Parsing Language-Specific Constructions: The Case of French Pronominal Clitics

This paper describes the treatment of French pronominal clitics developed for the multilingual Fips parser. Following a brief description of the Fips parser with its object-oriented design and a short review of the basic facts about French clitics, an analysis is presented which distinguishes pronominal chains (in the unmarked case) and argument absorption (for reflexive-reciprocal clitics agreeing with the grammatical subject). Specific data structures and associated procedures are necessary to implement the clitic-trace chain in the first case and the argument absorption in the second case. Exploiting the object-oriented model, we argue that such specific mechanisms should not be part of the basic (universal) model of the parser, but rather should be introduced as a specialization of the base model for languages which display pronominal clitics, such as Romance languages.