Maurice Gross


Maurice Gross was a French linguist and scholar of Romance languages. Beginning in the late 1960s he developed Lexicon-Grammar, a method of formal description of languages with practical applications.

Biography

Gross worked on automatic translation at the École Polytechnique without prior training in linguistics. This led in 1961 to a scholarship to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he met Noam Chomsky and became acquainted with Generative grammar. After returning to France, he worked as a computer scientist at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. In 1964 he went a second time to the United States, this time to the University of Pennsylvania, where he worked with Zellig S. Harris, whom he thereafter regarded as his linguistic foster father. He received his research PhD at the Sorbonne in 1967 with his dissertation L'Analyse formelle comparée des complétives en français et en anglais. He went on as a lecturer at the University of Aix-en-Provence, where he worked with Jean Stefanini. In 1969 he received his teaching doctorate at the University of Paris with defense of his thesis Lexique des constructions complétives, published under the title Méthodes en syntaxe. He was appointed professor at the new University of Vincennes, then at the University of Paris VII.
In 1968, he founded the Laboratoire d'Automatique Documentaire et Linguistique, and in 1977 the journal Lingvisticae Investigationes.
At the age of 67, while completing an essay explicating a fundamental principle in the work of his mentor, Maurice Gross succumbed to bone cancer.

Contributions

Gross's work, and that of the LADL, gives priority to the principles of methodological rigor, respect for data, empirical observation, comprehensive coverage of a language, and reproducibility of experiments. A systematic description of simple sentences of French yielded a dictionary based on the syntax identifying properties of words salient for parsing and grammatical tagging, and providing a reasoned and detailed classification of most of the elements of the French language. Indeed, before generative grammar adopted the Projection Principle or the Theta criterion, Gross had undertaken the systematic investigation of the interdependence of lexical entries and grammatical rules. It was for this reason that his methods and results were given the name lexicon-grammar. His students have verified this working hypothesis in many typologically diverse languages, including not only Romance languages and German, but also Modern Greek, Korean, Arabic, Malagasy, and other languages.
The work of the LADL was greatly enhanced by the use of computers, beginning in the 1980s. One result was a morpho-syntactic "electronic dictionary" of French. In parallel, taking finite automata as the competence model of language, Gross developed the concept of local grammar. Local grammars, consisting of finite automata coupled with morpho-syntactic dictionaries, support automatic text analysis by the closed source Intex software developed by Max Silberztein and by the open source software developed by the .
Concurrently, Gross was working on problems that he considered fundamental to linguistics, although they had long been neglected in the field, such as lexical ambiguity, idioms and collocations, and "support verb" constructions. In 1976 he discovered the "double scan" property of certain support verb constructions, which systematically identifies idioms. Gross's computer-assisted research on large amounts of linguistic material led to a picture of language as an instrument that is freely manipulated yet highly constrained idiomatically, a result that is consistent with the distinction between the Idiom Principle and the Open Choice Principle found by corpus linguist John McHardy Sinclair. Gross described the organization of language as a lexicon-grammar, and argued that any grammar must fail if its formalization fails to take into account its dependence on the lexicon. He demonstrated that to fully describe a language one must collect a huge quantity of tagged word combinations.
The facts registered in the dictionaries and grammars resulting from such collection are useful for natural language processing and in particular for deep linguistic processing.
Gross's students include Alain Guillet, Christian Leclère, Gilles Fauconnier, Morris Salkoff,, Bertrand du Castel, Annibale Elia, Laurence Danlos, Hong Chai-song, Cheng Ting-au, Claude Muller, Eric Laporte, Max Silberztein, Tita Kyriacopoulou, Elisabete Ranchhod, Anne Abeillé, Mehryar Mohri, Emmanuel Roche, Nam Jee-sun, Jean Senellart, and Cédrick Fairon.

Selected Writings

A of the writings of Maurice Gross is available. Below is a brief selection.

As Author

; Papers
; Monographs
  1. Syntaxe du verbe. 1986. .
  2. Syntaxe du nom. 1986. .
  3. Syntaxe de l’adverbe. 1990..