Syntax and Morphology in Verb Phrase Generation

In this paper we describe three computational approaches to modelling complex verb forms in French, including pre-verbal clitics and negative adverbs. It is shown that straightforward context-free modelling leads to an unacceptable combinatorial explosion. A transformational approach (in Harris ' sense of mapping one surface string to another) is shown to produce a significantly more elegant solution. Finally, a morphological approach is explored, in which negation and clitic information forms part of the description of the verb itself, and shows itself to have cer-tain advantages over the previous approaches. The repre-sentation metalanguage and the implementation are performed in VINCI, a natural language generation environ-ment. 1