Saussurian analogy: a theoretical account and its application

摘要

In the Cours de linguistique generale, Saussure mentions a phenomenon of tremendous importance in language, analogy. For example, given the series walk, walked and look, how can we coin the fourth term, looked? We give a possible account of this phenomenon in terms of edition distances, thus paving the way to computational applications. This explanation accounts for prefixing, suffixing and infixing. We show how it is possible to perform the analogical analysis and generation of sentences, using a tree-bank and approximate pattern-matching. As a consequence, our proposal finds its place in the example-based approach to natural language processing.