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The purpose of this article is to explore some issues that seem to me related when it comes to dealing with improvisation in the traditions that share the maqām system. Some of these questions are at an ontological level, even a metaphysical one; others at a descriptive and methodological level: What community are we talking about when talking about maqām music? How to analyze improvisation in a given tradition? What is the relationship between tradition and novelty? To what extent is improvisation a subset of musical composition? When can we really talk about improvisation and not imitation? What is the role of authority in a tradition, that of deviance (who defines tradition, and when is deviant behaviour accepted and becomes part of tradition)? What kind of knowledge (practical and/or theoretical) is required to improvise? What starting point to take to explain the system (individualism or methodological holism, that is to say, what part to give to the individual and what part to the musical language as such)? etc. These theoretical problems are the subject of the first part. Once the problems are clearly circumscribed, the central part of this article is an attempt to answer the challenge posed by the problem of improvisation, and I try to offer some lines of reading that would allow an initial analysis. I take the position that only a grammar of the generative type is able to account for the knowledge necessary for improvisation, for the reasons given in the first part. For this, of course, one must be able to produce an answer to the question of how the individual is able to acquire this grammar, which I shall try to do by showing the holistic links that unite the different canonical genres composing these traditions, and the heuristics involved in the process of the individual put in front of these forms to arrive at internalizing the necessary knowledge. I here propose a simple and unified way of answering these questions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Every project of automated lemmatization is confronted to the problem of lexical ambiguities. The aim of the authors is to provide a description of the lexical ambiguities to be found in Ancient Greek. They also wish to present a first set of local grammars intended to solve them. Results of automated desambiguisation are compared with lexical data previously treated by hand. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this article is to study the French pronoun y in its spatial uses. y can refer to different types of phrases and, in particular, to spatial prepositional phrases. This induces that those phrases have contextual effects, as other nominal phrases have. We study the role played by certain spatial prepositions in this process and conclude that they act as functions, working on entities of the universe of interpretation to produce new entities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]