Maurice Gross

Maurice Gross (born July 21, 1934 in Sedan, Ardennes department; died December 8, 2001 in Paris) was a French linguist and scholar of Romance languages. Beginning in the late 1960s he developed Lexicon-Grammar, a method of formal description of languages with practical applications.

Gross worked on automatic translation at the École Polytechnique without prior training in linguistics. This led in 1961 to a scholarship to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he met Noam Chomsky and became acquainted with Generative grammar. After returning to France, he worked as a computer scientist at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS). In 1964 he went a second time to the United States, this time to the University of Pennsylvania, where he worked with Zellig S. Harris, whom he thereafter regarded as his linguistic foster father. He received his research PhD at the Sorbonne in 1967 with his dissertation L'Analyse formelle comparée des complétives en français et en anglais ("Comparative formal analysis of complements in French and English"). He went on as a lecturer at the University of Aix-en-Provence, where he worked with Jean Stefanini. In 1969 he received his teaching doctorate (habilitation) at the University of Paris with defense of his thesis Lexique des constructions complétives, published under the title Méthodes en syntaxe (Paris : Hermann, 1975). He was appointed professor at the new University of Vincennes (which was later Paris VIII), then at the University of Paris VII.

In 1968, he founded the Laboratoire d'Automatique Documentaire et Linguistique (LADL, the CNRS), and in 1977 the journal Lingvisticae Investigationes.

At the age of 67, while completing an essay explicating a fundamental principle in the work of his mentor, Maurice Gross succumbed to bone cancer.

Gross's work, and that of the LADL, gives priority to the principles of methodological rigor, respect for data, empirical observation, comprehensive coverage of a language, and reproducibility of experiments. A systematic description of simple sentences of French yielded a dictionary based on the syntax identifying properties of words salient for parsing and grammatical tagging, and providing a reasoned and detailed classification of most of the elements of the French language. Indeed, before generative grammar adopted the Projection Principle or the Theta criterion, Gross had undertaken the systematic investigation of the interdependence of lexical entries and grammatical rules. It was for this reason that his methods and results were given the name lexicon-grammar. His students have verified this working hypothesis in many typologically diverse languages, including not only Romance languages and German, but also Modern Greek, Korean, Arabic, Malagasy, and other languages.

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