Vers un thesaurus syntactico-sémantique des mots d’affects

Our project of semantic classification of words of “feeling” lays claim to being the verification of the strong hypothesis about the link between syntax and semantics which underlies Dubois’ and Dubois-Charlier’s electronic dictionary Les Verbes Francais: “There is a mapping between the syntactical schemas of a certain language and the semantic interpretation given by speakers.” Our concern here is not limited to verbs: a dictionary entry can be the net of different activations of the same morphological root (for instance, the entry “triste, tristesse, tristement, attrister”). The structure of the general classification is made up of three basic syntactical structures: a) sentences with an intransitive predicate and a subjectargument human affected; b) sentences with a transitive predicate and a subject-argument cause; c) sentences with a transitive predicate and a subject-argument human affected. Moreover, four others syntactic–semantic categories are defined: each of them combines two of the three basic structures above mentioned. At this stage, we reach a certain semantic coherence for these classes. Through the use of all others syntactical properties, we expect that our dictionary will reach an even more coherent semantic categorisation.