Maurice Gross

Maurice Gross (born 21 July 1934 in Sedan, Ardennes department; died 8 December 2001 in Paris) was a French linguist[1][2] and scholar of Romance languages.

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.

[6][7] 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.

[10] Local grammars, consisting of finite automata coupled with morpho-syntactic dictionaries, support automatic text analysis[6][10] by the closed-source Intex software [1] developed by Max Silberztein and, after Maurice Gross's life by the open source Unitex [2] conceived by the Gaspard-Monge Computer Science Laboratory (LIGM) and the open source NooJ [3] software developed at the Université de Franche-Comté.

Concurrently, Gross was working on problems that he considered fundamental to linguistics, although they had long been neglected in the field, such as lexical ambiguity, idioms and collocations, and "support verb" constructions.

Gross's students include Alain Guillet, Christian Leclère, Gilles Fauconnier, Morris Salkoff, Joëlle Gardes [fr], Bertrand du Castel, Annibale Elia, Jean-Pierre Sueur, Laurence Danlos, Hong Chai-song, Cheng Ting-au, Claude Muller, Eric Laporte, Denis Maurel, Max Silberztein, Tita Kyriacopoulou, Elisabete Ranchhod, Anne Abeillé, Mehryar Mohri, Emmanuel Roche, Nam Jee-sun, Jean Senellart, and Cédrick Fairon.