A methodological contribution

to a computable dictionnary of verbs

Semantico-cognitive analysis of verbs of motion and activity

This thesis is a methodological contribution which aims at the building of a dictionnary of French verbs for automatic processing of language. The thesis explores the verbal unit: where it is located, how to describe it, and if it is justifiable to focus on an intrinsic semantics. After having given the theoritical elements to build such a unit, we analyse the lexicon of verbs, examining their behaviour in the language, in order to know what the formalism brings to the fore, and if the results are able to improve our knowledge about language behaviour.

This thesis is nested in the Applicative and Cognitive Grammar program, which aims to install a coherent general metalinguistic system ending up with a real automatic formal calculus, by stretching a theory of language invariants made of operators and operands. The semantico-cognitive schemes (SCS) build a formal representation structure of each meaning of a verb.

The power of this formalism to represent the lexical semantics is tested on a corpus of French verbs of motion, in order to:

1. i) evaluate the part of seman tics which lies in a lexical verb;
2. ii) represent the verbal polysemy;
3. iii) operate from this formalism, the same inferences as those we make in the language;
4. iv) give a model which links in cognition the verbalised knowledge to pictures;
5. v) give some arguments to the localism theory reformulated at a cognitive level.