French extra "du" before nouns

[Gend Smith]

Hey guys,

I have been trying to learn GF programming language recently, and I started to build my sentences in GF. I started with the sentence "I want to play XX movie."

I succeeded in building the English sentences, but the program started to show some problems when the French version was added. It kept adding the word "du" before verbs after V2 was used. I'm not sure what caused this problem.

And how would you guys help to clarify what kinds of syntax analysis methods have been used in GF? Is there any common knowledge for linguistic analysis? Appreciate your time and effort.

[Aarne Ranta]

Hello Gend,

You write

mkNP (mkN  MovieArr.s);

which means that you use the noun (N) as an noun phrase (NP) as if it were a mass term, which in English means no article but in French inserts the partitive (de + definite article).

You maybe want to use (mkNP the_Det X) where X is any noun without an article. Then the definite article (without de) is added.

A noun (N) should never have an article in it, but articles are added by mkNP either by the_Det or a_Det, or their plural versions. Just like in English!

I'm not quite sure about your second question about linguistic analysis, but maybe it helps if I say that the RGL is based on traditional grammar knowledge as written in standard grammar books. In the case of French, Grevisse and Bescherelle were the main sources.

Regards

  Aarne.

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[Inari Listenmaa]

In this case, the words are movie titles, so the most appropriate type for them is PN. You can make a PN from a string (mkPN "Spider Man") and you can make a NP from a PN with mkNP, see appropriate instance at http://www.grammaticalframework.org/lib/doc/synopsis/index.html#NP:

mkNP

PN -> NP

Paris

So you can do this instead:

MovieStr = mkPN MovieArr.s;

And change mkN to mkPN in the other places where needed.

Inari