Vers une classification sémantique fine des noms d’agent en français

Abstract

This thesis proposes a fine-grained semantic classification of what is traditionally named agent nouns in French; it is thus a study of semantic derivation. Our classification was elaborated starting from 1573 agent nouns extracted from the dictionary Le Nouveau Petit Robert. The definitions of several agent nouns in Le Nouveau Petit Robert represent paraphrastic reformulations that are sufficiently close, which allows us to distribute these nouns into semantically more specific subclasses. We have identified 22 subclasses of agent nouns; these subclasses, along with the corresponding lexical units, were described by means of the formalism of lexical functions proposed by Meaning Text theory. We also elaborated definition templates for lexical units of each subclass as well as generalized government patterns (? subcategorization frames) for them. The interest of our work lies in the fact that the suggested classification allows for a more uniform and a more coherent global description of agent nouns.