Linguistic Facts as Predicates over Ranges of the Sentence

This paper introduces a novel approach to language processing, in which linguistic facts are represented as predicates over ranges of the intput text, usually, but not limited to, ranges of the current sentence. Such an approch allows to build non-linear analyses with a polynomial parsing complexity that take into account simultaneously and with the same technical status morphological, syntactical and semantical properties, this list being non limitative. Classical analyses, such as constituency trees, dependency graphs, topological boxes and predicate-arguments semantics are then obtained as partial projection of a complete analysis. The formalism presented here is based upon Range Concatenation Grammars (hereafter RCG), and has been successfully implemented, thanks to a previously existing RCG parser and a syntactico-semantical grammar for French.