follows partly from the elimination of false lexical ambiguities - i.e., ambiguities introduced in order to account for all the possible positions a word can be in within a sentence -- and partly from a system of features constraining the possible combinations.