Arabic presents many challenges for automatic processing. Although several research studies have addressed some issues, electronic resources for processing Arabic remain relatively rare or not widely available. In this paper, we propose a Tree-adjoining grammar with a syntax-semantic interface. It is applied to the modern standard Arabic, but it can be easily adapted to other languages. This grammar named “ArabTAG V2.0” (Arabic Tree Adjoining Grammar) is semi-automatically generated by means of an abstract representation called meta-grammar. To ensure its development, ArabTAG V2.0 benefits from a grammar testing environment that uses a corpus of phenomena. Further experiments were performed to check the coverage of this grammar as well as the syntax-semantic analysis. The results showed that ArabTAG V2.0 can cover the majority of syntactical structures and different linguistic phenomena with a precision rate of 88.76%. Moreover, we were able to semantically analyze sentences and build their semantic representations with a precision rate of about 95.63%.

This article explores the widely documented difficulty with object clitics in the acquisition of French. The study investigates the effects of L1 transfer and processing limitations on the production and comprehension of object clitics in child L2 learners of French with different L1 backgrounds (Chinese, Spanish). The Spanish-speaking learners performed better than Chinese-speaking learners on clitic-related tasks, indicating a facilitative effect of transfer when the L1 also has object clitics. Yet no evidence was found for (negative) transfer of null objects from Chinese to French, as learners consistently rejected interpretations requiring referential null objects on a receptive task. The frequency of Chinese-speaking learners’ object omissions in production was negatively correlated with an independent measure of working memory (backward digit span), consistent with the hypothesis that object clitic omission is affected by processing limitations. These findings are discussed within a psycholinguistic model of syntactic encoding during language production.