Sex-Based Nominal Pairs in the French Lexical Network: It's Not What You Think

Candice Delaite (1) , Alain Polguère (1)

1 ATILF - Analyse et Traitement Informatique de la Langue Française

We examine French nominal pairs of the type BERGER 'shepherd' ~ BERGÈRE 'shepherdess' and CHIEN 'dog' ~ CHIENNE 'bitch dog'. These pairs are considered from the viewpoint of their lexicographic modeling in an Explanatory Combinatorial lexical database: the French Lexical Network (fr-FLN). We first present, in section 1, the linguistic problem we are dealing with; we identify two main types of semantic relations involved in these lexical pairs: sex-based quasi-synonymy--that is analyzed in detail in section 2--and sex-based contrastive opposition--dealt with in section 3. As conclusion, section 4, we look at the implications of our modeling of such relations on the graph structure of the fr-FLN.

Mots clés: antonymy; contrastivity; synonymy; Explanatory Combinatorial Lexicography; grammatical gender; French Lexical Network; lexical function

Mots clés: antonymie; contrastivité; synonymie; Lexicographie Explicative et Combinatoire; genre grammatical; Réseau Lexical du Français; fonction lexicale

Domaines: Linguistique

Candice Delaite, Alain Polguère. Sex-Based Nominal Pairs in the French Lexical Network: It's Not What You Think. 6th International Conference on Meaning-Text Theory (MTT'13), Aug 2013, Prague, Czech Republic. pp.29-40. ⟨hal-00905229⟩