L’amas verbal au cœur d’une modélisation topologique du français

This article aims at two objectives : We want to show that principal word order phenomena can be described in a topological approach to linearization, i.e. a linking of an (unordered) dependency tree and a ordered structure, the topological constituent tree. Moreover, we want to put forward the importance and naturalness of a particular constituent in the modeling of French word order, the verb cluster (amas verbal) : It is composed of one or more verbs, of necessary functional words (prepositions and complementizers), and of very constraint lexical elements other than the verbs as for example clitics and certain adverbs. The work is based on a rigorous formalization of the dependency-topology link in Gerdes & Kahane 2001. The verb cluster in the topological structure remains to be shown to be closely related to a prosodic constituent.