This grammar covers the basic sentence inventory of French, paying special attention to the dislocations and clitic doubling phenomena. In particular, successful parses were found for the sentences:
One of the hardest things (still) to solve is the grammaticality of the sentence “Jean aime les pommes et Marie déteste”, where the object argument is only present on the first verb, but the sentence is still grammatical, even though the second verb has no overt object realized. Also, I could not figure out how to ban sentences *”Jean aime et Marie déteste les pommes” and *”Jean les aime et Marie déteste les pommes”.
Finally, it was problematic to ban the sentence *”Jean donne à Marie un livre” (in French, a ditransitive verb has to take the direct object np “un livre” before it can take the indirect object np “à Marie”), without messing up the grammaticality of the sentences involving clitics and ditransitive verbs, as they do not parse if I place the * modality (on slashes) or the unification features (on np objects) of the ditransitive verb. E.g. donne “to give”:
donner :- s<1> [E] \ np<2> [X nom]) /* np [Z dat]) /* np [Y acc] donner :- s<1> [E] \ np<2> [X nom]) / np<4> [Z dat]) / np<3> [Y acc].
Yet, with a current ditransitive category “donner” :- s<1> [E] \ np<2> [X nom]) / np [Z dat]) / np [Y acc], the clitic sentences parse fine, but the ungrammatical *”Jean donne à Marie un livre” is permitted, too.
The grammar file: :openccg:grammars:french.ccg.txt