Constraint-Based Syntax and Semantics: Papers in Honor of Danièle Godard

This volume is devoted to the syntax and semantics of various languages, studied with models based on constraints. Constraint-based grammars, a set of constraints on surface expressions that need to be satisfied simultaneously, emerged in the late 1970s, mostly in the form of models of grammars combining formal syntax and formal semantics, enriching tree representations with feature structures combined by unification.

Danièle Godard, Emeritus Research Director at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in France and member of the formal linguistics laboratory, was an important actor in the development of this family of approaches — in particular, phrase structure grammar. Godard published major papers on syntax, semantics and interfaces, especially on French and other Romance languages. This collection gathers contributions by nine of her co-authors and students in tribute to her work: the copula quantification, relative clauses, the passive, non-at issue meaning, tense auxiliaries, subjunctive mood and questions.

Anne Abeillé is a professor of linguistics at Université de Paris. A specialist of syntactic theories, corpus-based and experimental syntax, she has co-authored with Danièle Godard many papers on French syntax since 1994, and is co-editor with her of Grande Grammaire du français.

Olivier Bonami is a professor of linguistics at Université de Paris. In the 1990s and 2000s, he was a student and then close collaborator of Godard, with whom he co-authored many papers on French syntax and the syntax-semantics interface. Most of his recent work deals with issues in descriptive and theoretical morphology.

December 2020

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