A two-level grammar of the reduction processes of French complex terms in discourse

The aim of this paper is to offer an outline of a descriptive grammar — as yet unfinished — of two reduction processes, namely elliptic anaphor and lexical elision, which delete constituents of reiterated complex terms in French LSP texts. After an examination of these reduction processes and the term variants they generate, the paper presents the main building blocks of the grammar. The architecture of these building blocks, i.e. of the deep and surface structure rules which constitute the two levels of the grammar, is derived from the structural and semantic properties of French complex terms. The ordering of the rules in the grammar, on the other hand, is based on characteristics of elliptic anaphor and lexical elision as well as on properties of the term variants produced by these context-conditioned transformations.