Constraints: an operational framework for Constructions Grammars

International audienceUsually, linguistic theories make use of a hierarchical representation of syntactic information. Even when no relation with tree-like structures is explicit, as for HPSG (cf. [Sag99]) or Construction Grammars (see for example [Kay99]), a structure is described in terms of a hierarchy. This aspect is reinforced by lexicalization: representing syntactic information at the lexical level comes with feature localization in terms of position into a hierarchy, feature propagation being controlled through the head/mother structure. This conception, close to the generative way of representing information, is very rigid in the sense that building a hierarchical structure is a pre-requisite and one cannot say anything about syntactic properties of non-canonical (not to say non-grammatical) utterances. Construction grammars also suffer from this problem. Moreover, for the same reasons, the only way to represent local constraints is sub-constructions inheriting from higher level frames