Maurice Gross
   HOME

TheInfoList



OR:

Maurice Gross (born 21 July 1934 in
Sedan, Ardennes Sedan () is a commune in the Ardennes department and Grand Est region of north-eastern France. It is also the chef-lieu (administrative centre) of the arrondissement of the same name. Sedan is notable as the site of two major battles between ...
; died 8 December 2001 in
Paris Paris () is the Capital city, capital and List of communes in France with over 20,000 inhabitants, largest city of France. With an estimated population of 2,048,472 residents in January 2025 in an area of more than , Paris is the List of ci ...
) was a French linguistDougherty, Ray. 2001. ''Maurice Gross Memorial Letter''.
/ref>Jean-Claude Chevalier,

, ''
Le Monde (; ) is a mass media in France, French daily afternoon list of newspapers in France, newspaper. It is the main publication of Le Monde Group and reported an average print circulation, circulation of 480,000 copies per issue in 2022, including ...
'', 12 décembre 2001.
and scholar of Romance languages. Beginning in the late 1960s he developed Lexicon-Grammar, a method of formal description of languages with practical applications.


Biography

Gross worked on automatic translation at the
École Polytechnique (, ; also known as Polytechnique or l'X ) is a ''grande école'' located in Palaiseau, France. It specializes in science and engineering and is a founding member of the Polytechnic Institute of Paris. The school was founded in 1794 by mat ...
without prior training in linguistics. This led in 1961 to a scholarship to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he met
Noam Chomsky Avram Noam Chomsky (born December 7, 1928) is an American professor and public intellectual known for his work in linguistics, political activism, and social criticism. Sometimes called "the father of modern linguistics", Chomsky is also a ...
and became acquainted with
Generative grammar Generative grammar is a research tradition in linguistics that aims to explain the cognitive basis of language by formulating and testing explicit models of humans' subconscious grammatical knowledge. Generative linguists, or generativists (), ...
.Hamans, C. 2015. « How generative grammar landed in Europe », in Gerda Haßler (org.), ''Metasprachliche Reflexion und Diskontinuität. Wendeunkte - Krisenzeiten – Umbrüche''
MĂĽnster: Nodus, pp. 239-265, .
After returning to France, he worked as a computer scientist at the
Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique The French National Centre for Scientific Research (, , CNRS) is the French state research organisation and is the largest fundamental science agency in Europe. In 2016, it employed 31,637 staff, including 11,137 tenured researchers, 13,415 eng ...
(CNRS). In 1964 he went a second time to the United States, this time to the
University of Pennsylvania The University of Pennsylvania (Penn or UPenn) is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. One of nine colonial colleges, it was chartered in 1755 through the efforts of f ...
, where he worked with Zellig S. Harris, whom he thereafter regarded as his linguistic foster father. He received his research PhD at the Sorbonne in 1967 with his dissertation ''L'Analyse formelle comparée des complétives en français et en anglais'' ("Comparative formal analysis of complements in French and English"). He went on as a lecturer at the University of Aix-en-Provence, where he worked with Jean Stefanini. In 1969 he received his teaching doctorate (habilitation) at the University of Paris with defense of his thesis ''Lexique des constructions complétives'', published under the title ''Méthodes en syntaxe'' (Paris : Hermann, 1975). He was appointed professor at the new University of Vincennes (which was later Paris VIII), then at the University of Paris VII. In 1968, he founded the Laboratoire d'Automatique Documentaire et Linguistique (LADL, the CNRS), and in 1977 the journal '' Lingvisticae Investigationes''. At the age of 67, while completing an essay explicating a fundamental principle in the work of his mentor, Maurice Gross succumbed to bone cancer.


Contributions

Gross's work, and that of the LADL, gives priority to the principles of methodological rigor, respect for data, empirical observation, comprehensive coverage of a language, and reproducibility of experiments.Lamiroy, Béatrice. 2003. « In memoriam Maurice Gross », ''Travaux de linguistique'' 46:1, pp. 145-158.
/ref>Perrin, Dominique. 2002. "In memoriam Maurice Gross".
/ref> A systematic description of simple sentences of FrenchMichel Delamar

, 12 décembre 2001.
yielded a dictionary based on the syntax identifying properties of words salient for parsing and grammatical tagging, and providing a reasoned and detailed classification of most of the elements of the French language. Indeed, before generative grammar adopted the
Projection Principle In linguistics, the projection principle is a stipulation proposed by Noam Chomsky as part of the phrase structure component of Generative grammar, generative-transformational grammar. The projection principle is used in the derivation of phrases ...
or the
Theta criterion The theta-criterion (also named θ-criterion) is a constraint on x-bar theory that was first proposed by as a rule within the system of principles of the government and binding theory, called theta-theory (θ-theory). As theta-theory is concerned ...
, Gross had undertaken the systematic investigation of the interdependence of lexical entries and grammatical rules.Lamiroy 2003. It was for this reason that his methods and results were given the name lexicon-grammar. His students have verified this working hypothesis in many typologically diverse languages, including not only Romance languages and German, but also Modern Greek, Korean, Arabic, Malagasy, and other languages. The work of the LADL was greatly enhanced by the use of computers, beginning in the 1980s. One result was a morpho-syntactic "electronic dictionary" of French. In parallel, taking finite automata as the competence model of language, Gross developed the concept of local grammar.Ibrahim, Amr Helmy. 2002. "Maurice Gross (1934-2001). À la mémoire de Maurice Gross". ''Hermès'' 34.
/ref> Local grammars, consisting of finite automata coupled with morpho-syntactic dictionaries, support automatic text analysis by the closed-source Intex softwar

