Author Description

Maurice Gross, who died in December 2001, was a pioneer and leading thinker in the field of modern linguistics. Long before computers could facilitate large-scale, lexically-based language study, he and his team began building an exhaustive, empirically-based inventory of the "lexicon-grammar" of French which, thirty years later, still remains the most complete syntax-based lexicon available. Researchers all over the world have adopted the Gross model of description, which serves as a computational model for any language. As can be seen in the contributions in this volume, it has been applied to languages as different as Arabic, Chinese, English, Greek or Korean (as well as the major Romance languages, of course). In this volume the reader will also find a number of articles by eminent linguists who were close friends of Maurice Gross, and frequently in dialogue with him on linguistic issues. No matter whether they shared his theoretical views, or his particular empirical methods of description, they each had great respect for his work, especially for the close-grained linguistic analysis which has set a benchmark for future generations.