developed by Max Silberztein and, after Maurice Gross's life by the open source Unite

conceived by th
Gaspard-Monge Computer Science Laboratory (LIGM)
and the open source NooJ software developed at the Université de Franche-Comté. Concurrently, Gross was working on problems that he considered fundamental to linguistics, although they had long been neglected in the field, such as lexical ambiguity, idioms and collocations, and "support verb" constructions. In 1976 he discovered the "double scan" property of certain support verb constructions, which systematically identifies idioms. Gross's computer-assisted research on large amounts of linguistic material led to a picture of language as an instrument that is freely manipulated yet highly constrained idiomatically, a result that is consistent with the distinction between the Idiom Principle and the Open Choice Principle found by corpus linguist
John McHardy Sinclair John McHardy Sinclair (14 June 1933 – 13 March 2007) was a professor of Modern English Language at Birmingham University from 1965 to 2000. He pioneered work in corpus linguistics, discourse analysis, lexicography, and language teachin ...
(1933 -2007). Gross described the organization of language as a lexicon-grammar, and argued that any grammar must fail if its formalization fails to take into account its dependence on the lexicon. He demonstrated that to fully describe a language one must collect a huge quantity of tagged word combinations. The facts registered in the dictionaries and grammars resulting from such collection are useful for
natural language processing Natural language processing (NLP) is a subfield of computer science and especially artificial intelligence. It is primarily concerned with providing computers with the ability to process data encoded in natural language and is thus closely related ...
and in particular for deep linguistic processing. Gross's students include Alain Guillet, Christian Leclère, Gilles Fauconnier, Morris Salkoff, , Bertrand du Castel, Annibale Elia, Jean-Pierre Sueur, Laurence Danlos, Hong Chai-song, Cheng Ting-au, Claude Muller, Eric Laporte, Denis Maurel, Max Silberztein, Tita Kyriacopoulou, Elisabete Ranchhod, Anne Abeillé, Mehryar Mohri, Emmanuel Roche, Nam Jee-sun, Jean Senellart, and Cédrick Fairon.


Selected writings


complete bibliography
of the writings of Maurice Gross is available. Below is a brief selection.


As author

; Papers * (1979)
On the failure of generative grammar
. ''Language. Journal of the Linguistic Society of America'', 55:4.859–885. .
1981. "Les bases empiriques de la notion de prédicat sémantique". ''Langages'', 63, pp. 7-52.
* (1993) "Les phrases figées en français". ''L'information grammaticale'', 59.36–41. .
1994. "Constructing Lexicon-Grammars". ''Computational Approaches to the Lexicon'', Oxford, Oxford University Press, pp. 213-263.

1997. "The Construction of Local Grammars". ''Finite-State Language Processing'', The MIT Press, pp. 329-352.
* "Etat du lexique-grammaire du français et perspectives d'extension". In: Sylvain Auroux et al. (Eds.): ''History of the Language Sciences, Vol. 3''. De Gruyter, Berlin 2006, pp. 2122–2129. . ; Monographs
''Méthodes en syntaxe. Le régime des constructions complétives''
Paris: Hermann (1975). . * ''Grammaire transformationnelle du français''. Cantilène, Malakoff. # ''Syntaxe du verbe''. 1986. (EA Paris 1968). # ''Syntaxe du nom''. 1986. (EA Paris 1977). # ''Syntaxe de l’adverbe''. 1990. . * ''Introduction to formal grammars'' (Tr. by Morris Salkoff of ''Notions sur les grammaires formelles'', 1967). Springer, Heidelberg (1970) (with André Lentin)Translated also into German, Japanese, Russian, and Spanish. . * ''Mathematical models in linguistics''. Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs (1972).


As editor

* ''Syntaxe transformationnelle du français'' (Langue Française; Vol. 11). Larousse, Paris 1971 (with Jean Stéfanini). * ''Méthodes en grammaire française'' (Initiation à la Linguistique/B; Bd. 6). Klincksieck, Paris 1976 (with Jean-Claude Chevalier). * ''Études de syntaxe française'' (Langue Française; Vol. 39). Larousse, Paris 1978 (with Christian Leclère) * ''Grammaire et histoire de la grammaire. Hommage à la mémoire de Jean Stéfanini''. Universität, Aix-en-Provence 1988 (with Claire Blanche-Benveniste and André Chervel).


Memorials cited

* Chevalier, Jean-Claude. 2001

ttps://web.archive.org/web/20131110063708/http://www-igm.univ-mlv.fr/~laporte/artJCChev.htm Archive * Delamar, Michel. 2001
"Maurice Gross", 12 décembre 2001.
* Dougherty, Ray. 2001
Maurice Gross Memorial LetterArchive
* Ibrahim, Amr Helmy. 2002
"Maurice Gross (1934-2001). À la mémoire de Maurice Gross". ''Hermès'' 34.
* Lamiroy, BĂ©atrice, ww.cairn.info/revue-travaux-de-linguistique-2003-1-page-145.htm "Maurice Gross (1934-2001)", ''Travaux de linguistique'' 1/2003 (no46), p. 145-158br>Cache
* Perrin, Dominique. 2002
"In Memoriam Maurice Gross."Cache


References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Gross, Maurice French scholars 1934 births 2001 deaths Massachusetts Institute of Technology alumni École Polytechnique alumni Members of Academia Europaea University of Pennsylvania alumni University of Paris alumni Academic staff of Paris 8 University Vincennes-Saint-Denis 20th-century French linguists